this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
57 points (73.9% liked)
Fuck Cars
9581 readers
626 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My dude, have you never ridden a bicycle in your life?
Of all of my bike crashes, only two involved a car. One spectacular one involved another cyclist on a fixie--it's always the fucking shitheads on fixies--running a red light and t-boning me because you can't fucking stop quickly on a fixie. (Seriously, don't fucking ride a fixie on public streets or trails, you slack-jawed fucking morons.) My two car incidents were separated by 20-odd years; the first one was in San Diego in the 90s, when a cab cut me off on a steep hill and I tried to put my face through his rear windshield, and the most recent was in Chicago when I got slightly doored (hit my leg, left a huge bruise, but my bike was fine). Otherwise, most of my crashes have involved road conditions, like ice during a sudden winter rainstorm, wet steel plates over construction trenches, or an 8" deep pothole that I couldn't see because it looked like just another puddle. My ex-wife broke her pelvis when she got hit by another cyclist.
In your previous comment, you were equating "Danger" to "Death Rates." How often do you hear of a cyclist dying in an incident that doesn't involve a car?
Yes, accidents and injuries happen. I've literally fallen while walking twice in the past week.
And if that was a car, do you think she would have survived?
First: you said, and I quote, "Riding a bicycle itself isn’t all that dangerous, even without a helmet.". That is blatantly, proveably false, especially when you say that it's not dangerous even without a helmet. I've broken multiple helmet in multiple single-bicycle accidents over the 20-odd years that I was commuting regularly by bicycle; at least one of those would have very likely have been fatal without a helmet.
How many cyclists die outside of interactions with cars? In 2001, 44% of fatal bicycle accidents--377 out of 853--did not involve being hit by, or hitting, a car. So, there ya go. Damn near half of cycling fatalities aren't involving motor vehicles. (The site mentions them as being bicycle transportation fatalities, which seems to exclude bicycle recreation fatalities, but I can't guarantee that they aren't including deaths from mountain biking. Per the same source, helmets appear to reduce the risk of brain trauma by about 60%.)
If she had been in a car, and hit by another car? Yes, I think she would have been fine. Cars have airbags, set belts, and crumple zones. If she'd been hit by a car, while on a bicycle? Can't say. Statistically? Yes.
You seem to be having trouble with reading comprehension. Maybe you need to read things more thoroughly? I'll try to provide some clarification.
I didn't say it's "not dangerous", I said it "isn't all dangerous", which implies there is some danger.
That's not what your source says. "Of the 1,230 bicyclist deaths in 2021, 853 died in motor-vehicle crashes and 377 in other incidents," is what it says, so that 30% that weren't in a direct motor-vehicle crash. Even then, how many were indirectly caused by motor-vehicles? If a bicycle veers out of the way of a car, that's counted as an "other incident". Speed is one of the most dangerous aspects of bicycles and you feel to cycle faster when riding with traffic. Even you previous noted many incidents which are poor infrastructure or maintenance issues.
That's the point...cars are dangerous to people not in cars.