On 19 Oct 2004 15:32:44 -0700, (Silas Denyer)
wrote:

I'm sorry, but on my (admittedly flawed) analysis of the available
data, pedestrians are (to the nearest order of magnitude) JUST AS
LIKELY to be killed by a cyclist as by motorists running red lights.

Yes, your analysis is flawed, and the biggest flaw is that you single
out an ofence that most motorists are unable to commit because they
are constrained by other traffic, while assuming that all cycling
fatalities are caused by that same offence (which clearly they are
not). Singling out individual offences in that way makes no sense -
you are more likely to be injured by a cyclist throwing his bike at
you than by a driver throwing his car at you, but that does not
indicate that cars are safer.

I am not suggesting that all pedestrians killed by bikes are not at
fault, nor that apples and apples are being compared. But enforcement
of red lights for cars IS BEING PRIORITISED and I'm arguing that
cyclists should be treated equally according to the threat posed.

Which is precisely what we've been saying all along. In an ideal
world all road traffic laws should be enforced, no group should be
singled out. In a world of finite resources it is easy to justify
singling out those groups which pose most risk, in this case car
drivers, and dealing with the lesser risk by means of the occasional
purge, as is currently done.

At present we have Michael Howard proposing that public order offences
should be subject to zero tolerance (and I think it quite likely that
pavement cycling would be included in that) while motoring offences
should be subject to zero enforcement. That is wrong, which is why I
in particular am steamed up about it at the moment. The truth is that
cyclists and pedestrians are both victims of motor danger. The
largest complaint of pedestrians against cyclists, that they ride on
the pavement, is in the main a response to this common danger. If the
common danger is tackled at source, by applying zero tolerance and
meaningful penalties to /all/ road traffic offences, then the
symptomatic problem will, to a large extent, go away of its own
accord.

You don't fight knife crime by issuing all grannies with body armour,
and you don't fight road danger by prosecuting those who have been
scared off the roads.

I understand the nature of the debate. My "solution" is not the
only one, nor is it the best one. In fact I think it would be a great
shame to register bikes (although compulsory insurance for cyclists
makes a lot of sense). But I'm sorry, I simply don't agree that the
antisocial behaviour being perpetrate by many cyclists (even if they
are not in these groups) is a sufficient cause for concern to debate.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. If you admit that your "solution" is
inappropriate, why raise it? It is clear that it will shed more heat
than light, not least because the arguments for /not/ adopting that
solution are well-rehearsed. The issue of compulsory insurance has
also been discussed at length, and the reasons against appear entirely
sound (even to me as a well-insured cyclist).

As to whether the behaviour of cyclists is a fit subject for debate,
that is questionable, when the nature of that debate seems to be
tediously predictable: allegations of widespread lawlessness by
cyclists, counterd by arguments that actually all road users appear to
be lawless, and the risk posed by lawless cyclists is tiny by any
measure. I know of nobody on uk.rec.cycling who condones lawless
cycling. We may understand the reasons for it, and even occasionally
do it ourselves, but we do not condone it.

Any attempt to debate the issue in properly neutral terms would lead
to a very short thread. A proposal that the problem posed by a
response to motor danger should be addressed by prosecuting the group
who are victims of that danger, rather less so - as you have seen :-)

By the way, I am also a cyclist as well as a motorist and a
pedestrian. In my experience of cycling, cyclists are (on average)
far, far more likely to routinely ignore all or most traffic laws than
the average motorist. Volumes make the difference here in terms of
risk (more car miles, less bike miles).

Really? So how do you account for the vanishingly small injury
figures, or the fact that cyclists are responsoible for thier own
demise less than one time in five, compared with half the time for
pedestrians? Without denying that some - mainly "yoofs" - are
lawless, it seems to me that cyclists have a powerful incentive for,
in the most part, using their vehicles with far more care and
vigilance than is exercised by the average motorist. Bodywork damage
bike may cost us less to repair, but it /hurts/.

Cyclists on their own can be far worse by the way - cycle accidents on
dedicated cycle paths are twice as likely as cycle accidents on road
(per cycle mile travelled)!

