Originally Posted by
john m flores
The way that I read it was that the question was specifically about how people got to work, so the typical BF enthusiast would likely select "drive" not "other".
There are interesting geographic and demographic layers to this too, as in who is choosing to live in communities where biking to work is even possible? A common pattern in the US if for post-college worker to favor cities but then move out to the suburbs when they start families. I wonder what migration and housing patterns in the UK are?
Thanks for your expert contributions to this discussion.
There is very interesting raw data present ... like average commute distance and urban/suburban/rural classifications ... sadly, the authors went for the bang for the buck (which is understandable as that's how one builds a career in academia) but there's controllable underlying factors (like you and I mentioned.)
It remains important to note that the authors conclusions are correct, bike commuting does correlate with a reduction in mortality versus walking to work (which is the same as train/bus/car/etc...)
please remember that this is Europe with all it's caveats (better transport options, shorter distances, better fitness than North America).
my hunch/speculation, or rather hypothesis, would be that if people were sorted by fitness (they are sorted by job classification and wealth in the UK census(es)) I would hypothesise that the most fit groups would bike commute more than the less fit groups (people bike commuting to work are like 3% overall anyway) and that would also cancel any heath advantage correlated with bike commuting.
with this data, once could even control for the wealth difference/job ranking difference, but the bike commuting population that died/had issues is very small so it's very hard to draw any conclusion in my opinion other than correlation with a better lifestyle overall.