Is bike riding safe? Yes. No. Maybe. All of the above. None of the above.

[Occasional rider]

The New York Times says we don’t know.

“It’s not that there is a lack of data. Instead, it is that the data are inadequate to answer the questions.No one has good statistics, for example, on crashes per mile ridden. Nor do the data distinguish road cycling on a fast, light, bike with thin tires from mountain biking down dirt paths filled with obstacles or recreational cycling on what the industry calls a comfort bike. Yet they are very different sports.”

And bike injuries underreported to officials like police or insurance companies if no motor vehicle was involved.

And not if but when.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/how-safe-is-cycling-its-hard-to-say/?ref=health

Sorry to those of you who don’t subscribe and have already hit your monthly limit of free article views.

[mstone]

Um, how can the data be adequate if they can’t answer basic questions? That sounds to me like a pretty obvious lack of data.

[ronwalf]

I read it as “there is plenty of data about cycling, it just doesn’t answer the questions you care about.”

[KLizotte]

Of course no one ever speaks of fixing the basic infrastructure to prevent a lot of these injuries, like fixing potholes, smoothing out tree bumps, removing grates, designing better boardwalks, etc. All of my spills have been a result of such issues, not cars.

[mstone]

@ronwalf 67125 wrote:

I read it as “there is plenty of data about cycling, it just doesn’t answer the questions you care about.”

I think you might be right, but I also think that’s a confusion of “data” and “anecdote”.

[ronwalf]

@mstone 67132 wrote:

I think you might be right, but I also think that’s a confusion of “data” and “anecdote”.

Not really. We have all sorts of data on fatal crashes, data on injury types at hospitals, surveys on ridership and some vehicle counts. But what we really want to know is “given the general class of cyclists I belong to, what are my chances of injury/death.” We can answer that question much better for drivers than we can for cyclists.

[PotomacCyclist]

There might be at least one question that can be answered, somewhat. That is, whether riding slow, heavy upright commuter bikes (for example… Bixi/CaBi bikes) tends to be safer than cycling in general. The answer seems to be yes, if you look at the accident and injury statistics for Capital Bikeshare over its first three years of operation. I don’t have the current stats, but the last time I read about them (maybe 6 months ago?), the injury rates were much lower than what is thought to be the typical injury rate for cyclists (given the incomplete stats, since there aren’t authoritative stats on how many bike trips there are for all bikes). Well, I guess that may not be proof then. But the CaBi injury rates have been very low, especially considering that many of the users are riding for the first time as adults or they haven’t ridden in many years and they may have poor balance and bike handling skills. Many of them don’t wear helmets either. (Yes, I know that’s a separate and controversial topic, whether helmets lower the rate or severity of injury.)

In my personal experience as a very frequent CaBi user, I have my own ideas about why injury rates are so low on CaBi. The speeds are much slower than for almost any other type of common bike. This gives both the cyclist and car drivers much more time to avoid an accident, or at least to slow down before a collision takes place, thus decreasing the severity of an injury if an accident does happen. The bikes are heavy with a low center of mass. This makes them relatively sturdy and harder to tip over. Just a couple weeks ago, I rode into a deep, unmarked ditch on a Columbia Pike sidewalk. I’m pretty sure that if I had been riding my tri bike or even my mountain bike, that I might have tipped over to the side or even flipped over the handlebars. On the CaBi bike, I felt the thud as I hit the bottom of the ditch, but I barely wobbled to the side and the back wheel didn’t even hint at rising up and over the front wheel.

I’ve read a comment on the forum about someone watching a CaBi user in a bike lane when a car driver opened a car door. The CaBi user simply bounced off the door, swerved slightly and then kept going. I can believe that because CaBi users tend to ride more slowly than other cyclists (because of the weight and low gearing of the bikes). The low center of mass would help explain that situation too.

NOTE: I didn’t bother reading the NY Times article, based on the other comments here. Doesn’t sound like it’s worth the time, or the loss of one of my article views for the month.

[ronwalf]

@PotomacCyclist 67144 wrote:

Doesn’t sound like it’s worth the time, or the loss of one of my article views for the month.

If you’re using Chrome, that’s what right-clicking and hitting ‘Open Link in Incognito’ is for. (Firefox may or may not have something similar).

[fuzzy]

You could get killed walking your doggie!!

[mstone]

@ronwalf 67140 wrote:

Not really. We have all sorts of data on fatal crashes, data on injury types at hospitals, surveys on ridership and some vehicle counts. But what we really want to know is “given the general class of cyclists I belong to, what are my chances of injury/death.” We can answer that question much better for drivers than we can for cyclists.

