Invisible Cyclists in Solstice Dark

Sorni wrote:

If stairs have potholes, pebbles, thorns, sewer grates, flinging doors, etc
etc etc, then you might just have a point!


Whether they do or not, they still cause substantially more head
injuries than cycling.

An estimated 1 million people in Britain attend hospital each year as a
result of a head injury. Of these:

* 150,000 will suffer a minor head injury, resulting in
unconsciousness for 15 minutes or less.
* 10,000 will suffer a moderate head injury, causing
unconsciousness for up to six hours. After five years, some will still
have physical or psychological problems.
* 11,600 people will suffer severe head injury and remain
unconscious for six hours or longer. After five years, only 15 per cent
will have returned to work.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/awarenes...tml#statistics

Of that 1 million, about 1% cyclists. Dept for Transport statistics show
under 3,000 serious cyclist injuries of all types.

I do trust you wear your helmet all the time Bill to protect against
these other causes of head injury, mainly trips and falls. After all it
just takes one........

--
Tony

"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the
right."
- Lord Hailsham

Tony Raven wrote:
Sorni wrote:

If stairs have potholes, pebbles, thorns, sewer grates, flinging
doors, etc etc etc, then you might just have a point!


Whether they do or not, they still cause substantially more head
injuries than cycling.

Per foot? LOL

An estimated 1 million people in Britain attend hospital each year as
a result of a head injury.

Clumsy blokes, eh?

Of these:

* 150,000 will suffer a minor head injury, resulting in
unconsciousness for 15 minutes or less.
* 10,000 will suffer a moderate head injury, causing
unconsciousness for up to six hours. After five years, some will still
have physical or psychological problems.
* 11,600 people will suffer severe head injury and remain
unconscious for six hours or longer. After five years, only 15 per
cent will have returned to work.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/awarenes...tml#statistics
Of that 1 million, about 1% cyclists. Dept for Transport statistics
show under 3,000 serious cyclist injuries of all types.

I do trust you wear your helmet all the time Bill to protect against
these other causes of head injury, mainly trips and falls. After all
it just takes one........

Yawn. Tell you what, Tony. If I descend a steep set of unfamiliar stairs,
you bet I'd be cautious. (Hold a hand rail, go slow, whatever.) Just today
on my ride I was looking back to say something to my friend and hit an
unexpected bump/crease/hole pretty darned hard. If not for my tremendously
impressive bike-handling skills (AKA pure luck), I could easily have gone
down fast and hard. /If I had/ I would have been quite glad to be wearing a
helmet.

Just as with stairs, if I'm careless I deserve what I get. (Although here
in the US, of course, falling down MUST mean a lawsuit, regardless of how or
why it happened.) I'll take what /reasonable/ extra protection I can get.

Bill "good night now" S.

Sorni wrote:


If I descend a steep set of unfamiliar
stairs, you bet I'd be cautious. (Hold a hand rail, go slow,
whatever.) Just today on my ride I was looking back to say something
to my friend and hit an unexpected bump/crease/hole pretty darned
hard.

A great example of risk compensation in action.

--
Tony

"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the
right."
- Lord Hailsham

wrote:

Personally I am amused that a bike messenger would
always be the one to remind an 'engineer' about
the minimum standards of the scientific method.
But this is just basic stuff I learned when I was in
grade school; it's not like you have to be a
professional researcher to understand the basic
standards for what can be called data.


Would I prefer to trust flying in an aircraft designed by a qualified
engineer or a bike messenger who left education after grade school?
Moreover if it did crash would which would I trust more - a scientific
investigation into the causes and corrective actions by a qualified
engineer or by a grade school bike messenger? Tough call.

--
Tony

"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the
right."
- Lord Hailsham

Sorni wrote:
wrote:

Sorni wrote:

wrote:

gds wrote:

OK but how does that effect your personal helmet wearing behavor?

I used to wear one almost all the time. Now I rarely wear one. I've
literally never come close to needing it.


Only takes once.


Yep. It only takes once tripping while going down a set of stairs,
too.

But I'm still not going to wear it. How about you, Bill?


If I went up & down stairs at 30-40 mph for 20, 30, or 60 miles in the
vicinity of even-faster-moving two-ton machines? Definitely!


The illustration is still valid, there are dozens of places where your
likely to fall and give yourself a severe case of head trauma. People
trip and fall on stairs all the time. I often use a radio scanner, and
listen to local transit communications (best traffic report in the
city). If you listen for 3 hours, your likely to hear at least one
report of a fall on stairs, or getting on a bus (stairs there too, often).

