Category: Biking Elsewhere

[Note the limited scope of this study.]
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Oct 13 – The results of a single-center study suggest that bicycle injuries in the US have become more severe, with a marked increase in chest and abdominal injuries. Moreover, despite greater public awareness, helmet use has not increased and head injury rates have not fallen.
"There is a paucity of studies looking specifically at bicycle injuries," lead researcher Dr. Jeffry Kashuk, from the University of Colorado, Denver, told Reuters Health. In the last several years, greater environmental awareness, economic downturns, an emphasis on fitness, and other factors have pushed towards greater bicycle use in the US.
On Tuesday at the 2009 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago, Dr. Kashuk report on a study of 329 patients with bicycle injuries who were admitted to the Rocky Mountain Regional Trauma Center in Denver from 1996 to 2006.
He and his colleagues found that the median injury severity score increased significantly over the study period, and the number of chest injuries rose by 15%. Over just the last 5 years, abdominal injuries increased threefold.
Emergency room documentation of helmet use improved during the study period, yet actual use did not appear to have changed significantly, based on their findings in the 118 patients (36%) with significant head injuries, Dr. Kashuk said.
The rise in injury severity likely reflects an increased rate of "motor vehicle associated injuries, which might suggest, along with a trend towards older age, that the injuries occurred in commuters more frequently than the past, as opposed to recreational riders," Dr. Kashuk said.
The findings, Dr. Kashuk believes, could have important implications for cycling infrastructure in the US.
"Although the public is very enthusiastic about bicycle use as a means of transportation, we think that infrastructure has lagged behind in the US," he explained. "The government is pushing bike days, and rebates for bike use. Communities are putting in bicycle kiosks." However, there is only limited data to show that "we have bikeways to support this increase in bike use."
Continue reading “Bicycle Injuries in US (Maybe) Becoming More Severe”

Susanne Scaringi died after her bicycle slammed into the side of a van that abruptly pulled in front of her. The driver had failed to yield.
The driver wasn’t drunk or using drugs, and didn’t commit a crime under state law. But should it be a criminal offense to commit a traffic infraction that results in someone’s death?
That’s one question the Cascade Bicycle Club wants to ask Wednesday during a Traffic Justice Summit to be held at City Hall. The club is proposing a new state law that would aim to protect bicyclists and pedestrians, and is inviting victims and the public to weigh in during the two-hour discussion.
The advocacy group is pushing for a "Vulnerable User Bill," which would expand Washington’s negligent driving law to include traffic infractions that result in death or serious injury to a cyclist or pedestrian, such as a fatal failure to yield. Such infractions then would become gross misdemeanors, punishable by up to a year in jail.
The proposal is the club’s top priority for the 2010 legislative session, said David Hill, Cascade’s advocacy director.
…
The appellate court overturned the law after ruling that it didn’t mesh with a state law that decriminalizes most minor traffic infractions.
"This isn’t about acts of God or things that are generally unavoidable. This is about when people deliberately ignore the parameters we have established for safe operation of what is a very dangerous appliance and it results in seriously bodily injury or death," he said.
Continue reading “Deadly car vs. bike accidents: Should they be a crime?”

…

As long as cities have been planning for bicycle traffic, business owners have complained that bike lanes, bike parking, and other bike-related facilities hurt their business. The thinking goes like this: Car access equals business success. Do anything to decrease that access — like remove car parking, narrow or remove car lanes for bikeways, or install traffic calming measures like medians or speed bumps — and the result is less business.

However, there are recent academic and real life examples that seem to prove that bike access is good for business.

A study based in Toronto and published by the Clean Air Partnership in February found that the removal of car parking and installation of a bike lane did not negatively impact merchants. The executive summary of that study stated:

“The spending habits of cyclists and pedestrians, their relatively high travel mode share, and the minimal impact on parking all demonstrate that merchants in this area are unlikely to be negatively affected by reallocating on‐street parking space to a bike lane. On the contrary, this change will likely increase commercial activity.”

…

Continue reading “Bikes and the bad-for-business rap (or not)”

[Interesting comments compared to Baltimore’s fatal hit and run which supposedly was the cyclists fault.]
REDWOOD CITY — A 58-year-old woman was killed Wednesday morning after trying to squeeze past a truck making a right turn in Redwood Shores.
The cyclist, Mary Yonkers of San Mateo, died at the scene. Police are looking for the truck driver, who left the scene and likely entered the freeway.
“It’s unknown at this point if he’s even aware he struck anyone,” said Redwood City police Sgt. Kathryn Anderson.
Police received two 911 calls at 7:51 a.m. reporting the accident at the intersection of Shoreway Road and Holly Street.
Witnesses said Yonkers was riding southbound on the right side of the road alongside the truck on Shoreway Road.
As the vehicle, alternately described as a dump truck and a tractor-trailer with red paneling, began to turn right onto Holly Street, Yonkers attempted to squeeze past, Anderson said.
“The back part of the vehicle knocked her over and some part of the vehicle ran over her,” Anderson said.
The maneuver, while legal, was unsafe, she said.
“It depends on the length of the vehicle. Some have wide turning access. It’s a dangerous move,” she said.
Continue reading “Police search for dump truck driver after fatal hit-and-run”

