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Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet



 
 
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  #901  
Old August 23rd 05, 09:37 PM
Just zis Guy, you know?
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

I submit that on or about Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:29:07 GMT, the person
known to the court as Steven Bornfeld
made a statement
in Your Honour's bundle) to the
following effect:

Risk compensation is real, and denying it is vacuous.


No one is denying it. I am denying that safety measures are fruitless.
I think it was Guy who suggested that road signs be removed in order
to make vehicular traffic safer.


There are two separate ideas there.

The first is that safety improvements are fruitless. That is not
quite what I'm saying; what I pointed out was that in 1938, Smeed
noticed an inverse-square relationship between road casualties and
motor vehicle ownership. He found it applied across 20 countries for
which he had good data. It was always an empirical formula. What
Adams notes is that despite all the time, effort, ingenuity and money
spent on road safety interventions over the years, it's actually quite
hard to prove any improvement over and above what the Smeed law
predicts - which indicates that some at least of the safety benefit is
being consumed in other ways. We all know this: modern cars
accelerate faster, corner faster, brake better in the wet - and we use
these features to get away quicker, go round corners faster and brake
later than we used to, so we get to the end point quicker - or at
least we would if we hadn't compensated for /that/ advance by choosing
to live further from work!

http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/PD...%27s%20law.pdf discusses
this (and there's more from Adams at
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/publish.htm)

The second point is that removing road signs, in line with Hans
Monderman's "naked streets" ideas, might make the roads safer.
Actually I suspect that some or all of the improvements in safety
which have been yielded by these experiments would regress to the mean
after a few years, or rather, that the overall levels of casualties
would return to previous levels, but I'd be surprised if the
severities would be as great, and I'd also be surprised if the balance
didn't shift (right now we have a lot of highway engineers making
changes which improve safety for those who are already safest at the
expense of their victims; I don't know whether the so-called "naked
streets" initiatives will reverse this at all). But even if that
happens, even if the roads end up after a few years no safer than they
were before, the end result is vastly more pleasant aesthetically, and
vastly more humanised.

Here's a comparatively limited scheme, in Kensington High Street in
the City of London:
http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/Environmental...eforeafter.asp

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
Ads
  #902  
Old August 23rd 05, 09:55 PM
SMS
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

Mark & Steven Bornfeld wrote:


I was making an
inference (justified or not) that those who oppose helmet use based on
risk compensation seemed to be saying that as a consequence (of risk
compensation) that devices intended to improve safety would not
accomplish this goal. This was never my opinion; whether my inference
was unfair or not is another issue.

Steve


Yesterday I took my kids, and two nieces bicycling in Monterey. I
realized that I had packed everything, except my own helmet. I didn't
know what to do. I thought about those people who are just positive that
risk compensation would rear its ugly head and I was terrified that I
would suddenly begin riding at 2 mph and would have to pull over every
time a car or bicycle approached from the front or rear.

Amazingly, I found that I did not ride any differently with or without a
helmet. I still raced down the downhill sections at 40 mph, I almost had
a squirrel emded itself in my spokes which might have caused a fall
beyond my own control, but fortuntately it mad it across the road a
split second before my wheel.

I finally realized that the problem was _not_ that I suddenly was riding
more carefully because of no helmet, but that I had been riding too
carefully when I actually did have a helmet. I should be riding much
more dangerously when I wear a helmet, because otherwise the whole
theory of bicycle helmets and risk compensation goes out the window.
  #903  
Old August 23rd 05, 10:12 PM
Mark & Steven Bornfeld
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:

I submit that on or about Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:29:07 GMT, the person
known to the court as Steven Bornfeld
made a statement
in Your Honour's bundle) to the
following effect:


Risk compensation is real, and denying it is vacuous.



No one is denying it. I am denying that safety measures are fruitless.
I think it was Guy who suggested that road signs be removed in order
to make vehicular traffic safer.



There are two separate ideas there.

The first is that safety improvements are fruitless. That is not
quite what I'm saying; what I pointed out was that in 1938, Smeed
noticed an inverse-square relationship between road casualties and
motor vehicle ownership. He found it applied across 20 countries for
which he had good data. It was always an empirical formula. What
Adams notes is that despite all the time, effort, ingenuity and money
spent on road safety interventions over the years, it's actually quite
hard to prove any improvement over and above what the Smeed law
predicts - which indicates that some at least of the safety benefit is
being consumed in other ways. We all know this: modern cars
accelerate faster, corner faster, brake better in the wet - and we use
these features to get away quicker, go round corners faster and brake
later than we used to, so we get to the end point quicker - or at
least we would if we hadn't compensated for /that/ advance by choosing
to live further from work!

http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/PD...%27s%20law.pdf discusses
this (and there's more from Adams at
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/publish.htm)

