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

[Tim Kelley]

@PotomacCyclist 67201 wrote:

I still see plenty of CaBi riders on the streets and in bike lanes. I’d guess that only half of them wear helmets.

Even if half of the CaBi rides are on the sidewalk, that still means there have been a couple million CaBi bike trips on the roads and bike lanes over the last 3 years, with almost no serious head injuries.

If you are looking for details, page 22 of this report has helmet information: http://capitalbikeshare.com/assets/pdf/CABI-2013SurveyReport.pdf

[DismalScientist]

@GregBain 67182 wrote:

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.

There’s always the Peltzman effect, which hypothesizes that people take more risks when using safety devices. Sorta like the fools that drive their 4x4s without reducing speed on snow-covered roads.

[PotomacCyclist]

I just skimmed through the report. I didn’t see any data on accidents or injuries there.

I’m basing my injury stats on a post from one of the CaBi/BikeArlington staff. On a WashCycle post, the topic of helmet use and CaBi came up. He clarified that as of that date (spring 2013 maybe?), there had been no reported serious head injuries among all CaBi users, and only a relative few number of total serious injuries. I’ve only read about 2 or 3 in the local news but apparently there have been a few more. That’s still a pretty low rate, which is very cool.

[Tim Kelley]

@PotomacCyclist 67206 wrote:

I just skimmed through the report. I didn’t see any data on accidents or injuries there..

Yeah, that’s just a user survey which includes helmet use as a topic.

Here’s an article on Bikeshare safety that includes some ride/crash data: http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/05/01/bike-share-has-a-great-safety-record-in-cities-more-dangerous-than-nyc/

[GB]

@DismalScientist 67204 wrote:

There’s always the Peltzman effect, which hypothesizes that people take more risks when using safety devices.

I did think of that, but there is the off setting (not necessarily equal) effect which is that risk adverse people tend to be consistently risk adverse. Risk adverse people where helmets and ride safely. (I’m sure there’s an econ term for that.)

The great thing with the helmet problem (the problem is that people don’t always wear helmets) is that over time it should be self-correcting; in that only people who wear helmets will be left. Or put another less extreme way, it is self-correcting to the extent that it is a problem.

I say all that as an avid helmet wearer; it has saved my head from a bad bump or worse at least once. I still think that helmet use is highly correlated with bike safety, as it basically the only piece of safety equipment worn. However one would need a very large sample to see that because it only helps in accidents that involve the head, and it doesn’t help (enough) in all of those.

[mstone]

I’ve actually made a conscious decision to cut back on helmet use. I still wear one, e.g., for the work commute, where I’ll go over 20MPH on roads like 123. But I decided that it was stupid to wear one for a quick errand in the neighborhood. Basically, if I’d walk the same route without a helmet, I won’t wear one on the bike. It’s evolved from rational safety tool to hypocritical safety litmus fetish, and I think that’s bad for cycling overall.

Oddly, in other countries people can bike that way without all the fake concern, and surprisingly, they aren’t all dead or brain damaged.

[hozn]

Yeah, I think if you are riding on your neighborhood sidewalks below 10mph then a helmet probably isn’t the most critical thing.

I also don’t think it’s all that critical to wear a seatbelt when driving a car slowly around an empty field.

[lordofthemark]

The point of the Pelzman effect is not so much that it distorts statistics on effectiveness, but that it means you get less public health benefit when you MANDATE usage than you might expect. The idea is people know how much safety they want to “buy” by foregoing comfort, speed, etc – and when you mandate seatbelt usage (and presumably helmet usage, though it was seatbelts Sam Peltzman studied, Im pretty sure) people compensate by say increasing their speed (or equivalent changes on a bike). They are still getting benefits, but taking them in the form of speed (or a riskier bike route maybe) rather than greater safety. If you are voluntarily using a seatbelt, there would be no such effect. Though in the case of a bike helmet, which is visible to motorists, there is the troubling possibility, claimed by some, that drivers pass closer if you wear a helmet.

