105-Year-Old Cyclist Rides 14 Miles in an Hour En Route to a World Record

Re:105-Year-Old Cyclist Rides 14 Miles in an Hour En Route t... by nl on Thursday January 05, 2017 @10:28PM (#13333672)

but it's not unduly dangerous to ride on city streets, even in large cities.

I love cycling (I cycle a lot), but unfortunately this isn't true. In the US, you are roughly twice as likely to die as in a car[1]. It is much, much, much safer than motorcycling! (Somewhat old data, though)

[1] http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/166/2/212.full

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Re:105-Year-Old Cyclist Rides 14 Miles in an Hour En Route t... by mikekchar on Friday January 06, 2017 @02:47AM (#13334615)

Double a really small number is still a really small number. From that link, I get 9.2 fatalities per 100 million person trips for a car, 13.7 fatalities per 100 million person trips for walking and 21.0 fatalities per 100 million person trips for cycling.

If you ride your bike 3 times a day, every day for 70 years, you have about a 1.6% chance of dying. This is not unduly dangerous.

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Re:105-Year-Old Cyclist Rides 14 Miles in an Hour En Route t... by Xylakant on Friday January 06, 2017 @07:31AM (#13335789)

Comparing fatalities based on distance traveled obscures the real risks, especially if you do that country-wide: Highways and other long-distances roads are a comparatively safe environment for cars. Accidents are comparatively rare, but often fatal. City traffic differs: speed is in general lower (< 50 km/h), distances traveled shorter and accidents will often not result in injuries for vehicle occupants.

Injuries for cyclists thus are far more likely. Even collisions at lower speed that basically leave a car dented and the occupants uninjured will result in injuries for cyclists: The classic dooring accident, run over by a turning car, etc. Even overtaking the cyclist with too little safety distance can lead to a fatal accident [1]

The stats in Berlin (2015) indicate that while cyclists are involved in about 4% of all accidents, they make up 21% of persons killed (pedestrians are even worse off: 1.33% involvement, but roughly 40% of all persons killed). They also make up more than 30% of all injured (30% of major injuries). Pedestrians make up for 13% of the injuries (24% of major injuries). So the group of soft targets that is involved in roughly 5% of accidents suffers 60% of all fatalities, 54% of nmajor injuries and 43% of all injuries.[2]

[1] see incident 10 on this list http://adfc-berlin.de/radverkehr/sicherheit/aktionen/62-geis... (sorry, german only) [2] data taken from https://www.berlin.de/polizei/aufgaben/verkehrssicherheit/ve... (sorry, german only)

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Re:105-Year-Old Cyclist Rides 14 Miles in an Hour En Route t... by mikekchar on Sunday January 08, 2017 @07:59AM (#13349522)

The data that was linked to was fatalities per 100 million trips. Unless I've missed something, that's what you want. I'm not going to say that cycling is as safe as not cycling, but it's still quite a safe activity. Your odds of getting seriously injured are quite small.

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