Stay with this to the end. There’s a surprise and a bit of a moral there.
Necessary Disclaimer: I’m going to have to use some approximate numbers here, as I don’t have the documentation handy. I may off a bit, but not significantly.
Bicycle Accidents: A “bicycle injury accident” is one in which the cyclist is injured. All bicycle injury accidents can be divided into two groups. The first group is “Automotive Impacts.” That’s when a cyclist and a car collide. Doesn’t matter who hit who, whose fault it was, or who was moving and who was standing still. If a bike and a car collide it’s in this group. The second group is “All other bicycle injury accidents.” That second group includes anything a rider is doing that results in an injury.
Demographics: Let’s look at number of accidents per thousand riders per year. Let’s break these down demographically.
Cyclists age 5 to 15: In both categories, “Automotive” and “Other” the rate is just under 500 per 1000 per year. Pretty bad, but not unexpected. Kids fall over and run into things.
Cyclists age 15 to 25: The rate here is better, but not good. It’s still just under 400 per 1000 per year in each category.
Club Riders: You would expect things to improve here. These are the enthusiasts, the experts. Well, the number do get better. They are around 250 per 1000 per year in both categories. Better, but still not good.
Cyclists who routinely ride in adverse conditions: The word adverse here refers to situations that are usually considered dangerous or “bad,” rain, heavy traffic, bad road, night time, winter, etc. One could be forgiven for thinking something like, “These guys must be suicidal, and I bet their numbers are the worst of the lot.” In fact, this groups has about 3 impact incidents with automobiles per 1000 per year. They have a bit more than 2 of the “other” category of incidents per 1000 per year.
But these are the clowns who routinely ride in really bad conditions! Oh wait, it gets worse.
Industrial Actuarials (the folks who study the frequency and probability of accidents for industrial insurance carriers) talk about “exposure risk rates.” The idea is, the longer that somebody is exposed to a risk, the more likely it is that the bad thing will happen. Think of Russian roulette. If the idiot who plays it only loads one cylinder, and only tries once, then they have one chance in six of decorating the walls. But if they keep doing it, sooner or later… You get the picture. So the idea is, if you drive a lot, you are more likely to have an accident than someone who doesn’t drive as much. Apply this to cycling. The high mileage cyclist is more risk exposed. So according to this, theory, the incident rate should rise dramatically at some point.
Well, if we looks at those “club riders,” we find they typically ride about 3500 miles per year. Now guess what? That group of riders who routinely ride in adverse conditions? They correlate pretty well with an annual mileage too. Seems the majority of them ride between 8,000 and 10,000 miles per year. So according to the actuaries, they should be 2 to 3 times more likely to be involved in an accident than the club rider.
So they ride in bad conditions and they are more exposed, and yet, they have extremely low accident numbers. What’s going on?
Could it be that cycling is not as dangerous as it might seem? How about this? If somebody does something a lot, and does it carefully and thoughtfully, then they just might get pretty good at it.
Ride more. Ride thoughtfully. Ride your bike to work and the store. You just might live longer.
Food for thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment