Connect2

[Jeremy Parker]

"wafflycat" <w*a*ff£y£cat*@£btco*nn£ect.com> wrote

[snip]
>
> This is something I cannot fathom - the assumption that those of us
> who cycle and are passionate about it apparently don't drive cars.
> Which is a load of tosh. Like many of the regular posters to urc, I
> walk, I cycle and I drive. Don't ride a horse though I love
> being out on my bike. I thoroughly enjoy driving too. Walking isn't
> bad either

Well, in inner London you do have a better chance than average of
finding people who do not drive, and even people who never have.
It's the same in Manhattan,of course. There's a certain amount of
incomprehension and hostility towards motorists evident within the
London Cycling Campaign (LCC). There are also people who do not
particularly like bikes, but are in favour of them just because they
don't like cars, and see bikes, no matter how unpleasant and
dangerous they may be, as the only possible substitute.

Mind you, I'm a member of the Barnet branch of the LCC. Barnet is
an outer London borough - the green belt starts at the bottom of my
garden. The Barnet LCC has never done a survey, but it's fairly
obvious that a substantial majority of our members own cars.

The question is, are cars owned by cyclists different from the
average car. I think they might be. I've seen it estimated that
about half the cost of a car is tied up with the status symbol
aspects of it. Since cyclists tend not to look on their cars as
status symbols, they tend not to spend that half of the money, and so
get their motoring at half the price it costs a "real" motorist.

Jeremy Parker

 

[[email protected]]

On Jan 21, 7:22 pm, Don Whybrow <[email protected]> wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> > On Jan 20, 5:55 pm, [email protected] wrote:
> >> It's not a competition, though: it's a comparison.  Walking is an
> >> acceptable risk (in fact, it's probably not an activity you thought of
> >> as risky at all) - oh, look, so is cycling.
>
> > Having been on the board of trustees of the Pedestrians' Assn/.Living
> > Streets for 5 years until a couple of years ago, you may rest assured
> > that it did not need the correspondents on this site to draw the risk
> > of walking to my attention.
>
> Feck'n'ek!
>
> --
> Don Whybrow
>
> Sequi Bonum Non Time
>
> "There is a wicked pretense that one has been informed. But no
> such thing has truly occurred! A mere slogan, an empty litany.
> No arguments are heard, no evidence is weighed. It isn't news at
> all, only a source of amusement for idlers." (Gibson-Sterling,
> The Difference Engine)

Whybrow? or Why bother?

 

[Ian Jackson]

In article <9b5d7cab-1b92-4134-a1e7-23e8922bb714@p69g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,
<[email protected]> wrote:
> LAB 96 WA 94 LAW 74
>Major w/o bike facilities 0.66 0.75 1.00
>Minor w/o bike facilities 0.94 0.98 0.92
>Signed bike route only (BR) 0.51 N/A N/A
>On-street bike lanes (BL) 0.41 N/A N/A
>On-street bike fac (BR or BL) N/A 0.54 0.53

These numbers are not very convincing to me. The chief reason I find
to be sceptical is that the differences are not very great - a claimed
risk difference of 1.3 to 1.9. If these studies had a very sound
methodology, large sample sizes for the relevant data, and were very
carefully controlled then one might very cautiously draw some
conclusions from these kind of numbers. However, that's not the case.

Taking the most recent attempt at data collection in the actual Moritz
paper:

This study involved sending out a survey to members of the League of
American Bicyclists. The study relies entirely on self-reporting of
both accidents and distances ridden on various kinds of road. As a
result it is almost impossible to control well for confounding factors
such as other properties of the roads or riders; it seems to me that
these kind of things could easily cause errors of a factor of 2-5 in
the final answers. At least 13.5% of the responses reported figures
which were internally inconsistent with errors of 40% or more (these
were discarded for the study but it shows how unreliable the data is).

As an example of a reason to be sceptical about the conclusions drawn
from this data, there appears to be no explanation for the reported
result of the Moritz study that (of roads with no bike facilities)
major roads are 1.4x safer. Across the three reported studies the
comparative safety of major and minor roads varies by a factor of
between 0.92 and 1.4.

Most of the riding and the vast proportion of the accidents were
recreational riding and/or on off-road trails. The bike routes, bike
lanes and `multi-use trails' are each 6-7% of the total reported
distance in the Moritz dataset (comment in the `About Their Cycling'
section, 4th paragraph). This means that the `relative danger
indices' are in fact calculated from very small samples:

From Table 4 of Moritz and the 6-7% remark I calculate that the total
distance on each of these types facilities was around 640,000km. The
estimated crash rate of 26 per million km (for bike lanes) seems thus
to have been based on a total of only approximately 16 crashes of
which only about 8 were `serious' (defined AFAICT as causing more than
$50 of damage).

Also, note that the summary table covers all crashes. If we attempt
to reconstruct data for `serious' crashes from the first half of Table
4 and 5 we get something like this:

Serious Minor
>Major w/o bike facilities 0.41 0.24
>Minor w/o bike facilities 0.46 0.48
>Signed bike route only (BR) 0.4 0.1
>On-street bike lanes (BL) 0.3 0.1
(normalised only within each column)

(The latter two lines have only one significant figure because I've
had to reconstruct them from single-digit percentages.)

--
Ian Jackson personal email: <[email protected]>
These opinions are my own. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/
PGP2 key 1024R/0x23f5addb, fingerprint 5906F687 BD03ACAD 0D8E602E FCF37657

 

[wafflycat]

"Jeremy Parker" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
snippity...
>
> The question is, are cars owned by cyclists different from the average
> car. I think they might be. I've seen it estimated that about half the
> cost of a car is tied up with the status symbol aspects of it. Since
> cyclists tend not to look on their cars as status symbols, they tend not
> to spend that half of the money, and so get their motoring at half the
> price it costs a "real" motorist.
>
> Jeremy Parker
>

Well I do drive a Merc. Albeit a very little Merc, but I do love my Herman
the German.

 

[[email protected]]

On Jan 22, 4:29 pm, "wafflycat" <w*a*ff£y£cat*@£btco*nn£ect.com>
wrote:
> "Jeremy Parker" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>
> news:[email protected]...
>
>
>
> snippity...
>
> > The question is, are cars owned by cyclists different from the average
> > car.  I think they might be.  I've seen it estimated that about halfthe
> > cost of a car is tied up with the status symbol aspects of it.  Since
> > cyclists tend not to look on their cars as status symbols, they tend not
> > to spend that half of the money, and so get their motoring at half the
> > price it costs a "real" motorist.
>
> > Jeremy Parker
>
> Well I do drive a Merc. Albeit a very little Merc, but I do love my Herman
> the German.

What emotions to you attach to the pollution and carbon it emits?
Paul Gannon

 

[Don Whybrow]

[email protected] wrote:
> On Jan 21, 7:22 pm, Don Whybrow <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Don Whybrow
> Whybrow? or Why bother?

How original, never hear that one before.

So, do you understand the difference between absolutes and comparisons yet?

--
Don Whybrow

Sequi Bonum Non Time

Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.

 

[Ekul Namsob]

<[email protected]> wrote:

> On Jan 22, 4:29 pm, "wafflycat" <w*a*ff£y£cat*@£btco*nn£ect.com>
> wrote:
> > "Jeremy Parker" <[email protected]> wrote in message
Since
> > > cyclists tend not to look on their cars as status symbols, they tend not
> > > to spend that half of the money, and so get their motoring at half the
> > > price it costs a "real" motorist.

> > Well I do drive a Merc. Albeit a very little Merc, but I do love my Herman
> > the German.
>
> What emotions to you attach to the pollution and carbon it emits?

As the owner of a 1998 Mercedes C180 Elegance, I would prefer the car to
have lower emissions but I find it no less economical than my previous
car, a 1998 Renault Mégane 1.6e. I wonder whether this has to do with
its automatic gearbox encouraging a, shall we say, sedate driving style.

I don't see the car as a status symbol: it cost me the same amount in
2006 as the Mégane had cost in 2003 and vastly less than most of my
colleagues' cars. Nothing has, fingers crossed, yet broken on the Merc
whereas the Mégane cost me on average GBP600 a year in parts. I wonder
whether the longer average life of a Mercedes goes some way towards
reducing the actual pollution caused by the vehicle over its life.

Cheers,
Luke


--
Red Rose Ramblings, the diary of an Essex boy in
exile in Lancashire <http://www.shrimper.org.uk>

 

[MJ Ray]

Mark T <pleasegivegenerously@warmail*turn_up_the_heat_to_reply*.com.invalid>
> >> > Please address messages to the group rather than individuals.
> >>
> >> It was a question to Paul.
> >
> > So send an email.
>
> Please stop being a twit.

I'm not the one sending personal messages over Usenet.

> > At least in the LAW one, it's very selective quoting bordering on
> > misrepresentation. I wonder whether the less publicly-verifiable ones
> > are similarly resummarised.
>
> Could you give a little more detail? So far the criticism of Franklin's
> work has been too general and unspecific.
>
> (I'm assuming you were referring to this one):
> <www.bikexprt.com/research/kaplan/recom.htm>

Compare Franklin's summary:-

National survey of LAW members.
Cycle paths 292 accidents per million cycle miles, against 104 for minor
roads and 111 for major roads.

with typical statements from the abstract:-

As cycling experience increased, accident involvement appeared to
decrease dramatically: About one out of every 17 subjects was involved
in a collision or serious fail. that required professional medical
treatment. Bicycle accident rates appear to be about twice as high as
motor vehicle accident rates; age, sex, and years of experience of the
bicycle rider all are influential on the rate. The data also suggest
that safety conscious individuals (those wearing helmets, using rear
view mirrors, and always obeying laws) are involved in less accidents
than others.

It's a very different spin. Also, the study explicitly states about
the off-road facilities in there:-

It should be noted that less than 25 percent of the respondents (N=705,
N=663) reported any travel at all on special bicycle facilities including
bicycle routes, lanes, or separate pathways. This travel amounted to less
than 7 percent of the total miles traveled by all respondents. [...]

and:-

Off-street bicycle facilities (that do not allow motor vehicle traffic)
showed the highest overall accident rate, and also an extremely high
serious accident rate. [...] No explanation is known for this finding. A
guess might be that cyclists use less caution on this type facility,
feeling it is free of the menacing motor vehicle only to collide with
a tree or fall on some slippery gravel. Coincidentally, the lowest
accident rate existed for both the categories of all accidents and
serious accidents when those incidents that occurred on bikelanes and
bike routes were examined.


That's not at all the spin that typical Franklin-quoters of this
parish want... I suggest that the summary is misleading at best.

Hope that explains,
--
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder,
consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ -
Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

 

[MJ Ray]

Mark T <pleasegivegenerously@warmail*turn_up_the_heat_to_reply*.com.invalid>
> Ok, so we go with the 'LAW' study:
>
> "Surprisingly, bicycle facilities where no motor vehicles are allowed
> showed the highest accident rate of any variable examined. On-street
> facilities, such as bicycle lanes or routes, showed a very low accident
> rate. The rates for both major and minor streets fell in between."

That's cute. The main body of the report also comments:-

Off-street bicycle facilities (that do not allow motor vehicle traffic)
showed the highest overall accident rate, and also an extremely high
serious accident rate. [...] No explanation is known for this finding.

So its author explicitly points out there is no explanation, yet Mark T
knows better and can use it to prop up his preferred explanation?

> [... Franklin's comments of the other studies ...] It's been alleged, in
> this thread, that he has selectively quoted 'to the point of
> misrepresentation' but no one has bothered to (been able to?) give
> examples.

I just hadn't seen the challenge yet. Usenet transmission is variable.

--
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder,
consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ -
Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

 

[Rob Morley]

In article <[email protected]>, Jeremy Parker
[email protected] says...

> The question is, are cars owned by cyclists different from the
> average car. I think they might be. I've seen it estimated that
> about half the cost of a car is tied up with the status symbol
> aspects of it. Since cyclists tend not to look on their cars as
> status symbols, they tend not to spend that half of the money, and so
> get their motoring at half the price it costs a "real" motorist.
>
I'd be interested to know that. Have you noticed how motor mechanics
tend to have scruffy old cars too?

 

[Ian Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
MJ Ray <[email protected]> wrote:
>[ stuff about the 1974/5 LAW study ]

Why are we concentrating on this study as if its the most cogent ?
Surely it's one of the least so. It only occurs so near the top of
Franklin's research summary page because Franklin's page is in
chronological order.

Franklin's summary of it is indeed very brief; obviously it is
intended to identify the paper by what Franklin considers the most
salient feature. It's obviously not intended as an assessment of the
paper's value. Anyone who is arguing from such a short summary is
obviously misguided.

Unfortunately the that page only goes up to 1999 so and doesn't cover
the recent (and quite surprising to many people) before-and-after
research from various places.

--
Ian Jackson personal email: <[email protected]>
These opinions are my own. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/
PGP2 key 1024R/0x23f5addb, fingerprint 5906F687 BD03ACAD 0D8E602E FCF37657

 

[Ian Smith]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:44:02 -0000, Rob Morley <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, Jeremy Parker
> [email protected] says...
>
> > The question is, are cars owned by cyclists different from the
> > average car. I think they might be. I've seen it estimated that
> > about half the cost of a car is tied up with the status symbol
> > aspects of it. Since cyclists tend not to look on their cars as
> > status symbols, they tend not to spend that half of the money, and so
> > get their motoring at half the price it costs a "real" motorist.
> >
> I'd be interested to know that. Have you noticed how motor mechanics
> tend to have scruffy old cars too?

Though that may be related to motor mechanics being paid less than
average (if they are - I don't actually know) whereas regular cyclists
are reputedly paid more than average.

Are motor mechanics cars scruffier than average for people in similar
employments?

regards, Ian SMith
--
|\ /| no .sig
|o o|
|/ \|

 

[[email protected]]

On Jan 23, 12:43 pm, Ian Jackson <[email protected]>
wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> MJ Ray  <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >[ stuff about the 1974/5 LAW study ]
>
> Why are we concentrating on this study as if its the most cogent ?
> Surely it's one of the least so.  It only occurs so near the top of
> Franklin's research summary page because Franklin's page is in
> chronological order.
>
> Franklin's summary of it is indeed very brief; obviously it is
> intended to identify the paper by what Franklin considers the most
> salient feature.  It's obviously not intended as an assessment of the
> paper's value.  Anyone who is arguing from such a short summary is
> obviously misguided.
>
> Unfortunately the that page only goes up to 1999 so and doesn't cover
> the recent (and quite surprising to many people) before-and-after
> research from various places.
>
> --
> Ian Jackson                  personal email: <[email protected]>
> These opinions are my own.        http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/
> PGP2 key 1024R/0x23f5addb,     fingerprint 5906F687 BD03ACAD 0D8E602E FCF37657

This discussion thread would make an excellent opportunity for you to
give a few details of some of these recent reports.
Thanks
Paul Gannon