Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Matthew Poole,
That’s actually not very much. A commuter who has a 10km ride to work does 100km/week, and 10km is nothing.
It might not be uncommon amongst Taupo riders, but but only a tiny proportion of even the 750,000 “regular” (at least once a month) cyclists ride 130km a week. I ride about five days a week both for exercise and to substitute car journeys and I often wouldn’t do that. (In my defence, I deliberately ride up volcanoes.)
And very, very few people cycle-commute 20km daily. Most actual NZ cycle commutes are a fraction of that, if only because riding 10km on city streets at commuter hour takes a fair bit of time.
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Oh, here's the full text of Conspicuity and bicycle crashes: preliminary findings of the Taupo Bicycle Study if anyone else wants to read it.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Thomas Lumley,
The observational evidence on actual injuries from the Taupo Bicycle Study is supportive of quite a large benefit, though there are possible biases. The two most obvious (to me) biases are in opposite directions. Firstly, people who ride in more dangerous conditions may be more likely to wear hi-vis clothing (which would lead the study to underestimate the benefit). Secondly, people who wear hi-vis clothing may be more cautious/paranoid/realistic and so have a low crash rate for that reason, which would lead the study to overestimate the benefit).
There are others. Drawing your sample from people who ride in the Taupo Challenge means excluding even most regular cyclists.
I ride nearly every day, but I wouldn’t consider myself trained for Taupo. That really means many hours out on the open road, or dicing with cars on city roads like Tamaki Drive, where maybe it’s a sound choice to wear hi-viz. And as you say, to be more aware of the value of doing so, given the cumulative risks of the hours they spend riding. The average distance ridden per week among the 2469 people who responded to the once-only questionnaire (44% of the 2006 entrants) was 130km a week! (Tbh, I'm sure that's not typical of many Taupo cyclists, including the ones who ride in relay, but it's the profile of the sample.)
The researchers did correct for exposure (number of hours on the road) and other things. They’re not mugs. But what they’ve got to work with is the self-reporting of a highly-exposed group of cyclists quite unlike the vast majority of the the 1.27 million cyclists and 750,000 regular cyclists in New Zealand.
Also, a minority of those crashes seem to have involved a motor vehicle:
Most of the epidemiological literature describing bicycle crashes and injury comes from uncontrolled case series data from emergency department presentations, hospitalizations, and records of traffic safety authorities.101213 Some studies suggest that the vast majority of injuries arise from rider-only crashes (74% in one series), with only a small proportion (6%) attributable to collisions with motor vehicles.13 In this study, 40/636 (6.3%) participants who had at least one crash (disrupting daily activities for more than 24 h) attributed not being seen by traffic as “important” or “extremely important”. However, the other two outcomes were more often attributed to not being seen by a motor vehicle. For those reporting at least one presentation to a health professional resulting from a bicycle crash, the proportion was 73/266 (27.4%), and, for those who had at least one day off work due to a bicycle crash, this proportion was higher still: 28/86 (33%).
Trials of driver recognition have shown that cyclist and pedestrian use of fluorescent colors increases detection and recognition time by drivers,14 but, to our knowledge, no observational or experimental studies have previously shown a reduction in rate of bicycle crashes. We suggest that an intervention study is warranted, with randomization of fluorescent colour use to control for potentially confounding factors, particularly risk-taking behavior. The case-crossover study design may also be applied to assess the effect of wearing fluorescent colors, considering the reversibility of risk, and the distal nature of the exposure in the causal pathway. This approach allows control of between-person confounding factors, although recall bias of the control exposure period is a potential threat to validity.
And the authors very prominently say this 2007 paper is intended as the foundation of a longitudinal study. I’d be keen to see the rest of it.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Ben Gracewood,
Yup, I ride over the Waima St footbridge (and walk up that killer hill) on the way to work, but cruise down the road on the way home. Dunno why :)
I ride up that hill, but in the knowledge that I'm doing it for the exercise and possibly the beer afterwards, not to commute to work.
But try the Arch Hill path one day. It's more ... recreational. And the climb up Bond St ain't so harsh.
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Hard News: Media3: Bad News for the Force, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yes. But what took them far too long to do was have their own voice in the discussions. It was like there was no one owning the place, and that's the kind of place that gets vandalised.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Ben Gracewood,
And just so I’m not always a complainer, here’s a sped-up version of my commute home to Te Atatu:
Nice. But don't you find those full-finger gloves get a bit sweaty?
For variety, you could always get on the Arch Hill path on the north side of the motorway, from Bond Street -- that's quite fun -- and join the main cycleway at Mountain View Rd.
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Jesus. I've just noticed one comment still on the Facebook page that is so vile I actually don't even want to paste it in here. We've been assured that there is a national police social media strategy, but if there is it's not apparent to me.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Ben Gracewood,
We are so incredibly privileged in Auckland to have the North-West Cycleway. It’s a fantastic piece of infrastructure which allows me to relax and not deal with traffic for 90% of my commute.
It pretty desperately needs that upgrade, though. And happily, the cycleway will be upgraded before the rest of the motorway. Which means it will be above the motorway for a while!
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to BenWilson,
Does that mean that motorists should wear helmets? No.
Well, it means that if cyclists should, there’s a strong argument that motorists also should. The question of whether either should is not so clear, but they are related if the justification is harm-prevention overriding all other concerns.
I'm old enough to remember when seatbelts became compulsory in cars. For years, people would go out of their way not to buckle them up. Now, who does that?
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Ben Gracewood,
Same time, same intersection, different wanker:
Un-fucking-believable.