Chart of the day: Bicyclists up, injuries down
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This is not nearly as counterintuitive as it might seem at first blush:
By my calculations, these numbers mean that you’d need to ride your bike in NYC for 7,300 days, on average, before getting injured. At 200 days a year, that’s over 35 years. And I’m quite sure that a large proportion (but by no means all) of the injuries and fatalities happen to people riding unsafely — against traffic, through red lights, without a helmet, that kind of thing. Which means that the odds of a safe bicyclist being injured in NYC are even lower than that.
Going forwards, the safety in numbers effect is going to make cycling even safer and more popular, which means that we should be able to extrapolate the blue line up and the brown line down more or less indefinitely. Good news!
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The helmet thing is controversial. If people feel like they have to wear a helmet, they think biking is dangerous, so they drive, get fat, and die from heart disease. Danish cycling activists think the recent helmet promotion there has hurt biking.
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/thre e-types-of-safety.html
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2009/03/dutc h-cycling-retains-its-popularity.html
http://www.howwedrive.com/2008/10/01/to- wear-or-not-to-wear-and-is-that-even-the -right-question-ian-walker-on-cycle-helm ets/
(I feel naked without mine though. Been wearing it so long it’d be impossible to stop now)
“…which means that we should be able to extrapolate the blue line up and the brown line down more or less indefinitely.”
…ah yes. No doubt it was after plugging those numbers into a Gaussian copula function that you were able to confidently predict that one-way trend line. Securitize it!
i have another theory. i stopped riding my bicycle in NY in late 2005. now that i am off the streets, they are far more safe for bicyclists.
Actually I live on a busy cycle route and the general behaviour of cyclists is deplorable. Stop and yield signs are totally ignored as are pedestrian crossings and red lights. Groups often ride abreast blocking half of the road. If the numbers of these people is going up it just goes to show that good old US entitlement is alive and kicking in these troublesome times.
another thing: i’m sure that ridership went up and casualty rates went down when they opened the west side route which was completely out of traffic — plus opening the bike path on the williamsburg bridge helped too though i think that happened before 2005. so i am sure that the whole story is more nuanced than the graph indicates.
also: riding without a helmet shouldn’t distinguish between injury and no injury, though it can change the severity of an injury.
riding without a helmet…anyone care to recall a certain Pittsburgh starting QB doing that a few years back ?? There is NO way I would ride without one
to quote N. Dynamite…lucky