The second point is that removing road signs, in line with Hans
Monderman's "naked streets" ideas, might make the roads safer.
Actually I suspect that some or all of the improvements in safety
which have been yielded by these experiments would regress to the mean
after a few years, or rather, that the overall levels of casualties
would return to previous levels, but I'd be surprised if the
severities would be as great, and I'd also be surprised if the balance
didn't shift (right now we have a lot of highway engineers making
changes which improve safety for those who are already safest at the
expense of their victims; I don't know whether the so-called "naked
streets" initiatives will reverse this at all). But even if that
happens, even if the roads end up after a few years no safer than they
were before, the end result is vastly more pleasant aesthetically, and
vastly more humanised.

Here's a comparatively limited scheme, in Kensington High Street in
the City of London:
http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/Environmental...eforeafter.asp

Guy


Where is the traffic? ;-)

Steve

--
Mark & Steven Bornfeld DDS
http://www.dentaltwins.com
Brooklyn, NY
718-258-5001
  #904  
Old August 23rd 05, 11:41 PM
John Forrest Tomlinson
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:57:53 GMT, Mark & Steven Bornfeld
wrote:

I'm finished with this thread.


Good. I hope for your own sake you keep reading it though.

JT

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  #905  
Old August 24th 05, 12:29 AM
Steven Bornfeld
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet



John Forrest Tomlinson wrote:
On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:57:53 GMT, Mark & Steven Bornfeld
wrote:


I'm finished with this thread.



Good. I hope for your own sake you keep reading it though.

JT


You're a good guy, John. Trust me on this one--continuing to read this
post will NOT be good for my health.

Steve


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Cut the nonsense to reply

  #906  
Old August 24th 05, 02:05 AM
Jay Beattie
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Posts: n/a
Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet


"bryanska" wrote in message
ups.com...
This post is solely intended to drive this thread to 1000

posts. Please
pitch in.


I'm in. So, how does this compare to "Sheldon is a Party Doll."
Attention Carl Fogel -- you have a research assignment. Which
thread is longer? -- Jay Beattie.


  #907  
Old August 24th 05, 03:02 AM
Bob Schwartz
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

You idiots can knock it off now. L'Equipe came up with
a troll that beats this one all to ****.

Bob Schwartz

  #908  
Old August 24th 05, 05:04 AM
Tom Kunich
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in message
...
Per Tom Kunich:
I even
had Dr. Shively, the DEAN of helmets as past director of the Snell
Institute
admit at the transportation committee in Sacramento that no possible
helmet
can make a difference in any accident which would normally cause a
fatality
on a motorcycle.


Maybe I'm misunderstanding what's above. Is that to say that somebody
claims
that a motorcycle helmet cannot save somebody's life?


That is to say that accidents in which a motorcyclist is killed from a head
injury alone and in which the head injury therefore sustained could be
mediated by a motorcycle helmet to less than lethal are so rare as to be a
statistical freak. If you read the accident reports and the statistics you
can arrive at no other answer.

Moreover, Dr. Shively, the past director of the Snell Memorial Foundation -
the originator of safety helmet science - said so at a meeting of the
Transportation Committee meeting in Sacramento, CA.

It was widely reported in the media as "Hell's Angels Defeat Helmet Bill".

Then when everyone else had cleared out the fine Senators quietly passed the
helmet bill and bankrupted 2/3rd's of the motorcycle shops in California.


  #909  
Old August 24th 05, 10:17 AM
Curtis L. Russell
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Posts: n/a
Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 21:37:49 +0100, "Just zis Guy, you know?"
wrote:

The second point is that removing road signs, in line with Hans
Monderman's "naked streets" ideas, might make the roads safer.


And after a short time with GPS in the Prius, I have to say that it is
entirely doable in the near future. Don't need the entire map system
display, just a couple of text displays. No problem about reading road
signs at night or worry about missing signs.

Curtis L. Russell
Odenton, MD (USA)
Just someone on two wheels...
  #910  
Old August 24th 05, 10:36 AM
John Forrest Tomlinson
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Default Trikki Beltran's bad concussion and his helmet

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 05:17:21 -0400, Curtis L. Russell
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 21:37:49 +0100, "Just zis Guy, you know?"
wrote:

The second point is that removing road signs, in line with Hans
Monderman's "naked streets" ideas, might make the roads safer.


And after a short time with GPS in the Prius, I have to say that it is
entirely doable in the near future. Don't need the entire map system
display, just a couple of text displays. No problem about reading road
signs at night or worry about missing signs.


Uhhh, dude, you know there are people who travel w/o cars sometimes --
like walking or even (gasp) on a bike. Are we supposed to carry a GPS
at all times too?

JT

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