Bicycle fatalities up 15%, here's why

[redir]

I live and work on a college campus and go for a walk jsut about every day during lunch. I've designed my own 'study' to determine how many people are distracted while driving simply by looking at people as they drive by. It's pretty freakin' scary. I mean seriously like 70% of the people are looking down at a screen. Some of them try to do it 'safely' by putting the screen right up on the top of the steering wheel so they can see through it. Others hold it down under the dash so no one can see what they are doing like an alcoholic that takes a hidden sip from a bottle.

It's an epidemic and I'm afraid I will become a victim of it.

[fiamme red]

Originally Posted by nooneline

that's not true. the safety in numbers phenomenon is well documented.

injury numbers might be rising, but cycling rates are rising faster - so the rate of injuries is declining.

the equation is clear. more cyclists = safer cycling.

http://john-s-allen.com/blog/?p=669

John Forester, founder of the Effective Cycling program of cyclist education, and statistician, has demonstrated that the Safety in Numbers claim of Jacobsen (also cited in the Oakland paper) is faulty. Due to faulty math, a random set of numbers will generate the curve that apparently shows a decreasing crash rate with increasing numbers of users. This is not to say that the safety-in-numbers claim is false, but rather that Jacobsen has provided no evidence to support it. (Forester also questions Jacobsen’s explanation for safety in numbers as applied to bicyclists, but that’s a different issue.)

The Oakland report expresses the same complaint about Jacobsen’s math, and goes on to use better math to look for answers...

"Safety in numbers" is Axiom #1 of the segregated-cycling advocates, but it has never been proved.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pink

.........and nobody is keeping a good count.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ody-s-counting

Is distracted driving becoming a larger cause of death by car than drunk driving? Yes. Are the car companies thru dash screens making being distracted easier? Yes. Does the technology exist to disable this crap while driving available? Yes..will any legislator anywhere, at any level, jeopardize the YUGE bribes(campaign contributions=bribes) he gets from the makers of all things telecommunication and automotive? NO chance. Huge push back right now for the carried technology that LEO can use on the spot to scan phone records to see if driver was texting or whatever at time of accident or to even see if they were texting while driving...

Be careful out there.

[Jaybee]

I'm a little too young to remember, so can someone educate me on the tipping point for when drunk driving switched from "not a big deal" to huge social stigma? I'm aware of/can google legislation and when that happened, but when did the tide of public opinion shift, and why? I think that most people now consider a DWI to be a sign of a problem with alcohol. Why do we not consider a distracted driving citation (as rare as they are) to be a problem with phone use? Both the drunk and the texter are behaving in a hugely dangerous and irresponsible manner to their fellow citizens.

I'm concerned that part of the reason smartphone use and driving are so common and not stigmatized is that it's a regular occurrence for the "leaders" in our society. How many executives, lawyers, doctors, engineers, CPAs, wouldn't take a client call while driving, or glance down when the email notification dings? When everybody does it, it's easy to justify the unsafe behavior as standard practice.

By way of anecdote, I work for a largish environmental/engineering consultant. We have a strong safety culture because we have to have a strong safety record to get work with big clients. Distracted driving is a big deal at least for our health/safety group. Company policy is that the phone should go on silent and be put away until you get to your destination or you pull over, put the vehicle in park and deal with it. No one does this because from the top of the company down, project and program managers are taking client calls or firing off quick emails and texts. If they pulled over for every ding they'd triple their travel time. This trickles down to the staff level, because god help you if you don't respond in a timely manner to a PM with a question. I don't think my company is unique.

[pdonk]

Don't know if this was distracted or impatient driving, but this topic hits close to home, literally, the top of my street an intersection i walk, drive through or ride through everyday.

Guy dropped his daughter off at school and was riding to work, gets hit by a car that was hit by a streetcar as the car was trying to race a streetcar across the road.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toront...dale-1.4361692

Sad, family reunited and working hard for a better life.

[nooneline]

Originally Posted by fiamme red

"Safety in numbers" is Axiom #1 of the segregated-cycling advocates, but it has never been proved.

proved? i don't know about proved, but it's been observed by well-established epidemiological methods, outside the field of segregated-cycling advocates. people in public health, injury prevention, and data-driven urban planning.

that paper seems to be about specific models that describe the relationship, which is a little bit different than just epidemiological observations. and, looking at the comments on that link, it sounds like there's some disagreement. but i don't have the time (or, really, the expertise) to evaluate the math in question. might bounce it off of a math professor.

edit:
talked about this with a math professor, who said:
The claim is just that "Whenever two ratios produced from three variables, one used in the numerator of one ratio and then used in the denominator of the other ratio, are plotted against each other, this will result." This doesn't let you extrapolating this to say that "safety in numbers is either false or unproven" ... in fact could be the opposite. Forester's claim is that the reduction in accident rate isn't PRODUCED BY the increase in numbers. Not that there ISN'T a reduction in accident rate.

[classtimesailer]

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers led the effort to fix some of that issue.
If today's mothers put their phones down for a minute, they could fix this. We are f'ed.