Because we’re missing important data like total miles traveled, details about how people are biking, and, most importantly, consistent reporting.

[lordofthemark]

The article spends a lot of time on the question of under reporting of bike accidents not involving cars, esp relatively minor accidents. That issue is also addressed in the comments here.

The larger data issue, I think, is exposure data – how much riding is there. IIUC even for cars injury data has problems, but you can at least use fatality data as a metric for policy issues – and for cycling we can’t speak clearly about fatalities, because we don’t have a good denominator.

The NYT article spends a bit of time talking to folks in the bike industry about bike sales, showing that biking actually peaked decades ago. Yet we know from census that bike commuting has increased, and there is abundant evidence of a revival in transportation cycling – so, is it that that is more than offset by a decline in recreational cycling? Or that bikes last longer now (passing through multiple hands via craigslist, institutions like Phoenix bikes, etc) ? Or that fewer people buy a bike just to own one and ride very occasionally?

However all that aside I don’t particularly need data to know that this is dangerous, at least for someone with my skills : “Until his bike slid out of control while he was going 35 miles an hour downhill around a sharp turn, Dr. Harold Schwartz thought cycling accidents were something that happened to other people.”

[mstone]

@lordofthemark 67163 wrote:

The NYT article spends a bit of time talking to folks in the bike industry about bike sales, showing that biking actually peaked decades ago. Yet we know from census that bike commuting has increased, and there is abundant evidence of a revival in transportation cycling – so, is it that that is more than offset by a decline in recreational cycling? Or that bikes last longer now (passing through multiple hands via craigslist, institutions like Phoenix bikes, etc) ? Or that fewer people buy a bike just to own one and ride very occasionally?

Exactly–it’s kind of a weird article. Why should bike purchases be related to bike miles ridden? We don’t measure VMT by the number of cars sold, after all. From my observations, it seems like bikes last a lot longer than cars, among people who use them regularly. (Excepting vanity upgrades.) If you look at the bikes people ride around the city, I’d say that most of the ones on the street aren’t less than a couple of years old.

[GB]

@PotomacCyclist 67144 wrote:

(Yes, I know that’s a separate and controversial topic, whether helmets lower the rate or severity of injury.)

That’s controversial? I suppose there’s always someone who will disagree for fun. If there’s any evidence supporting the dangers of helmets please pass it along.

I think that the unreported cycling accidents have to be ignored in the same way that unreported car and running/walking accidents are ignored, unless there’s some reason to think that there are proportionally significantly more unreported accidents in one of these categories ignoring them all should still yield meaningful results.

Without having read the article I imagine that overall cycling safety (and cycling safety in any category of riding, from downhill mountain biking in the dark to slow city riding in the day) is highly correlated with helmet and light use.

I agree with the people that say safety measurements should be based on miles ridden rather than bike sales.

[PotomacCyclist]

Not the dangers of helmets, but how much they improve safety. It is quite a controversial topic in some cycling circles, especially in relation to debates about mandatory helmet laws. (One issue is whether helmet use improves safety enough to offset the marked decline in adult cycling when mandatory helmet laws have been passed in some jurisdictions and countries.)

The topic of CaBi riders and helmets has been discussed many times, whether there is a safety issue because of the fact that relatively few CaBi users wear helmets. There was a brief attempt by a Maryland politician to institute a mandatory helmet policy for adult cyclists, but that was sorted out before the Montgomery County CaBi stations were installed. The fact that there have been almost no serious head injuries among CaBi users, over millions of individual bike trips, tends to show that helmet use is just one element of overall bike safety. In some situations, helmets can definitely help. But other factors (infrastructure, safety education for cyclists and car drivers, bike design, etc.) can be even more important.

Another oft-cited example is Australia, or one of its cities. (I don’t remember which one. Maybe Sydney?) A mandatory helmet law was blamed for greatly decreasing the rate of cycling among the general population. People debated whether the lower rate of cycling would result in more health problems (from obesity and sedentary lifestyles) than helmets would prevent or lessen (if most adults wore them).

I’m not going to try to cover the entire topic here. Just tossing out some of the usual points in the debate.

