Re: Some traffic stats

On 3/14/2024 12:00 AM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 3/13/2024 4:06 PM, Zen Cycle wrote:

On 3/13/2024 3:44 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 3/13/2024 11:34 AM, AMuzi wrote:

https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/newsroom/incidentreports/incident.cfm?id=30855

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 From that site:
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* On average, every day, twenty pedestrians are killed by a moving vehicle in the United States.
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* Approximately 76,000 pedestrians and 47,000 bicyclists are injured in roadway crashes annually in the United States.
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I'll note that the figures for pedestrians are far worse than for bicyclists. Yet the general public thinks of bicycling as much more dangerous than walking.

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I think if you compare injuries per participants or injuries per miles traveled, you'll see they're probably correct.

 That's far from certain.
 Powell et. al., “Injury Rates from Walking, Gardening, Weightlifting, Outdoor Bicycling and Aerobics”, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 1998, Vol. 30 pp. 1246-9 polled over 5000 people who had chosen at least one of those activities for exercise. One question was whether the participant had incurred an injury during the previous month.
 The results:
Weightlifting: 2.4% of participants injured
Gardening or yard work: 1.6%
Aerobic Dance: 1.4%
Walking for exercise: 1.4%
Outdoor bicycling: 0.9%

a link would help:
https://paulogentil.com/pdf/Injury%20rates%20from%20walking%2C%20gardening%2C%20weightlifting%2C%20outdoor%20bicycling%2C%20and%20aerobics.pdf
Nice study, short enough to escape the dreaded TLDR excuse. However, I think it's important to note the authors comparison the the self-reported participation in the NHIS study:
"Comparing the NHIS with ICARIS, participation rates are lower in NHIS for walking for exercise (44% vs 73%), gardening or yard work (29% vs 71%), weightlifting (14% vs 21%), and aerobics or aerobic dance (7% vs
14%). "
Notably, the NHIS study doesn't go into injury/accident rates for cycling, but given the rather significant differences in reported participation rates and the small sample size, I'm thinking a .5% difference in injury rates between cycling and walking in the ICARis data probably falls well within the margin of error.
I'm not saying you're wrong, rather, the data presented isn't convincing (to me, anyway).

 And while injuries =/= fatalities, Dr. John Pucher of Rutgers has published (in "Making Walking and Cycling Safer: Lessons from Europe") an estimate from U.S. data that bicyclists suffer 109 fatalities per billion km ridden.  Pedestrians suffer 362 fatalities per billion km, three times as bad!
 Pucher's number works out to 5.7 million miles ridden per fatality for cyclists, 1.7 million miles walked per fatality for pedestrians. And Pucher's later work, as well as other sources, show he greatly overstated the bicycling risk. It's now widely accepted that Americans ride over ten million miles between fatalities.

Again, a link would help
https://www.vtpi.org/puchertq.pdf
Another interesting statistic from that study is injuries per million trips:
"In 1995, there were 29 pedestrian fatalities, 26 cyclist fatalities, but only 9 car occupant fatalities per 100 million person trips"
But the data does validate your point - cycling per mile is ~ 3 times safer than walking

 British data for decades has consistently found more pedestrian fatalities per mile traveled than bicycling fatalities per mile. AFAIK, there have been only a couple years in the past 20 where the reverse was true. I've also seen Australian data showing the same result.
 In any case, for most Americans the far bigger danger is sitting on the couch.

yup
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400064/

 

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