Hey I’m starting to groove on this low-calorie Feed now with low fat. Translation: Not only was the Feed much smaller than usual this morning but the signal to noise ratio was very high, resulting in fewer articles that required filtering out. Now if some of the web sites would just do something about making the comments sections more readable from a technical standpoint (are you listening hamptonroads.com?) I could just get this done and on to other things by Noon.
Picking up an article first brought to my attention by BikePortland is this report of a hit-and-run. News – Thursday 7/9 – Local Beaverton Bicyclist Injured in Hit and Run From witness reports and other things stated in the article this seems to be entirely the fault of the driver who fled the scene. Find the driver, I’ll get the backhoe and the cement mixer. If he was drunk I’ll even do the rabid badgers. As for how you can avoid a similar situation, well from the reports it would be difficult as the driver waited until the cyclist was practically on his front bumper before pulling out. This was so close to being a deliberate act of assault I can’t tell you how to avoid it.
A drunk driver drives off the road and hits a cyclist. Where have we heard that before? Teen Injured in Car vs. Bicycle Accident LEO are assuming there was no malicious intent in the wreck, but I wonder if they have tried matching IP addys to hate messages directed against cyclists in the news sites in Boise? I did find the comment on the site amusing, “Loser. Sue him until his ears bleed.” Can lawyers induce intra-cranial bleeding?
A cyclist hit from behind in the UK wins his lawsuit. Injured cyclist to receive £4m I have never heard the term “tetra-plegic” before, “quadriplegic” yes. Reading the article it took the victim almost 3 years to be released from hospital to nursing home care. That is a terribly long time to be in hospital, and now he is as close to being a basket case as you can get and still be able to get about.
After the Sand Springs OK cycle killer others start to raise awareness of bicycles on the roads. Local doctor puts pedal to the metal The only thing I have the problem with is trying to keep cyclists off “inappropriate” roads. If there is a problem with the roads fix the roads, don’t try to keep cyclists from using them.
Cyclists are protesting what is proving to be an excessively high speed limit on one of the through roads in their town. Bicyclists to rally for lower speed limit on Shore Drive The major beef is that in order to get to other parts of the state without taking a 60 mile detour it is necessary to use this road, and to get to certain destinations there is no other choice but to use this road. A large number of people in the comments section complained about cyclists not using the bike path that cost so much to build, that only goes for 1.5 miles and stops well before the city limits. This makes it a recreational facility, not a transportation facility.
Finally some words about helmet laws. Freedom I wear my helmet every time I ride unless I’m riding to troubleshoot a noise in which case I don’t wear my full face bike helmet that also covers my ears, but I don’t ride in the street when I’m doing that unless it’s a noise that only shows up at speeds to fast to reach or be safe in the alley behind my house. I also loathe and despise helmet laws. Allow me to explain the dichotomy here. Bike helmets are pretty much the only PPE we have as cyclists, besides gloves which are only good if you fall off your bike and slide on your hands. But bike helmets are only effective at speeds up to 12.5 MPH at impact, and sharply reduce brain injury up to a 20 MPH impact. Above 20 MPH impact speed helmets will reduce brain injury severity but only slightly. Your skull may not be broken, but there will be brain damage and it will change your life in ways you cannot begin to fathom. Why would someone demand that I wear such poor protection under penalty of law? That would be like requiring police to wear ballistic vests that don’t protect vital organs and that only stop .22 Long Rifle bullets. There are more of .22 LR guns out there, and they do kill more people than any other round, but there are many more rounds out there that would completely overwhelm a vest designed to stop a .22 LR. Well the same applies for bike helmets, sure the most common head injury wreck is the fall off the bike move, but the most severe wrecks are the ones involving motor vehicles at speeds much higher than 12.5 MPH. That’s why I wear a full face helmet that gives me a touch more protection than the standard bicycle helmet.
And that’s all I have today.
Billed @$.02, Opus
2 responses so far ↓
Richard Keatinge // July 10, 2009 at 05:21 |
I too used to be a bit obsessive about wearing a helmet, until some inconvenient facts came out.
The trouble with bike helmets is that the figures don’t show that they work – helmet laws have stopped a lot of people cycling and have done nothing for head injury rates, see Robinson DL. No clear evidence from countries that have enforced the wearing of helmets. BMJ 2006;332: 722-5. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7543/722-a. (Robinson’s work is the best scientifically because she uses the best scientific methods, all available control groups and so on.) It appears that helmets break easily, but don’t absorb the impact, see the engineers quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet. A broken helmet has simply failed, and the widespread anecdotes on the theme of “a helmet saved my life” seem to owe more to wishful thinking than to science. As for “a car ran over my head”, see the pro-helmet site http://www.helmets.org/smush.htm; if a car goes over your head, I’m sorry to say you won’t be sitting up and praising your helmet. The only known connection is that helmets have strangled a few young children who were wearing helmets while playing off their bicycles.
I no longer wear a helmet and haven’t pressed them on my children. I do check that their brakes work and that they have a good idea of the rules of the road.
At my moderately advanced age it’s far too dangerous not to cycle – regular cycling, Danish style, not too far, not too fast, nearly halves the death rate, see http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/160/11/1621 All-Cause Mortality Associated With Physical Activity During Leisure Time, Work, Sports, and Cycling to Work. Andersen et al, Arch Intern Med. 2000;160:1621-1628. Bicycling is good for health, but helmets don’t seem to be.
Speaking of falling: A brief word about helmets « BikingInLA // August 6, 2009 at 12:18 |
[...] fact, bike helmets are designed to provide full protection from brain injuries at speeds up to just 12.5 mph, while reducing the severity of such injuries at speeds up to 20 mph. If you get hit by a car, [...]