***

I mentioned my experience with CaBi. I’ll also add my other experience with helmet use. The only somewhat serious accident I’ve had was in my first month of outdoor riding as an adult. I had just bought a triathlon bike and began exploring local trails and roads. While riding down the Capital Crescent Trail one afternoon, I started to pick up speed. It was a longer straightaway. I could see that there was no bike or pedestrian traffic for a couple hundred feet, so I felt comfortable going a little faster. But I hit a series of large bumps in the asphalt. They knocked me to the side of the trail. I was worried that I was headed for the dense foliage and fallen trees off to the right, so I instinctively cranked down on the brake levers (as an inexperienced cyclist). The bike stopped suddenly and I was pitched forward over the handlebars. Surprisingly enough, despite a complete flip and landing on the back of a shoulder and then my cheek and brow, my helmet did not touch the ground at all. When I inspected it later, there wasn’t even a speck of dirt on it, whereas the back of my shirt was completely brown from the dirt. My cheek was bruised and I had cut my eyebrow.

I was OK after gathering my wits, but I rode home very slowly. (I also learned a key lesson that day, which is to never do speed workouts on trails. Save that for wide, smooth roads.)

If I had hit my head, the helmet might have helped to decrease the severity of an injury. But probably not if there had been a neck injury. (I realize that I was a bit lucky that day. I landed about 6 inches off to the side of the asphalt. If I had hit the paved trail with my shoulder or cheek, I might have suffered some broken bones or a concussion. As it was, I escaped with a shoulder that remained tight for a few weeks, a bruised cheek and a cut on my eyebrow. No concussion or broken bones. No permanent injuries, once the shoulder healed up after 3-4 weeks. My confidence was shaken, but I managed to get myself back on the bike about 4 days later.)

[NOTE: After mentioning this incident on the forum, others pointed out that the bumps had been on the trail for several years. The National Park Service had spray-painted them with fluorescent paint at some point. But by the time I rode that day, the paint had nearly faded completely. When I looked back at the trail, I could barely see the traces of the bright paint. When I had been riding, I couldn’t see that paint at all. I wrote to the Friends of the CCT and asked them to contact NPS. I then wrote to the NPS directly and explained the trail condition. I said that the bumps were a serious safety hazard, even potentially life-threatening. I wasn’t exaggerating, since I had a close call myself. It was a downhill section so it’s not unreasonable to expect that some people would ride a little faster on that straightaway. That seemed to have woken up the NPS. I later found out that work crews went out there within the week and began marking and repairing the trail.]

***

The only other incidents have been minor over the following years: the slow tipover at intersections when I stopped while learning how to ride with clipless pedals, trying to bunny-hop a curb on the MTB and not being very good at it (but suffering just a scraped knee), and hitting the back of my calf on a pedal when I got tired toward the end of the bike messenger challenge at the Diamond Derby last year. Part of it is luck, but I’ve also made my own luck, by riding smarter. If I’m unfamiliar with a road or trail, I ride a bit slower, until I get more experience and learn where hidden intersections/sharp turns/rough spots are. I ride defensively, meaning that I always assume that car drivers don’t see me. I look ahead to see potential problems before I get to them (texting drivers, drivers pulling out of parking lots without looking, speeding drivers, pedestrians stepping suddenly into a road in the middle of blocks, cyclists passing aggressively on trails by crossing the center line and forcing those on the other side to veer off, etc.). I do wear a helmet on every training ride and on bike commutes. Even for most short errands. But not always on shorter CaBi rides. However, I still ride defensively, which continues to help me lower the risk of accident and injury.

While it’s impossible to get to a zero percent risk while riding, I know that my approach leaves me with a much better chance at long-term health than some of the very aggressive riders I see occasionally downtown. (Yes, they usually appear to be bike messengers. Sorry if that’s a stereotype, but I do see very risky behavior from some of them. I assume they are bike messengers because they have older bikes, messenger bags, usually old-style cotton caps instead of helmets, and a certain hipster-ish look that I can’t really define but I think most know what I mean. Some will speed right through fast-moving car traffic in the middle of busy intersections, weaving in and around cars going in different directions. My heart nearly stops when I see those moves and I’m not even the one doing that. If someone follows that approach often enough, a serious bike accident is inevitable at some point. Plus there are the speedsters who are racing and “threading the needle” while passing on crowded bike/ped trails like the MVT in rush hour. Those people are likely to get into an accident sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, they are also likely to cause harm to others because of their behavior.)

Apologies for the long tangent. But it’s related to bike safety, so it’s sort of on-topic. Kind of.

[Drewdane]

@PotomacCyclist 67144 wrote:

But the CaBi injury rates have been very low, especially considering that many of the users are riding for the first time as adults or they haven’t ridden in many years and they may have poor balance and bike handling skills. Many of them don’t wear helmets either. (Yes, I know that’s a separate and controversial topic, whether helmets lower the rate or severity of injury.)

Based on personal observation, because so many CaBi users are as you describe, I suspect they are more likely to ride on sidewalks and thus take themselves out of the equation.

[Author]

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