Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#171
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
James Annan wrote in
: Pyromancer wrote: Anyone who deliberately rides through a red light in anything other than a dire emergency is a complete moron and should be put off the road. I ride through red lights all the time. Presumably legal in Japan? If you want to get worked up about something, why not make it something really important, like Hawaiian shirts or milk-in-first versus tea-in-first. Anyone without a Hawaiian shirt should be shot. The same goes for those who put the tea in first. :-) -- Chris |
#172
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]() |
#173
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
Monkey Hanger wrote:
James Annan wrote in : Pyromancer wrote: Anyone who deliberately rides through a red light in anything other than a dire emergency is a complete moron and should be put off the road. I ride through red lights all the time. Presumably legal in Japan? No, but that doesn't bother anyone. James -- If I have seen further than others, it is by treading on the toes of giants. http://www.ne.jp/asahi/julesandjames/home/ |
#174
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
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. On my admittedly flawed analysis of the available data, I'm a dutchman, and a monkey's uncle, and the moon is made of green cheese. |
#175
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
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 |
#177
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
On 21 Oct 2004 13:43:32 -0700, Silas Denyer wrote:
They do, however, show that you are as likely to be killed by any particular bike as by any particular car running a red light, which is still statistically significant! No they don't. No it isn't. regards, Ian SMith -- |\ /| no .sig |o o| |/ \| |
#178
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote in message . ..
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." I'm off to find fresh data. In the mean time I shouldn't be suprised that someone who goes by the soubriquet "Just zis Guy, you know" quotes Douglas Adams (actually Douglas Adams allegedly quoting THGTHG) as a philosopher. FWIW, your points are well made, even if I don't agree with them. My original point was, however, that I was concerned that mass lawlessness (whether dangerous or not) was a bad thing for society, and that when this lawlessness was being openly accepted as a competitive advantage in business and furthermore being perpetrated by uniformed police officers, society was on very shaky ground indeed. There are very few forms of mass-perpetrated antisocial behavious which are routinely ignored, but these cycle-related issues are one of them. Other motoring offences are another of them, to be debated in the appropriate forum - this isn't an "either / or" type of debate. In quoting DA, you should not forget that the same "philosopher" told us how mankind caused God to vanish in puff of logic, shortly before proving black was white and killing himself on the next zebra crossing. Mankind was clearly therefore just being a good pedestrian:-) Until I return with fresh data, good luck trying to miss the ground... Silas |
#179
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]() |
#180
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
On 21 Oct 2004 13:43:32 -0700, (Silas Denyer)
wrote in message : a) the total number of pedestrians killed by vehicles of all kinds b) the total number of pedestrians killed by bicycles c) the total number of pedestrians killed by cars crossing lights at red These data are sound. Sound in the sense of extrapolated beyond their applicability, you mean? Or sound in the sense of embodying invalid assumptions? Singling out the offence which, by your own admission, drivers are least likely to commit is also very obviously invalid. In fact what I have been arguing for is the policing of cyclists. And we have pointed out that (a) cyclists are already policed (there is even a scheme for fixed penalties specifically for cycling offences), and (b) the police - rightly - take the view that this policing is a very low priority, since the risk is clearly miniscule. Cycles running red lights unpenalised are a manifestation of a failure to police. All road traffic offences are evidence of that. Some classes of road user seem to think that enforcement is an infringement of their civil liberties. They are not the cyclists, either. They do, however, show that you are as likely to be killed by any particular bike as by any particular car running a red light, which is still statistically significant! So you believe that all cycling offences put together are still only as bad as cars running red lights, which you seem to think they rarely do; I think that's a point against you rather than for you! Still, you might be able to find a job at the ABD. They love people who can use statistics to prove the opposite of the truth :-) 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 |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
![]() |
||||
Thread | Forum | |||
'Near miss' between District and Piccadilly line trains near EalingBdwy | London Transport | |||
OTish: Laptops on planes - hand luggage? | London Transport | |||
Guinness rules (was: Breaking the tube record using IT) | London Transport | |||
Guinness rules (was: Breaking the tube record using IT) | London Transport | |||
Guinness rules (was: Breaking the tube record using IT) | London Transport |