Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
For all we know the 90+% of the "crashes" that result non-fatal/non-disabling injuries may result in nothing more than road rash, and that the 7% disabling injuries could be made up of broken fingers and sprained wrists.
Not a good conclusion. They break injuries down as follows:
Injury
K Killed
A Type Injury (disabling)
B Type Injury (evident)
C Type Injury (possible)
O No Injury
Unknown
In the 2005 data they have 34 fatalities, 62 disabling injuries, and 955 reported accidents. No type breakdown. Doing the math myself, 6.49% of the accidents in 2005 are injury (disabling), and 3.56% resulted in death. This is clearly over all types of accidents, and coming up with 7% would be pretty easy if someone made a rounding error.
Killed is a solid category. So are no injury (the EMTs looked and couldn't find anything, and the patient was insisting they weren't hurt), and unknown (could not catch cyclist to examine them). There can be some error in these categories of course, but figuring out a standard and sticking to it isn't hard.
That leaves the other three.
Injury (possible) is a pretty good category. We have caught the cyclist, examined the cyclist, and we can't figure out if anything's wrong. There's also "cyclist insists something is wrong, and we can't find it" and "we are sure there's something wrong and cyclist insists they're fine". It could be broken down more, but I'm not sure how helpful it would be in terms of data analysis. It is one of the largest categories, so there is some merit in breaking it down.
Injury (evident) is pretty straightforward. We have caught the cyclist, examined the cyclist, there is an obvious injury, and the cyclist agrees that they're hurt. Many things can go in this category, from road rash on up to broken bones or worse. An injury that kills the cyclist *can't* go here, or the cyclist ends up in the killed category. This category is very well defined (good!) and very large (bad!). There is data hiding here, and it would be useful to break it out further.
Injury (disabling) is not immediately obvious. But since we can establish a rough idea of what the other categories mean, we now have meaning for this one. We have caught the cyclist, examined the cyclist, have found an injury, and the injury is permanent/non-repairable. A spiral femur fracture probably does not go here, since it does permanent damage but is repairable. Paralysis certainly does since it is both permanent and non-repairable. A broken finger doesn't go here as it is temporary and repairable. An injury that results in death can't go here, for the same reasons as in (evident). Breaking this category out further doesn't strike me as particularly useful, as the sample size is small.
Given the large volume of injury (evident) and the small size of injury (disabling), it is *very* unlikely that minor injuries are classed as disabling.