A Few Thoughts About Safety and Urban Riding

One year ago, as I cycled to work the morning after the long Labor Day weekend, on a quiet residential street in our neighborhood, I crashed head-on into oncoming car. She had cut the corner on a 90-degree turn we were each negotiating from opposite directions, and suddenly there she was in my path. My disk brakes locked up, my back wheel skipped into a skid, and I thought “Ohhhhhh shiiiiiiit…”

I was extremely fortunate – she was stopped by the time I hit her bumper at an angle, and I flew diagonally across her hood, took off her passenger mirror with my thigh, and somehow managed to tuck and roll as I fell onto the road. I stood up immediately, with a huge “I’m ALIVE!!” adrenaline rush, and went to reassure the driver that I was ok and sort it out. My body was mostly fine – a major bruise on my thigh, a sore wrist, an adrenaline jag, but my beloved Trek was toast – taco’d front wheel, bent front chainring, bent frame, broken brake lever, etc.

Site of my accident.

One year later, on my 9-mile ride to work today – over the same route where the accident happened – I was pondering bicycles, traffic, and accidents. Seattle has had a terrible summer for bicycle accidents, with multiple fatalities and an unknown number of collisions, injuries, and near-misses. Safety and accidents are not a topic I like to dwell on, but every urban cyclist I know thinks about it, and a decent number of people I talk to stay off bikes out of the perception that bike commuting is dangerous.

Photo by Richard Masoner.

I was going to post a fact-filled discussion of the relative merits and dangers (and joys!) of bike commuting, but the truth is that for all the statistics out there, none of them are actually very good – most bike accidents and injuries are unreported, and it’s hard to quantify risk per mile or per hour because nobody really knows how much people cycle in America (though that number seems to be going up steadily).

The short answer is that cycling is a little dangerous, but it’s probably impossible to quantify whether it is more dangerous than sitting on your ass (heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and kills over 400,000 men and women each year) or driving in your car. It’s more dangerous to ride across intersections, in the “door zone,” and out of driveways into the street (a frequent kid accident).  And it’s less dangerous the more experienced you get, the more careful you are, and most importantly, the more others are out there riding too.

Yes, seems pretty clear from the studies that have been done (see Pedaling Revolution): when the number of cyclists goes up, the accident rates go down. There’s safety in numbers. Come on out and ride!

Photo by Bike Portland.

“The gain of ‘life years’ through improved fitness among regular cyclists, and thus their increased longevity exceeds the loss of ‘life years’ in cycle fatalities. (British Medical Association, 1992)