[cfox]

Originally Posted by nooneline

that's not true. the safety in numbers phenomenon is well documented.

injury numbers might be rising, but cycling rates are rising faster - so the rate of injuries is declining.

the equation is clear. more cyclists = safer cycling.

Cycling usage has gone up more than 15.2% over 2 years? Wow. And there are more than 22% more pedestrians in that time period? Surprising.

[Pastashop]

The new iOS has this option:



I think it’s helpful... easy to bypass, yes, but still gives one pause...

Camera phones in Japan were required to have an audible shutter sound when taking photos that could not be disabled – this may still be the case. In a similar vein, some equivalent of a Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packets could be displayed by default, requiring acknowledgement...

That said, consider the possibility that your passenger is using your phone, and you end up in an accident through no fault of yours. Are you more liable than if the passenger had not been using your phone? How do you prove things?

[Jaybee]

I had a MotoX that had a "driving mode". When the GPS sensed that it was traveling faster than a certain speed it would shift everything to voice activation. You wouldn't hear the notification chime, it would say "new text from Jessica, would you like to respond?" and then, if you say yes, you use a speech to text function to send the thing. Still too much distraction, IMO.

Other drawbacks were the reliability of the text/speech function, especially if background noise was high, the fact that it turned on even when you didn't want to (passenger, cycling, etc.) and was a pain to disable, and took a long time to realize it wasn't traveling anymore and switch back to normal.

I think the passenger thing and the disabled thing can happen from a technology perspective, we just require the collective willpower to be disconnected from our phones while driving.

[redir]

Originally Posted by Jaybee

I'm a little too young to remember, so can someone educate me on the tipping point for when drunk driving switched from "not a big deal" to huge social stigma? .

I seem to remember it becoming a big deal in the early 80's. My father is an alcoholic as is many people in my family. However he's a highly functional one even today in his old age. But I do remember when I was a kid it was not uncommon at all for dad to leave a party well lit and having 'one for the road.' Believe it or not it was very common. Anyway when the laws started becoming VERY strict I never saw my father drive drunk again. It was not necessarily the law per se, laws don't seem to matter to most drunks, but it was how the laws got passed which gave awareness to how insanely dangerous it is to drive drunk.

[nooneline]

Originally Posted by cfox

Cycling usage has gone up more than 15.2% over 2 years? Wow. And there are more than 22% more pedestrians in that time period? Surprising.

My point about the 'safety in numbers' phenomenon was in response to the idea that cycling has gotten more dangerous - not specifically in response to these data. There are plenty of location-specific analyses of cycling rates and injury rates that bear rising numbers and lowered rates.

As for these data: the thing about trends is that if you zoom in too close, you don't know what you're looking at. No epidemiologist would consider a two-year change to be indicative of a trend. They'll want at least five years worth of data to make a trend, and then, still, longer is better.

Here's what the article says:
"Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent."
And here's their chart of those data:



Now, obviously they're referring to decades of declining deaths, which you can clearly see on the chart. But, in those decades of decline, there are also short spikes - because within a trend, there are elements of randomness too.

A similar article could have been written about other short term deviations from the greater trend:


But still, there have been "decades of declining deaths." It's entirely possible that in a few years, the data continue to drop and follow a larger, more general trend - and look something like this.



Simply put, to an epidemiologist (I am not one, but I work closely with several), a two-year change is not a sign of a trend changing.

[Mark McM]

In addition to the above comments, I'll also add that this is the wrong data to analyze. As one might expect, the more miles people driver/ride, the more accidents (and deaths) you'd expect. If you look at the data for deaths per miles driven (available on the Fatality Facts page of the IIHS web site), there has not really been any spike in fatalties-per-mile-driven at all. The reason that there is an increase in fatalities in the last few years is because there has been a similar increase in total number of miles driven.

Likewise note that the sudden drop in fatalities between 2007 and 2009. This corresponds to a sudden drop in the number of miles driven in the time period - which happens to correspond to the start of the "Great Recession". The recent sudden rise in fatal accidents probably also corresponds to an economic recovery (or at least a drop in the unemployment rate). Those previous downturns in the fatalities graphs probably also correspond to economic downturns, which resulted in people driving less.

[Mark McM]

So, here's the graph from the IIHS web page. It shows the same data as the total fatalites graph (with the recent spike in total deaths), but the fatalities per 100 million miles graph shows that on a per mile basis, there has been no spike, and has been relatively flat the last few years. It also shows the general downward trend in fatalities per miles driven is more consistent than trend in total fatalities.

[Mark McM]

And a follow up thought:

While bicycles can crash in a wide variety of ways, not surprisingly the vast majority of fatal crashes involve a motor vehicle. The data shows that total number of miles motor vehicles are driven has spiked in recent few years, which means that at any given time, there are more motor vehicles on the roads on the road. With more exposure to motor vehicles, you'd expect that there would be a similar increase in collisions between bicycles and motor vehicles. Perhaps the recent increases in bicyclist deaths can be completely explained by the increase in exposure to total motor vehicle traffic, and not to any (hypothesized) increase in distracted driving.