Are cyclists allowed to race on public roads 5617

On Wed, 18 May 2005 17:34:19 GMT, "Jeremy Collins"

Actually it's not quite that simple - this view confuses the transitive and intransitive meanings of danger. Motor vehicles are safe for those in them, but dangerous to everybody else.

Since the roads are public rights of way the baseline should probably be the lowest common denominator, which is walking. Walking poses little or no threat to anyone else. Cyclists kill and injure a small number of pedestrians, mostly on the carriageway as far as I can tell. Motor drivers kill and injure more pedestrians on the footway than do cyclists (by a very large margin), and are responsible for roughly 90% of the 3,500 rests on the roads every year (i.e. 90% are put down by the police to driver negligence on one side or the other).

In cases where cars hit pedestrians or cyclists, whoever is at fault, the pedestrian or cyclist is the one injured. In the case of cyclists not more than one third of these collisions are the fault of the cyclists, and it might be 15% or lower, depending on which study you read.

So, RipVanWinkle is right that we all have a right and a need to use the roads, but the peds got there first and they are at greatest risk from negligence on the part of others, so it is proper to place a greater burden of care on those who bring the greatest risk.

You are right, it is distorted by the fact that few cyclists travel long distances on limited-access roads :-)

A better measure is risk per journey. But any measure is going to contain an element of guesswork.

We do know from other sources that the life expectancy of a regular cyclist is two years longer than average, that their fitness level will typically be equivalent to a non-cyclist ten years younger, and that the health benefits outweigh the risks by around 20:1. We also know that for the most experienced cyclists the mean time between serious injuries equates to approximately 3,000 years, which suggests that a good deal of the difference might be accounted for by lack of training. Happily adult cycle training is now becoming more readily available.

Consider the case of flying, lowest risk mode. Actually the risk per journey is quite high, due to airport congestion and the dangers in taking off and landing, but once in the air the plane travels in some cases prodigious distances with almost no risk at all.

Consider the case of rail. After Paddington and Hatfield there were calls for no expense to be spared, even though rail is already the safest mode of land transport, and more people die on the roads in an average day than on the railways in an average year (not counting dissolutions).

Surveys. But beware: if you walk or cycle to the station, take the train to town and walk or ride to the office, you are counted as having done the entire journey by the dominant mode, in this case rail. If you are injured crossing the road to the station, you are counted as a pedestrian casualty.

Journeys under one mile are not counted at all (most of these are done on foot).

So the figures are not as accurate as they might be, and contain some systemic bias. I believe they are working on a more accurate method of transport surveying.

Guy --

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