That is because the majority of cycle paths are ill-conceived and
designed primarily to get us out of the way, and because the least
experienced cyclists are likely to use them preferentially, and
because they are ill-maintained, and a whole host of other reasons.
But you miss the point rather: how many people die as a result of such
crashes? Walking around is dangerous, too, accounting for half of all
visits to A&E by children, for example, but it is motor traffic which
accounts for half their injury deaths.

Can you explain how come you are nearly two hundred times as likely to
be killed by a motor vehicle on the footway than by a bike, despite
what you claim to be widespread use of bikes on footways?

Yes, car miles outweigh bike miles by a similar or much larger margin.
When you remove that weighting (i.e. normalise the results) you'd be
surprised how similar they are.

But, according to you, car miles on the footway are close to zero,
while an appreciable proportion of all bike miles are on the footway,
sometimes legally sometimes not.

I have at no time suggested singling out anyone. I'm asking for
even-handed policing and enforcement, that's all.

Which requires infinite resources. You need to vote for a party which
will raise enough tax to police all offences equally. If you can find
one.

When the Police in
London start routinely riding their bikes on the pavement and the
wrong way up one-way streets then that is clearly not happening.

The police in London also drive their cars through red lights, in case
you hadn't noticed.

You need to check your sources more carefully. The proposed EU Fifth
Insurance Directive covers both cyclists and pedestrians

No, you have erred in logic. Merely because I was arguing that
cyclists are dangerous does not imply that I supported the converse
proposition, i.e. that pedestrians are blameless. See my other post
about stats and pedestrian culpability.

You have missed the point. You cited the fifth insurance directive,
but this applied equally to cyclists and (more often blameworthy)
pedestrians. Amazingly most of the newspapers which covered the story
didn't quite find space to mention the latter. Knowing as we do that
there are more pedestrians, more pedestrian injuries, and pedestrians
are more likely to be the authors of their own demise, why was the
directive invariably portrayed as placing the blame on drivers for the
actions of careless cyclists? But this is an aside.

Where do you get your stats from? According to, for instance,
http://www.ringroad.org.uk/wmrar2000.htm 57% of all crashes resulting
in pedestrian injury were due to pedestrians stepping, walking or
running from the footpath. 1.75% were due to pedestrian inebriation -
THREE TIMES the number caused by drunk drivers, but when was the last
time you saw drunken pedestrians vilified in the press?

A drunk pedestrian poses a risk mainly to himself, a point you
persistently miss. It sounds to me as if you are really just another
cagers' rights campaigner and not that interested in vulnerable road
users at all.

So, cyclists responsible for 0.4% of deaths. Better start with the
99.6% cause, don't you think?

Well, 60% or so were caused by the pedestrians themselves, so why
aren't we concentrating on them?

No idea, probably because they are mainly a danger to themselves. I
am in favour of all road users following the rules. Though of course
in many of the cases where the pedestrian "just walked out", we are
expected to take the driver's word for it.

You also have to remember that fatalities are sufficiently rare that
they do not form a sound basis for statistical analysis, which is why
KSI is more usually used. And of course you ignore the fact that you
are, as I have said before, nearly 200 times as likely to be killed by
a motor vehicle on the footway than by a bike.

But if cars drive 200 times more miles than bikes (not unreasonable
assumption based on figures) then bikes are no safer than cars, QED.

No, that's bikes /on pavements/ vs. cars /on pavements/ - where it is
asserted they hardly ever venture. Cyclists are responsible for on
average slightly under one fatality per year, if memory serves (and
that assuming that the cyclist os to blame in every case, which is a
big assumption), and drivers for over three thousand (90% of injury
crashes are reportedly due to driver error).

I think I clearly accepted the limitations of the figures I was able
to find. All along what I'm trying to do is to find a measure of the
order of magnitude of the problem using the available figures.

But the estimate, methodology, extrapolation, arbitrary selection of
offences and base assumptions were all invalid. The hole is deep
enough now, you shoudl stop digging :-)

I am very familiar with the figures. However, for instance, we are
quite happy as a society to ban, say, drink-driving, when the figures
show that this is also a very, very small proportion of all pedestrian
deaths caused by vehicles.

It did not used to be the case. There was a substantial drop in road
fatalities between the hours of 9pm and 4am following the introduction
of evidential breath testing.

Also, many of the dead are not pedestrians. Governments have an
annoying habit of lumping all road user fatalitiess together when
considering policy on motoring enforcement :-)

I also don't accept that drivers kill all of these people. People are
killed, but they are not all (in fact the vast majority are not)
killed by the drivers but by themselves.

No indeed. Only 90% of injury crashes are reportedly due to driver
error. So that's only around 3,000 deaths per year. There is no
record of what proportion of the cyclist-caused death rate is due to
rider error.

1. Many bikes ride on pavements and run red lights, etc. routinely
2. My single statistical sample suggests that the majority of London
cyclists run red lights
3. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian deaths are caused by bicycles
4. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian detahs are caused by cars
running red lights
5. Red light infringement by cars is being actively policed
6. Red light infringement by bikes is not being actively policed
7. Bikes are not intrinsically safer for pedestrians per mile covered
than cars

Stop digging NOW!

you are straying from the facts here. Those figures that I have
seen for pedestrian crossings do not apportion blame (did driver run
red light), only give overall figures.

On pedestrian crossings, pedestrians generally have priority. Its
what they are for, the quid pro quo for making pedestrians walk the
extra distance rather than allowing them free access to a public right
of way.

This implies, once again, that the vast majority of the pedestrian
deaths were caused by the pedestrians, not cars (or anyone else)
running red lights.

LOL! And if the cars weren't there they'd have walked into each other
and died of fright, would they? The whole point about a town is it's
full of people; if we choose to frive as if it wasn't, we can hardly
blame the people when the inevitable happens can we?

But again you miss the point: I have said all along that all road
users should follow the rules. It's just that the consequences of not
following them are masisvely greater as soon as you introduce a motor
vehicle into the equation. The various proposed solutions to this for
some reason all seem to involve restricvting those who are /not/ in
motor vehicles.

A philosopher writes:

"Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these
were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of
paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green
pieces of paper which were unhappy."

If we therefore strip away the pedestrian-caused
fatalities then bikes look significant. I'm sorry, but those are the
facts.

You are engaged in a turd-polishing exercise vis a vis your data.

I'm not making a case for anything other than a comparison of
modes. The bike isn't a scapegoat here.

So: deaths caused by pedestrians: around half of all pedestrian deaths
(say 350 annually); deaths caused by motorist negligence: 90% of
3,500, less a few for pavement lemmings, say about 3,000 annually.
Deaths caused by cyclists: around one annually.

Next contestant, please.

I am a pedestrian, a cyclist and a motorist, depending upon the
journey, and frankly resent the suggestion that just because I hold a
view counter to yours that I must by definition be pigeon-holed into
some arbitrary category.

You are being pigeonholed not because of your views, but because of
your apparent underlying prejudice.

I don't have an axe to grind, other than the
breakdown of society. If cars drove on pavements *routinely*, etc.
then I would be against that.

Just as well they don't, or they would kill even more people on the
footways. As I said, why focus on those who are responding to
perceived danger and mixed messages? Reducing the cause of danger at
source would eliminate both the symptomatic problem whihc so exercises
you, and a large amount of even the supposedly self-inflicted problem,
in that drivers who are more vigilant and moving slower are more
likely to be able to stop.

What you seem to fail to recognise is that there is plenty of evidence
(and we can continue the statistical debate for years if you like)
that bicycles pose a danger to pedestrians, and that the danger is of
a similar order to that posed by cars doing things which are heavily
vilified.

And what you seem to fail tor ecognise is that, by any rational
measure, the danger is essentially negligible. And there are already
special laws in place to control it anyway. And in any case the
danger is mostly the result of a response to a common danger
experienced by both pedestrians and cyclists.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University