Ontario Helmet Law being pushed through

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:03:42 GMT, "Steven M. Scharf"
wrote in message
t:

It is logical to conclude that the overwhelmingly higher number of
deaths for non-helmeted cyclists is why the serious injury numbers for
the non-helmeted cyclists are not higher than they are.

You say. On the other hand we know from a large volume of data
especially from Australia and New Zealand that the head injury and
fatality rate does not change with helmet use - and in fact the
percentage of helmeted head injured cyclists in Australia is currently
exactly the same as the percentage of helmeted cyclists overall.

So either you are wrong, or you are relying only on tiny observational
studies with their well-documented sampling bias. I would remind you
that the British Government could not find an example where cyclist
safety had improved with increasing helmet use.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 02:08:06 -0500, "Riley Geary"
wrote in message
:

[snip analysis]

Small data sets is always an issue. I recall that Rodgers analysed
similar data for every cycle crash in the USA over 15 years - about
eight million incidents - and found (a) no evidence that helmet use
was correlated with significantly reduced head injury rates; (b) a
significantly higher fatality rate among helmeted cyclists and (c) a
far greater benefit in reductions in injuries from the introduction of
standards for manufacture and sale of bicycles. For some reason
everybody seems to think a couple of hundred injured cyclists in
Seattle gives a more accurate picture than 8,000,000 crashes across
the whole USA ;-)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:27:59 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Depends which Bill.
The one with whom the ping-pong has been carrying on for months -
Zaumen. You've got caught that way before, I seem to recall.

He didn't get caught, and the "ping-pong" is kind of a lie since
I've been ignoring a good fraction of your posts. It was more a
continual rant on your part.

My word - Zaumen distorting the facts. Who could possibly have
predicted that?

Of course you evade a lot of what is said - especially where it
includes evidence or (worse still) calls for you to cite evidence.
But ping-pong it is; I am as determined to challenge your bull**** as
you are to repeat it, regardless of how often your "facts" turn out to
be fantasy. But you are an moderately good comedy helmet troll, and
so provide a valuable service to your own ego. Er, I mean society.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:29:42 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

As I said, due to *budget problems* a desirable program got scaled
back.

I bet the helmet promotion didn't. Mainly because it's paid for by
SafeKids, funded by Bell.

Nonsense - it got scaled back by having city employees handle it and
taking out some or all of the on-road classes. It still covers accident
avoidance.

You really are determined to miss the point, aren't you? So, who is
running the WHO Cycle Training Imitative? Who is pressing for
mandatory cycle training laws? How many schools forbid children to
cycle to school unless they have passed Effective Cycling? How many
general cycle safety posters do you see posted in schools and youth
clubs?

I am a school governor, and all cycling matters at the school pass in
front of me. In the last year we've had six sets of helmet promotion
literature and not one promoting general cycle safety. A woman is
coming to the Spring Fair to train children on how to wear helmets;
there will be no maintenance or skills training provided.

And yet every evaluation I have seen of the merits of various cycle
safety measures puts helmets last.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

Guy wrote:

Small data sets is always an issue. I recall that Rodgers analysed
similar data for every cycle crash in the USA over 15 years - about
eight million incidents...

How could anyone possibly do that. I think
what you mean is that he analysed available
data from ER visits?

- and found (a) no evidence that helmet use
was correlated with significantly reduced head injury rates; (b) a
significantly higher fatality rate among helmeted cyclists and (c) a
far greater benefit in reductions in injuries from the introduction of
standards for manufacture and sale of bicycles. For some reason
everybody seems to think a couple of hundred injured cyclists in
Seattle gives a more accurate picture than 8,000,000 crashes across
the whole USA ;-)

Regarding the "fatality rate" in (b), please clarify
what kind of fatality rate. Fatalities-per-hour,
fatalities-per-injury, fatalities-per-accident,
fatalities-per-participant, or what. This is a
crucial distinction.

Robert

wrote in message
ups.com...

Riley Geary wrote in part:

wrote in message
ups.com
...
What does the 1200-to-1 ratio of injuries-to-
fatalities mean? This number shows us that cycling is highly
unlikely to cause your death, but that it causes a ****load of
injuries. This is the dualism that some appear unable to grasp.


True, but keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of bicycling
injuries
are relatively minor or even trivial in nature, and that most of
these
actually occur to juvenile cyclists as part of the sometimes painful
process
of growing up and experiencing the real world.

Yes, but remember also that 1200-to-1 is the ratio of those seeking
medical attention for their injuries to fatalities, not the ratio of
ALL injuries to fatalities.

If you define "seeking medical attention" as showing up at an ER, the CDC
data would suggest the ratio with respect to fatalities is more like 600 or
700-to-1.

In my personal experience and observation,
cyclists tend to hurt themselves far more often than they visit the
ER or seek outpatient treatment. The number of ALL injuries is unknown
and unknowable, but a 5,000-to-1 ratio of total injuries-to-fatalities
seems reasonable. The ratio of hospitalizations to fatalities would
be what? About 60-to-1?


No, more like 25-to-1. The ratio of hospitalizations to fatalities for
motor vehicle occupants is only about 6-to-1, and just 4-to-1 for
pedestrians. OTOH, the ratio for non-traffic-related bicycle
hospitalizations to fatalities is probably close to 50-to-1. Keep in mind
this simply demonstrates that even among the more serious injuries requiring
hospitalization, cyclists are much less likely to die from their injuries
than either motor vehicle occupants or pedestrians (this is generally
considered a good thing, though I suppose it may depend on your
perspective).

Using CDC data from
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html to
put matters in some perspective, less than 1 out of every 26 trips to
the ER
by a bicyclist results in hospitalization, compared to nearly 1 out
of every
16 trips by a motor vehicle occupant, about 1 out of every 8 trips by
a
motorcyclist, ...

Speed kills. But just being on two wheels is problematic for many
folks.
The numerical bulk of cycling injuries comes from solo wipeouts--
resulting in generally mild to moderate injuries. Very few serious
injuries or deaths, but a ton of minor to moderate injuries.
While the towering pile of collarbones is impressive, what SHOULD
grab our attention in this discussion--trust me on this--is
the range of potential injury faced by the cyclist in traffic.
Which, not surprisingly, is similar to the range of injury faced
by drivers and pedestrians in traffic, and NOT similar to the
range of injury faced by basketball players or couch sitters.


Very true, but then couch sitters tend to suffer from a whole range of
serious health risks later in life due to their sedentary lifestyle; and
even for traffic-related injuries, cyclists suffer far fewer fatalities
relative to either serious injuries (~1 per 22 hospitalizations) or all
injuries for which medical attention is sought (~1 per 400 trips to the ER)
compared to either motor vehicle occupants (~1 per 85 ER visits) or
pedestrians (~1 per 28 ER visits).

It's important to remember also that cyclists in the ER may be less
likely to be hospitalized than drivers in the ER, cyclists are more
likely to end up there in the first place, on a per-mile or per-hour
basis.


Granted, even though a disproportionate number of those ER visits are due to
juvenile cyclists, and thus have little real relevance to adult cycling
conditions.

It's also important to remember that a "minor injury" in the grand
scheme of injuries may not seem so minor to someone who is
dealing with it. If you rip your calf open on your chainring,
for instance, and have to go in for 30 stitches, that's a
minor injury. When I ripped my finger to the bone, in the NEISS
data it would read something like LACR PINKY, which would surely
get Frank a-snickerin' ("skinned knees"), but if he had been
on the scene he might have lost his lunch. It's good policy
to withhold judgment on somebody else's "minor injuries"
until you've had a few yourself.

But minor injuries are not really what I'm talking about here.

... nearly 1 out of every 7 trips by a pedestrian,

Of traffic-related pedestrian accidents. But "pedestrian
accidents" (unintentional falls while walking) are by far the
number one cause of ER visits across all age groups. Pedestrians
in the ER are hospitalized far less often than cyclists.


Not according to the CDC data--unless you're including
non-transportation-related falls around the home, etc. Total ER trips by
pedestrians (as defined by the CDC, both traffic-related and
non-traffic-related) are only about 1/3 the number of bicycle-related ER
trips (~175k vs ~500k/year), even though pedestrians account for slightly
more total hospitalizations than bicyclists (~24k vs ~19k/year), and roughly
8 times as many fatalities (~6000 vs ~750/year). But then, that is the sort
of ratio relationship we would expect where one type of activity tends to
produce a much larger fraction of serious to fatal injuries compared to some
other activity.

Riley Geary

Just zis Guy wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:25:44 -0800, Benjamin Lewis
wrote in message :

I'm at a loss why anyone should care that if you cycle more, you're at a
greater yearly risk of sustaining a cycling related injury. Not only is
this completely obvious, it's not interesting or useful for anything.

Obvious? You think?

Risk per what? per mile?

Yearly risk is what I said.

I'd be amazed if that was not substantially lower for a high-mileage
cyclist. Ditto per hour. Per year? It would depend on how many miles
of low risk-per-mile cycling the high mileage cyclist does compared to
the low-mileage cyclist and their higher risk-per-mile cycling. Last
time I checked there was no binary split between high and low mileage
cyclists, so it would depend very much on where exactly you draw the line
between low and high mileage.

I'm still reasonable certain that if you plotted yearly risk against yearly
mileage for the "average cyclist", the graph would be monotonically
increasing, although with a slope of less than one. I agree that the
hourly or per mile risk would go down.

--
Benjamin Lewis

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

Riley Geary wrote:

A more serious problem is that you're looking at just a single year's worth
of data, and due to the relatively small number of fatalities involved, it
may or may not be an accurate representation of the broader picture. As it
turns out, the HSMV website you've referenced currently contains 10 years
worth of data (1994-2003), and 1997 just happens to have the lowest

I didn't choose 1997, while I was searching, that was the PDF that came
up in the search results, I didn't know there were other years data
available.