The real issue, is that by saying ONLY cycling is dangerous enough to
require helmets, your saying that cycling is much more dangerous, then
those other activities, like going up and down stairs, so the real
question is, is it more dangerous to bike 10 kilometers, or to go up and
down 10 flights of stairs.

One of the real issues here, is that there are a bunch of bicycle based
activities, touring, road cycling, off roading, free riding, urban
riding, and some of those are much more likely to result in a fall then,
others. For example I average about 10,000km on road between unplanned
dismounts, for off-road it's more like about 25km. MHL's do not
differentiate, between different cycling based activities. As for fast
moving 2 ton machines, a twisty down-hill section of single-track is
much more likely to leave you dismounted, then any car that is
reasonable control by it's operator ever will.

W

W

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:04:25 -0800, SMS
said in :

It's amusing when you see the posts by cyclists in countries with MHLs,
claiming that they've been riding for 20, 30, 40, 50, years, etc., but
gave it up when the MHL was enacted. Then they claim that the number of
cyclists has gone down, solely because of the MHL, yet the
injury/fatality rate has declined only linearly with the alleged decline
in the number of riders. There's at least three problems with their
claims.

And at least one with yours: the documented decline in cyclists in,
say, Australia, precisely coincident with the law, as recorded by
automated counters and telephone surveys.

Unfortunately your head is so far up your own arse that you can't see
daylight, let alone tell fact from fiction.

Guy
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

"To every complex problem there is a solution which is
simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:09:58 -0800, SMS
said in :

Please provide references and citations to prove this.

ROFLMAO! Thus spake Steven "make an assertion and then challenge the
world to prove it wrong" Scharf :-D

Guy
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

"To every complex problem there is a solution which is
simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken

On 11 Jan 2006 14:53:43 -0800, "peter" said in
. com:

Yes, the group of people who
chose to wore helmets prior to the accident that led them to the
Harborview ER had relatively fewer head injuries than the *other group*
of people who chose not to. But given that the two groups are
different in many ways we can't conclude on that basis that the results
would have been any different if everyone ( or no one) had worn helmets
at the time of their accident.

Actually even this is not entirely true: the "control" group had,
IIRC, about seven times the crash rate, so the injury rate per capita
would have been broadly similar.

Guy
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

"To every complex problem there is a solution which is
simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken

Tony Raven wrote:
Sorni wrote:


If I descend a steep set of unfamiliar
stairs, you bet I'd be cautious. (Hold a hand rail, go slow,
whatever.) Just today on my ride I was looking back to say something
to my friend and hit an unexpected bump/crease/hole pretty darned
hard.

A great example of risk compensation in action.

Bzzzt. Disagree. While there certainly ARE times when I'll ride a bit more
aggressively (I prefer...uninhibitedly?) because I'm wearing /some/
protective gear (helmet, gloves, even knee or arm warmers), this wasn't one
of them. We were just tooling along, and it I were a regular helmetless
rider I'd've thought nothing of turning my head to talk to him.

Like I said, it just takes once.

(And of course, the implication of YOUR argument is that one has to be
"white-knuckle" cautious if NOT wearing a lid; I'd prefer to /enjoy/ my
rides TYVM.)

Finally, just happened to see some crazy Aussies "tubing" down snow-covered
mountains in a Warren Miller film on a new (to me) HD channel last night.
Wild stuff. Every single one of them wore a helmet (no doubt mandated,
prolly by insurance). "Risk Compensation"? Hell yeah! So is a seat belt,
house insurance, safety goggles, etc. People take reasonable precautions
every day; I call it being smart.

Bill "good /morning/ now" S.

Sorni wrote:


Bzzzt. Disagree. While there certainly ARE times when I'll ride a bit more
aggressively (I prefer...uninhibitedly?) because I'm wearing /some/
protective gear (helmet, gloves, even knee or arm warmers), this wasn't one
of them. We were just tooling along, and it I were a regular helmetless
rider I'd've thought nothing of turning my head to talk to him.


And you think those 1 million hospital treated head injuries were
"aggressively" walking along the street or "aggressively" descending
stairs or were they just doing an everyday activity when whoops....? It
only takes just one moment of inattention walking down the street so why
take the risk when wearing a helmet is so easy and could protect you?
Or does your logic tell you that provided you protect against the cause
of 1% of head injuries, you don't need to protect against the causes of
99% of head injuries?

--
Tony

"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the
right."
- Lord Hailsham