Statistically, Cycling Is Incredibly Safe
No, really, it is. Apparently, you’re more likely to be injured in an hour of gardening than in an hour of cycling.
Yet there’s that campaign from The Times, that ends up getting a mention in PMQs:
There’s an excellent commentary on this piece of Parliamentary history over on As Easy As Riding A Bike (bottom line: the figures the PM trots out are insultingly small, compared with, say widening a few miles of the M25; we don’t want the PM’s “support” for the campaign, we want the PM to stop the hand-wringing and take action).
As Easy etc. also features this video:
Watching this, I’m struck not by the fact that so many cyclists are killed, but that so many actually make it to work, the shops, school, wherever, without being killed.
Safe but shit would be my take.
Continuous undercurrents of hostility & dangerous indifference, occasionally, bizarrely, randomly terrifying. That concludes the cycling forecast for Manchester, at 0800 pretty much every day.
Statistically yes in some ways.
However it is right to find out why people are scared and to dissuade the idiocy of intolerance. Every close pass or tailgate is frankly taking a risk with someone’s life and that they wont deviate from a given trajectory.
Actually cycling is pretty safe, its the cars that are the dangerous bit. I found myself driving yesterday for the first time in quite a few months. I was struck by how little attention I had to pay to anything in a car, just follow the bumper in front and wait in the queues. As a cyclist I have to work out which bit of the road to occupy, how to get past this illegally parked car, or that piece of roadside junk, which cars present the biggest threat, and which drivers are not paying attention and are most likely to do something dumb. Actually I rather enjoy it. Who would want to sit in a car watching their life drain away?
In the second clip, discounting the buses you probably have more people being transport by bike than by car, and taking up 20% of the road space, especially when you consider that most cars are used to transport a single person.
Cycling is safer than gardening, but you don’t have as many near misses when gardening or people trying to kill you.
Hey we are sitting here laughing, Yukie Nina Anna and I. Sounds stupid when you hear it. What are the chances of injuring yourself gardening, except that I nearly lost 2 fingers cutting bamboo in our front garden, leaving a blood trail all the way to the entrance and through the house. I was lucky only 6 stiches. In all my history of cycling like an idiot I have fallen a lot but never got that close to losing body parts. (Yukie reckons that is wrong, she thinks I nearly lost my backside and what the Japanese call the golden eggs due to lack of blood circulation after long distance cycling. I guess that won’t happen gardening!)
Statistically, me and my dog have average 3 legs
I gather one principal reason why some things seem dangerous while in fact they are relatively safe, and vice versa, relates to the measure of control we have over the risk. Some people are terrified of flying (in an airliner, that is) but have no fear of driving despite assurances that they are much more likely to be killed on the road to the airport than they are on the flight itself, because they don’t understand the physics of flying and don’t know how you fly a plane, couldn’t do it themselves.
Presumably people feel in ocntrol and safe when they climb a ladder to clean windows, or wield a chainsaw or hedge trimmer in their gardens. On a bike, they are defintiely not in control of the other traffic which threatens them, as they don’t know the techniques for managing it. If they did, they would have a healthy respect, rather than a fear, just as I imagine a lion-tamer does for his charges.
Of course all of that is a fairly pointless observation really, because human nature is what it is, and is probably harder to change than a separated cycle path is to build. Many of the supposedly supportive statements about the Times Cyclesafe initiative only really focus on training (cyclists) and education (motorists). They would waste less time if they moved straight on to the engineering.