…
The best part about this new dataset is that we’ve been able to add a lot of new, detailed information to Google Maps – information that helps people better explore and get around the real world. For example, college students will be pleased to see maps of many campuses; and cyclists will now find many more trails and paths to explore. Soon we even plan on providing you with biking directions to take advantage of this new data.
Continue reading “Google – Your world, your map”

Continue reading “73mph "bicycle"”

Continue reading “B.A.D.D. Bumper Sticker”

A Nelson police officer is to stand trial on assault charges after pepper-spraying a cyclist not wearing a helmet and then ramming him into a bank with his patrol car.
Justices of the peace Donald Horn and Mary Harley yesterday committed Senior Constable Garry Dunn to trial after a two-day depositions hearing in Nelson District Court. Dunn, who faces two charges of assault, has been stood down from duty on full pay.
Nelson chef Shaun Robert Taylor told the court Dunn used excessive force against him for not wearing a helmet on February 10 this year.
Continue reading “Cyclist pepper-sprayed for not wearing helmet”

…
The transformation of streets for people into roads for cars, perhaps inevitably, produced death and injury. By 1936 concerns about the alarming rise in cyclist casualties had led to the idea of a cycling proficiency scheme, eventually adopted nationally in 1948 (CTC 2005). To stem the carnage, cyclists must be trained to deal with the new, dangerous conditions. But things could have been otherwise. A 1947 book by J. S. Dean, former Chairman of the Pedestrians’ Association, is instructive here. In his ‘study of the road deaths problem’, Murder Most Foul, Dean’s basic tenet is that, ‘as roads are only “dangerous” by virtue of being filled with heavy fast moving motor vehicles, by far the greatest burden of responsibility for avoiding crashes, deaths and injury on the roads should lie with the motorist’ (Peel n.d., 3).
Yet road safety education concentrates not on the drivers of vehicles, but on those who they have the capacity to kill. Dean saw how placing responsibility for road danger on those outside of motorised vehicles might lead, by stealth, to placing of culpability on those groups, and Murder Most Foul is a tirade against the placing of responsibility for road accidents on children.
The dominant assumptions on which UK road safety was originally based have remained in place. Today, rather than producing strategies to tame the sources of danger on the road, road safety education tries instead to instil in ‘the vulnerable’, primarily school children, a fear of motorised traffic, and then to teach them tactics to escape from road dangers as best they can. The title of the UK Government’s highway code for young road users is Arrive Alive (Department for Transport 2000a). The message such a title sends to children is not how much fun and freedom can be derived from sustainable modes of mobility such as cycling and walking; rather, it tells children that the world outside is a dangerous place, full of potential accidents, and they had better make sure they ‘arrive alive’.
Continue reading “Constructing Fear of Cycling – by Dave Horton”

When ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides was dispatched to request Sparta’s help against the Persians, he ran 150 miles in two days and was able to declare victory to Athenian officials with his dying breath. Homer Macauley pedaled telegrams around Ithaca, California in the World War II-era novel The Human Comedy, often bearing news of a fallen soldier to still-hopeful mothers and lovers. Though the modern-day cycle courier is hardly as idealized—and conditions for their health and safety far from ideal—it is fairly typical of a busy messenger to cover the Athenian herald’s distance in the same time span, while continuously bearing information of essential import to recipients in major cities worldwide.
In 1991, San Francisco’s mayor declared 10-9 to be Messenger Appreciation Day by formal proclamation. Toronto followed suit in 1997, and the day is now recognized by such cities as Chicago, Vancouver, Houston, New York, and Washington DC. Oftentimes the day is celebrated by an alleycat race (a loosely-organized race designed to mimic the day of a bike messenger, involving routing oneself to visit specified checkpoints in the area while maintaining high speed and agility); many advocacy groups hand out food or other free items to working messengers.
While some view New York City messengers as a menace, they are a vital component of a functioning, sustainable city. Thousands of couriers, both male and female, ride daily in all seasons of city traffic. Using bicycles for deliveries reduces congestion, pollution, and gridlock, improves air quality, provides jobs, takes up less space on the streets, and is still the most efficient and least expensive way to guarantee same-day delivery of crucial parcels and non-digital information.
On Friday, October 9, please take the time to thank (and tip) the messengers who may have risked his or her life for your delivery.
Continue reading “Three cheers for the courier: Messenger Appreciation Day is October 9th”