[Tim Kelley]

“The Safety Paradox”

One take on things: http://hushmagazine.ca/social-commentary/the-safety-paradox/

[dasgeh]

The article annoyed me most of all for not even mentioning transportational cycling. Ugh. Not that there’s data for that either. It seemed to be geared towards the question of whether the sport of cycling is dangerous. Important, no doubt, but not as interesting as whether cycling as a mode choice is more or less dangerous than the alternatives.

One thought on data: data has been collected when there has been an economical reason to collect it. For cars, there are insurance companies and they want to know how dangerous (in terms of $ it will cost them) various drivers are, so they collect lots of data. I think bikeshare will be great for collecting data on a subset of transportational cycling, but it won’t capture all data: there is incentive to report serious injury, but not every little spill (especially if it didn’t harm the bike).

On helmets, my new way of discussing it with the uninitiated: it would reduce the risk of head injury to wear helmets when you walk or run (or drive, but that’s a different topic). Most people agree it’s silly to wear a helmet when you walk or run. A lot of cycling (those short trips on CaBi) are similar to walking/running — you’re going slow, you’re very stable. So it’s silly to wear a helmet on those rides.* Faster rides are different, and yes, you should always wear a helmet on those.

*For little kids, this logic is different because they aren’t as stable on a bike, and they’re more vulnerable to injury. So they should always wear a helmet on a bike. Since I am usually with little kids when I take these kind of short trips, I always wear a helmet, too, to model the behavior I expect from them. But when I am kid less and tooling around the city on CaBi, I enjoy the wind in my hair.

@Drewdane 67189 wrote:

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.

Huh? You can get injured riding on a sidewalk, and it’s an injury just as much as it would have been had you been riding on a road. Riding on the sidewalk may even be more dangerous than riding on a road, e.g., when there are driveways, more maintenance, etc.

[jrenaut]

I don’t know how much good it does to break cycling into functional categories – the way I ride is determined much more by where I’m riding than what the purpose of the ride is. Maybe that’s just me, but whether I’m riding to work, the grocery store, or out to the W&OD, I pretty much always ride down 14th Street, and the only difference in my riding there is the amount of traffic (generally lighter for rides to the W&OD because it’s at the crack of dawn).

[dasgeh]

@jrenaut 67438 wrote:

I don’t know how much good it does to break cycling into functional categories – the way I ride is determined much more by where I’m riding than what the purpose of the ride is. Maybe that’s just me, but whether I’m riding to work, the grocery store, or out to the W&OD, I pretty much always ride down 14th Street, and the only difference in my riding there is the amount of traffic (generally lighter for rides to the W&OD because it’s at the crack of dawn).

Fair point. Though if someone is thinking over whether they want to start biking their kid to school, they really want to know whether biking a kid to school is safer than driving or the bus or walking. Injury rates of triathletes are irrelevant to that.

And if you’re going to break it down, this isn’t the right break down (from the article):

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.

[hozn]

@dasgeh 67443 wrote:

Fair point. Though if someone is thinking over whether they want to start biking their kid to school, they really want to know whether biking a kid to school is safer than driving or the bus or walking. Injury rates of triathletes are irrelevant to that.

Yeah, I also think it would be useful to categorize the cycling. Perhaps its harder to make an analogy to driving here since we don’t have the same mix of pure sport (e.g. race cars) and transportation on the streets. Even people that are just going for a sunday drive are driving a street-legal car and following lowest-common-denominator traffic rules (like low speed limits) that don’t limit bikes in the same way.

In many cases the riding may end up being similar, but I know that I do choose my other bike for purely recreational riding. And that bike doesn’t stop as quickly (carbon wheels), sometimes has thinner tires, doesn’t have reflective sidewalls on the tires, is lighter, is less upright, etc. These things all make that bike a little less safe to ride — but arguably more fun! And that’s not to mention mountain biking, which, time has proven, is many times more likely to result in [minor] injury.

[mattotoole]

I agree with Tom Bowden, that like a lot of things, cycling is as safe as you make it. Here’s his Bike Summit talk:

[Author]

Posts