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One year of cycling to work

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Re: One year of cycling to work

#151

Post by sandover »

troncjb wrote: post #144
sandover wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're not informed. https://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5720762/stop-forcing-people-to...

> Helmet proponents are right about one thing: If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower — by somewhere between 15 and 40 percent. (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.) So this is why most of us wear a helmet. The logic is not "so few people get in accidents that if…

For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference.

The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted elsewhere in the thread.)

You need to be able to think about conditional probability.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#152

Post by lhopki01 »

EastLondonCoder wrote: post #57

Interesting to see comments about bike commuting in Stockholm and London since I tried it in both cities. Commuting by bike in Stockholm is a breeze even if you are biking in parts of the city with lots of traffic. Its also a beautiful city which adds to the experience. I have tried to commute by bike in London but its to scary for me. I think it would be fine if you can find a path through residential areas, but for…

How long ago did you bike in London? In the 9 years I've been cycling to work in London that change has been very dramatic.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#153

Post by thomasfl »

I’ll keep cycling to work in the foreseeable future. I don’t think this post is of much use to anyone, but I had fun reflecting my last year of cycling to work. Thanks for reading.

Good read. Modest author. Often it is the most personal blog postings, where people share details of their life, that attracts most readers.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#154

Post by michaelt »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #91
dguaraglia wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hostile are the drivers in Stockholm? Bay Area drivers aren’t super friendly to cyclists (to be fair, plenty of cyclists also behave like assholes, cutting in front of cars and crossing intersections when they shouldn’t.) My biggest concern during a year of using my bike to commute was making sure I didn’t get ran over by a car taking a turn, because signaling is not always their forte.

cutting in front of cars and crossing intersections when they shouldn’t What drivers who have never used a bicycle don't even consider is that as a cyclist you are extremely mobile and have a much better overview of the road. A cyclist can cross an intersection on red with little danger, a car attempting the same would be murderous. In countries like the Netherlands most everyone has biked to school from the age of 6…

  A cyclist can cross an intersection on
  red with little danger
Unfortunately, the 30% of riders who can't do this competently spoil things for the 70% of riders who can.

I don't own a car and I cycle thousands of miles a year, so I'm very much on the side of cyclists over motorists - but last year, as I walked across a pedestrian crossing with a green light, I was hit by a bicyclist running a red light - who promptly fled the scene without so much as an apology.

This kind of thing creates strong, memorable emotional responses people are keen to share. If I'd been more seriously injured, or if the fall had broken my expensive consumer electronics, or if I wasn't a cyclist, or if an infirm relative had been in the accident instead of me, even more so.

This being the case, it isn't realistic to convince other road users to approve of cyclists running red lights; getting them to do so is as unlikely as that last 30% of riders spontaneously becoming competent.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#155

Post by kqr »

dh-g wrote: post #137
kqr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only thing keeping me from commuting year round is lack of studded tires. I'll have to fix that until next year, because as I'm standing here, hoping for a train that's not jam packed, I really miss cycling.

I have ridden with studded tires but have found that my normal skinny road tires do surprisingly well for our winters here in (Canada).

Yeah, I know. It's just one of those things where I can picture myself climbing the Poisson CDF of inevitability...

Re: One year of cycling to work

#156

Post by troncjb »

sandover wrote: post #151
troncjb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helmet proponents are right about one thing: If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower — by somewhere between 15 and 40 percent. (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.) So this is why most of us wear a helmet. The logic is not "so few people get in accidents that if…

For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference. The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted…

> so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference

This is such, such flawed logic. If you are a cyclist getting hit by a car, the averages and statistics don't matter at all. If you are the cyclist getting hit by a car, the helmet is not a "marginal difference". Your protective gear matters. You need to consider the individual cyclist when you are making sweeping statements about the usage of protective gear.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#157

Post by bitL »

I was once at SAP and the roads around their HQ form a maze. No wonder public transport takes so much time. Bike would be vastly preferable, though it depends on weather. I've heard SAP allows fully remote work, so I am wondering why are you commuting to office anyway? You can save 1h/day for living your life easily.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#158

Post by sandover »

froindt wrote: post #149
troncjb wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't wear a helmet, don't worry about it, it doesn't mitigate that much risk. The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it. This is very, very stupid advice.

To throw an anecdote in, my brother was riding straight through an intersection on green when a driver turned into him. Witnesses said he flew up around 10 feet, up and over the car, and completely shattered his helmet when he landed. He got out of the hospital after 2 days with 3 broken vertebrae. He likely would have been in for over a week if he hadn't died. That helmet made all the difference. Yeah it's still pro…

I wear a helmet too!

But it doesn't change the truth of the sentence: "The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it."

Re: One year of cycling to work

#159

Post by lostlogin »

sumo89 wrote: post #117
ggregoire wrote: post #45

I've always used a bike to go to work, but now I'm in Mexico City. Too many cars, too much air pollution. Cycling here is bad for your health. The public bicycle sharing system is really good and cheap. Some parts of the city are bike friendly. But the air quality is just so bad. The trucks that spew black smoke continuously. The buses that have never been controlled in 50 years. The SUVs traveling at 100 km/h on the…

You're exposed to more pollution sitting in a car in traffic than you are cycling through it in the open. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-4599572/Avoi...

Breathing hard on a bike when pushing it is really nasty when the air is bad. Sucking in a chest full of exhaust fumes is horrible.

Re: One year of cycling to work

#160

Post by abakker »

sandover wrote: post #147
wbkang wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. "Cyclists without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury" https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/10/15/cyclists_without...

Look at it in terms of effect on life expectancty. The risk of death from 1 hour of cycling reduces life expectancy by about 24 minutes. Wearing a helmet probably changes this by a couple of minutes. - http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe... - https://nwurban.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/cyclings-impact-on-... 1 additional hour of sitting and watching TV in the evening, in an already sedentary lif…

I'm not sure it is appropriate to think about helmet use as having a bearing on life expectancy. The data on helmet accident avoidance is terrible. i.e. we have no idea what the severity of an accident "would have been" because that kind of data is never reported. Anecdotally, I've needed my helmet many times, but never reported its use to anyone.

you could theoretically look at the injury rate for non-helmeted people, but, again, you don't know how representative that rate is of the population. You are assuming that the non-helmeted accident statistics sample is representative of the cycling population. I am not sure that is true.

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