[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by prototoast

I'm honestly not sure. In particular, I'm not sure what is the bike and what is the circumstances.

Bernal crashed because he didn't see the bus stopped. Practicing your TT position means, among other things, keeping your head down. But a time trial effort on a regular road bike is also optimized by keeping your head down. If TT bikes were banned, would he not have been practicing in the head down position?

What about Froome? He was supposedly riding no-handed putting on jacket when hit by a gust of wind. That definitely wasn't the fault of riding in aerobars. Was it a disc wheel that caught the wind more? Maybe, but it's not necessary to ban TT bikes if you only want to ban disc wheels.

What about Chloe Dygert? Admittedly I think her crash, at her particular speed may have been avoided if she were on a road bike, but when it comes to winding descents in a race, I think riders tend to calibrate to a particular risk assessment rather than a particular speed. So even if a road bike lets a rider corner more precisely, in a racing environment, the rider will increase speed on the descent based on the improved cornering until the risk is equal. In the 2016 Olympic road race, Annemiek van Vleuten was in a similar position, essentially doing an individual time trial on a road bike down a winding descend, and suffered a similar fate, despite the potential advantages of the road bike.

I don't mean to determinatively say that TT bikes do not make cycling more dangerous, but the nature of racing is inherently what creates risk, and it's not clear to me that riders would actually have lower rates of injuries if TT bikes were eliminated. Think about the TdF--do more riders crash on a TT stage or a mass start stage? I haven't seen good data on crashes, but I would assume the crash rate is much higher on mass start stages. I know your particular question was about TTs with TT bikes vs TTs on road bikes, but at the margin, I would expect that converting a single mass start stage to a TT on TT bikes would reduce crashes by more than forcing all the riders to ride their road bikes on existing TT stages.

I see what you're saying but imagine if everyone was on a TT bike for a mass start stage? Utter chaos. I'm just saying at best the bike is harder to control just because of the handlebars, riding position, and higher speed, and it's awfully easy to list off big crashes from when people are training on TT bikes even though presumably time in the TT bike is a fraction of time spent on a road bike. But I have no data and this is speculation. Again I'm just wondering what benefit the TT bike provides in a time trial race.