Originally Posted by
StanSeven
That's a very reasonable policy your company has. You apparently don't understand your employer has responsibility and liability for what happens to you on company time
I think most of us do understand that. But what that company doesn't understand is that statistically, hour-per-hour of riding time, the average motorcyclist is almost 32 times as likely to be killed as a bicyclist. The average motorist, per hour of driving, is almost twice as likely to be killed as a bicyclist.
Since a bicyclist usually takes about twice as long as a motorist to get to his/her destination, a cyclist riding to the same destination as a motorist (on average,) has an almost identical risk of fatality as the motorist.
I've thought about crashing. A cyclist has little protection, and often fears the worst. A motorist has excessive protection, and often fears nothing. But when a motorist crashes, no matter the protection, his internal organs can come to a sudden "stop" inside his body, going from high speed to a near stop in a fraction of a second. That's where we get injuries like "ruptured spleen" or "bruised or punctured lung," or "severe head trauma," in which the brain is shaken violently inside the skull.
On a bike, you're likely to be going no faster than 25 mph., so you get a different type of injury.
I remember two friends at work who were in car accidents at different times. One guy hurt his back, and he eventually had two vertebrae "fused." His life has been altered from a robust outdoorsman to a young man coping with daily back pain, relegated to a desk job. The other friend actually had two crashes, one in a car and one on a bike (as a teenager.) The car crash didn't hurt him much, except that the air bag bruised his face so badly he had to take time off from work. The bike crash happened head-on with a car. He was riding home from football practice, and for some reason he still had his football helmet on. He went head-first into the motorist's windshield (the motorist had veered out of his lane and couldn't stop in time to avoid the cyclist.) As he crashed head-first into the motorist's windshield, his football helmet protected him. He had no serious injuries (though I wonder how his neck escaped injury.)