181–190 of 391 posts
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Helmet does not help in high speed crash with car and is not designed for it. It helps in small falls.
Absolutely not true. Concussions are always a threat, and a helmet provides limited protection even in a high speed collision.
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E-bikes are flattening terrain. Source: I live in Seattle, am an avid biker, and those Lime e-bikes are everywhere . People who wouldn't dream of biking because of the hills are now out on casual errands with those things.
Unfortunately I don't get the economics of lime ebikes. You pay $6/hr to ride one, which, assuming a very generous average speed of 14.5mph (the maximum of the bike), is an end user cost of $0.41 per mile minimum. It costs me ~$0.35 per mile to drive a car. I also don't have to bother with any apps or worry about the battery being charged, both of which are inconveniences. Also, just to set the record straight, I own…
Cities designed for bikes and bicyclists, are still not cities designed for humans. https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/ Bikes are expensive personal transportation, compared to not owning any, they take up space in every home with muddy, oily mechanisms, they take up a lot of space in bicycle parks outside every desirable destination serving to push everything further apart for humans on foot, th…
But less than 1/10th as bad as cars, no?
But, designing for not-cars feels like a choice of designing for humans or designing for bikes, not both. If things are close enough for walking then most people don't need bikes. If there's dense, regular, clean, affordable public transport, you can't really bring one bike per person onto it and you shouldn't need to. If things are far enough apart that everyone needs a bike, and everywhere you go has a wasteland of a few thousand bike parking spaces to cover everyone who might go there at once, then you've designed for individual vehicles not people, and cars would be more comfortable and faster. In that sense, I would think it just as much of a failure either way.
Like, if you have poisonous plants, and you want edible fruits, but what you get is harmless inedible plants, in one way it's a lot better, but in another way it's no better at all.
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> As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous. I understand this perspective, but as a counter to this, if no one bikes in the US then this won't change. I ride all over San Francisco. In the last 18 years of me living here things have gotten better and better for the cyclist, but there are still many areas that can be improved. I encourage you to support local or…
You would also fail your driver's test in SF if you don't check for bikers when making a right turn. However, this isn't the case if you do your test elsewhere. SF has pretty good bike infrastructure and awareness. I just did my driving test in the city, and this was drilled into my head by my instructor.
Infrastructure shouldn't be designed in a way to cause these types of turning conflicts. The general rule of the road is that vehicles on the right make right turns. Vehicles on the left make left turns, and vehicles in the middle proceed straight through the intersection.
Turning conflicts, like what you're describing, are a significant hazard to cyclists. Cars need to check for traffic[1] on their right, move to the right, and then make their right turn. Cyclists need to pass right turning traffic on the left.
[1] Cyclists are traffic.
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I've seen that stated many times. As far as I can tell, it traces back to a news article that did fun things like cherry picking individual observations from a study to support a claim even though the study's overall findings were contradictory. My own sense is that the science seems pretty clear that, provided you are in a wreck, wearing a helmet greatly reduces your risk of serious injury and death. Helmets aren't…
Assuming you are landing on a horizontal surface, it's only the vertical component of the fall that you have to worry about. A fall from 2 meters accelerates you to about 22 km/h (27 km/h for 3 meters). Helmets are design to protect you from a 2-3 meter fall onto an anvil (depending on the standard). As long as you don't hit anything vertical (the curb, a telephone pole, a car, etc), a helmet will give you good head…
One thing that would help is taking the lane when going at those speeds. People don't normally drive their cars going 40 km/h in the door zone, so the same thing should apply when riding a bicycle.
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I've seen that stated many times. As far as I can tell, it traces back to a news article that did fun things like cherry picking individual observations from a study to support a claim even though the study's overall findings were contradictory. My own sense is that the science seems pretty clear that, provided you are in a wreck, wearing a helmet greatly reduces your risk of serious injury and death. Helmets aren't…
> provided you are in a wreck, wearing a helmet greatly reduces your risk of serious injury and death So . . . you wear a helmet when driving? Because people get head injuries all the time in car wrecks.
As a Dutch person I am pleasantly surprised by this article, it gets basically everything right. One thing though is that our geography works well with biking. I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city. Everything is just closer and hence more bike-able. As a dutch person I would abs…
But what difference does that make? Why would I be more likely to visit a different city rather than another part of a bigger city?
the bike alone doesn’t replace the private automobile, and neither does public transit, but when you combine the two, that’s when the magic happens. Then the car becomes redundant in cities. I love the picture of a guy moving a bed on an oversized and strange (to my eyes) three wheeler.
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I believe in countries/cities like these its safer to not use a helmet. Drivers see that your being unsafe and give you much more room and are more aware of you. Less accidents and less deaths in total by not wearing a helmet! I couldn't find the study that was posted on hn, but there are lots of articles.
It's complicated. https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-bike-helmet-paradox The short answer is, "wear a helmet if you have one, and try to get one, but if you don't have one, you should still bike anyway."
the bike alone doesn’t replace the private automobile, and neither does public transit, but when you combine the two, that’s when the magic happens. Then the car becomes redundant in cities. I love the picture of a guy moving a bed on an oversized and strange (to my eyes) three wheeler.