OTOH, I recently spent a week in Florida at Daytona Beach,
and of the 50+ cyclists I observed there, just 1 was wearing a helmet, so I
suppose it's at least possible that the Florida helmet use data is a fair
reflection of reality.

I am from Florida, and was just back there earlier this month. Helmet
use is pretty low. Most of the cycling appears to be in beach towns, and
on college campuses, not a lot of commuting at all (too hot). So I do
think that Florida's low level of helmet use may be an anomaly.

Frankly, the 1.4 figure does seem a lot more reasonable than the 3.4
figure, since 21-33% more fatalities for non-helmeted riders is what
we've seen in other parts of the world.

There will never be a double-blind study, and the data will always be
subject to the influence of rider skill level, sobriety, age, etc., and
the real possibility that a helmet wearer is more likely to be someone
who follows traffic laws, uses lights at night, and exercises reasonable
caution.

Riley Geary wrote:

If you define "seeking medical attention" as showing up at an ER, the CDC
data would suggest the ratio with respect to fatalities is more like 600
or
700-to-1.

"Seeking medical attention" means just that.
The NEISS estimates a half million outpatients
seeking treatment for a bicycle-related
injury in addition to the half million ER visits.

The number of ALL injuries is unknown
and unknowable, but a 5,000-to-1 ratio of total injuries-to-fatalities
seems reasonable. The ratio of hospitalizations to fatalities would
be what? About 60-to-1?


No, more like 25-to-1. The ratio of hospitalizations to fatalities for
motor vehicle occupants is only about 6-to-1, and just 4-to-1 for
pedestrians. OTOH, the ratio for non-traffic-related bicycle
hospitalizations to fatalities is probably close to 50-to-1. Keep in mind
this simply demonstrates that even among the more serious injuries requiring
hospitalization, cyclists are much less likely to die from their injuries
than either motor vehicle occupants or pedestrians (this is generally
considered a good thing, though I suppose it may depend on your
perspective).

I want to be clear here. Are you saying that
motor vehicle occupants are hospitalized at
4 times the rate of cyclists who have been
injured in a car-bike accident? Or of cyclists
who have been injured in all types of bicycle
accidents? Big difference obviously.

It seems that the rate of hospitalization
would be similar for all parties involved in
an accident with a motor vehicle, whether the
injured party be on a bike, on foot, or a
passenger in a car. That is my suspicion
anyway.

...but then couch sitters tend to suffer from a whole range of
serious health risks later in life due to their sedentary lifestyle;

Yes of course. But everybody sits on the couch,
even avid cyclists. When we do so, we are at much
less risk of accidental injury than when we are
riding our bikes.

and
even for traffic-related injuries, cyclists suffer far fewer fatalities
relative to either serious injuries (~1 per 22 hospitalizations) or all
injuries for which medical attention is sought (~1 per 400 trips to the
ER)
compared to either motor vehicle occupants (~1 per 85 ER visits) or
pedestrians (~1 per 28 ER visits).

"Traffic-related injuries?" So all those would
involve contact with a motor vehicle then?
Otherwise it seems like you are just giving
another stat that shows that cyclists face
a greater likelihood of minor injury compared
to their driving counterparts (due to solo wipeouts),
IN ADDITION to facing a similar risk with regard
to motor-vehicle involved accidents.

Granted, even though a disproportionate number of those ER visits are due
to
juvenile cyclists, and thus have little real relevance to adult cycling
conditions.

Very true, although I suspect this is true even
if the kids' injuries are culled out. A disproportionate
number of the "trivial" ER visits belong to kids as well.
Adults don't go to the ER for "skinned knees."

But "pedestrian
accidents" (unintentional falls while walking) are by far the
number one cause of ER visits across all age groups. Pedestrians
in the ER are hospitalized far less often than cyclists.


Not according to the CDC data--unless you're including
non-transportation-related falls around the home, etc.

Well, yeah, we include non-transportation-
related cycling injuries don't we? Or do
we simply classify ALL cycling accidents as
"traffic-related?" If you look at the CDC
data (which I linked to from your site--great
resource, thanks), you see that unintentional
falls while walking around (in the park, across
the street, in the home, whatever) are the
number one cause of injury across all age groups.

Total ER trips by
pedestrians (as defined by the CDC, both traffic-related and
non-traffic-related) are only about 1/3 the number of bicycle-related ER
trips (~175k vs ~500k/year), even though pedestrians account for slightly
more total hospitalizations than bicyclists (~24k vs ~19k/year), and roughly
8 times as many fatalities (~6000 vs ~750/year). But then, that is the
sort
of ratio relationship we would expect where one type of activity tends to
produce a much larger fraction of serious to fatal injuries compared to
some
other activity.

Well, you have to define "pedestrian" very
narrowly to get that ratio.

Robert

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:15:20 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Err, Benjamin, the discussion is about helmets and biases you get in
statistics regarding the comparison of different groups of cyclists.

On which subject I recommend the 1989 Seattle study, a very good
example of these biases in action.

You recommend that one? Good for you.

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB