Road Safety Bill

Alan Braggins said:

Quoted message said:

But it's hardly the point that pk was making, which appears to be
that if
you tell pk that walking is more dangerous than cycling (even if you
have well documented statistics), he will ignore it because he
assumes it can't be.

Try reading and trying to understand instead of knee jerking.

pk

At Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:20:02 +0000 (UTC), message
<[email hidden]> was posted by
"p.k." <[email hidden]>, including some, all or none of
the following:

Quoted message said:

The "facts" are less clear cut than some might suggest:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_505587-07.hcsp
ksi per billion passenger km cycling = 910 Walk = 710 [1994]
Compare to:
http://www.pacts.org.uk/policy/briefings/statistics_uk.htm
Fatalities per billion passenger km Cyclist = 33 Foot = 48 [2002]

That's why I said "equally dangerous". In the context of the large
confidence intervals in these figures, the best you can say is that
they are "about the same".

710 sounds very precise, but in reality the 95% CI is probably several
tens of percent (should we propose the Thompson as the unit of
meaningless precision, I wonder?).

Quoted message said:

I restate my original point: Why prejudice a sound anti compulsion case by
dragging in things which are not demonstrably true?

Because, as far as I can tell, they are true. The percentage risk of
head injury is the same for cycling and walking, and the risk per unit
of exposure is either somewhat more or somewhat less, depending on
which particular jurisdiction and measure of exposure you use.

If the idea was that far-fetched the Japanese would not have
experimented with walking helmets for children.

As noted above, it's an audience dependent thing. With an intelligent
audience the idea that cycling is no more dangerous than walking often
brings people up short and causes them to start thinking, which is the
desired idea. And I don't think anybody on this NG is going to react
as you suggest.

Guy
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

"To every complex problem there is a solution which is
simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

>> "p.k." == p k <p.k.> writes:

p.k.> What gives better guidance are the posts in just about every
p.k.> cycling group I have ever seen about how ".... despite doing
p.k.> everything right I was nearly wiped out today by some brain
p.k.> dead cager....." it is self evident that as a cyclist on the
p.k.> road I am more at risk from said brain dead cager than as a
p.k.> pedestrian on the pavement.

Oh come on! Guess who populates this newsgroup? Cyclists. Is it any
wonder that the only accidents you hear about in this newsgroup relate
to cyclists? Do you really think that motorists are going to come over
to this newsgroup to inform us of near misses they have every day?

That you put more weight on anecdotal evidence from this and other
cycling forums over hard data is quite telling.
--
Cheers | ~~ __@
Euan | ~~ _-\<,
Melbourne, Australia | ~ (*)/ (*)