Clive George said:Quoted message said:
But we must be scrupulously honest in our attempts to promote
cycling as a reasonably safe activity.
It is important that we, ourselves, know just how safe cycling is.
That is a very difficult question to answer as there are so many
variables but
we should not take short cuts and use smoke and mirror tactics to
try and achieve our goal.
That doesn't really answer my question, does it?
What do you want to do with your figures?
If you did know exactly how safe cycling was, what would you do with
that knowledge? Eg if it turned out to be respectively 0.5, 1 and 2x
as risky as driving, or as walking?
I'm being entirely honest with my efforts to promote cycling as a safe
activity, even if it turns out to be twice as dangerous as driving.
That's because driving isn't actually that dangerous. (OTOH being
outside the car...)
Very interesting that you should plump for *"twice as dangerous"*......
Reference data brutally summarised:
##
Cyclists in Britain run a higher risk per hour than other modes.
If we take the normal British driver with a relative risk of death per year
of 1, then:
The risks for other modes are:
Driver = 1
Enthusiast cyclist (280hours per year/2,300miles) = 1.9
Average all cyclists = 3.5
280hour per year pedestrian = 0.9
Average all pedestrians = 1.5
(the full article points out that the actual difference is likely to be much
less than the above numbers for reason of biasing factors such as
undercounting of cyclist numbers in traffic censuses)
looked at a different way:
Per km the risk ratio Cyclist/Pedestrian = 0.7
And:
A better handle on the absolute level of risk is: The cycling risk
corresponds to cycling 280hours per year for 12,000 years before a fatal
accident
Source: Wardlaw TEC December 2002
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/papers/c2014.pdf
##
It seems to me that not only is your position on this sensible and
reasonable, it is the correct one. The risk of cycling compared to driving
is somewhere between 0.7 and 3.5 depending on how you look at the data (per
hour or per km)
To argue as some choose to do here that cycling is significantly safer than
walking or driving is to fly in the face of sound authoritative data from a
source much respected and oft quoted her on the subject of cycling safety in
general and helmets in particular.
What is important is that the *absolute risk* is very small, the benefits of
cycling are large and the more people who cycle the safer it is likely to
become (see the quoted article for the full argument)
It seems to me that Wardlaw's up front and honest approach is of far more
value than spurious juggling of dubious stats to *prove* cycling is safer
than walking!
pk
