I was thinking about the same thing recently. Personally I am curious as to how many forum members have been hit by a car or something similar. For me it happened in 8th grade - T-boned by a white Ford Bronco. Been lucky ever since but I have had another dozen close calls. I know a fair number of people who have been clipped by cars, but nobody I personally knew has died. Alternatively, I have a few people I know who died in car accidents.

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me, i know a lot of triathletes. and i know everyone who's died while on a bike in the last 3 years. and if i forgot somebody, i could easily get hold of all the triathletes i know and ask them who i've forgotten.

now, accidents, that's a little tougher. that might be possible if we're talking a specific medical event, such as paralysis. but, road rash? broken finger? i'd like to start by getting our arms around a stat we can feel confident in, and i suspect death during cycling while cycling is the proximate cause or salient activity (rather than having a heart attack, or you got caught in a tidal wave while cycling.

this i think maybe we can do.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

What is the metric you're trying to work toward?

% chance of being killed in a given year (independent of training volume)?

or

Risk per unit of activity (ex. hour or mile)?


The second one is harder to get (news articles don't typically include training history), but is more typical for safety statistics. We might be able to get that for a small subset (top AGers, pros) and extrapolate.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
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I was hit by a car in 2000 and was lucky to walk away with just a few scrapes and bruises. Had I been a second quicker would have likely had a very different outcome.

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"You can never win or lose if you don't run the race." - Richard Butler

what are you trying to get to with the data? There is already a ton of data online, such as here: http://www.iihs.org/...talityfacts/bicycles

"What is the metric you're trying to work toward? "

what is my chance, your chance, of getting killed while riding a bike. per year, per 5 years. per decade. if you ride for 20 years, 30, 40, 50. your risk over your lifetime, depending on what you consider a lifetime of riding, is that your chances of dying while riding your bike on the road is 1 in 8. or in 80. or 800. or 8000. or 80,000.

that's it.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"what are you trying to get to with the data?"

see my post just above.

"There is already a ton of data online"

i know a guy who got killed riding his bike while drunk, home from a bar, and he was riding his bike because his license was taken away because of DUIs. that's not my cohort. i'm interested in MY risk associated with road cycling.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

This might help you -http://www.rideofsilence.org/memoriam.php

Since you mention limiting this to triathletes, what I'm most interested in knowing as a triathlete is not my risk of death from cycling but my risk of injury from cycling that ends my ability to compete in triathlons.

I have a ridiculous fear of flying and found these stats ( or similar stats in many places), while trying to convince myself I would be safe flying. Apparently I should be more worried on my bike....a lot more worried.
DEATH BY: YOUR ODDS
Cardiovascular disease: 1 in 2
Smoking (by/before age 35): 1 in 600
Car trip, coast-to-coast: 1 in 14,000
Bicycle accident: 1 in 88,000
Tornado: 1 in 450,000
Train, coast-to-coast: 1 in 1,000,000
Lightning: 1 in 1.9 million
Bee sting: 1 in 5.5 million
U.S. commercial jet airline: 1 in 7 million

You might still start off by looking at all bicycle deaths, since that number is easy to find, and then get to the exercise related risk by excluding the ones that don't fit. If you start from scratch going only by what has been talked about on the internet, chances are there will be many that you missed.

i take it then that you think that what i'm proposing has no merit?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I 100% want this data. People right by me keep dying, I bike into southern Michigan.

If my risk of biking 10 hours per week outside was 1 in 10,000 to die per year I would still bike.

If it were 1 in 100 to die per year I would not bike.

Not sure exactly where my cutoff would be. Perhaps 1 in 5000 chance per year given 520 hours of biking a year, so approx 1 in 2,500,000 odds per hour biking I'd my drunk math us correct.

Before this thread breaks down into something else, I'll give a bumper sticker of my own experience: I was hit by a car in 1992 and got away with just a broken nose...I continued to train on the roads until my brother was hit and killed on the same road in 1998 (both took place in Bloomfield, NJ).

As long as this is not normalized to miles ridden, or time spent on a specific setting (urban/suburban/country) and road layout (w/o bike lane etc.pp), these data are not going to mean anything.

I actually encourage everybody to make their own assessment/quantification, by looking where they ride and when, take into account where chances are higher to get hit (or where people had been hit/killed).

Personal risk assessment is way more meaningful than calculating a generalized risk.

There are no guarantees in statistics, ever.

Statistics are a much much much much much better way to evaluate risk than to "look around when you ride".

Source - worked on wall Street.

I wouldn't ride Wall Street to begin with.

You might be able to calculate average risk for a population of cyclists. But I'm not sure you could get risk that's meaningful to you personally.

There are too many local variables. Your skill as a rider, and what type of riding you do. Where you ride. When you ride.

It's sort of like heart attack risk. We have good numbers for average. But # may be way, way, off for *you*.

Hard to say as riding your bike in a park on a bike path is very different than riding on the shoulder of a major road. The general bike stats will understate the odds for those of us on the road.

"As long as this is not normalized to miles ridden, or time spent on a specific setting (urban/suburban/country) and road layout (w/o bike lane etc.pp), these data are not going to mean anything."

okay, so you're out. anyone else like windshatten, who's out, please do me a favor and don't respond. anyone who's in, and who has worthwhile ideas to help the project, i welcome your commentary.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"There are too many local variables. Your skill as a rider, and what type of riding you do. Where you ride. When you ride... It's sort of like heart attack risk. We have good numbers for average. But # may be way, way, off for *you*."

okay, so you're out. thanks. for those who're out, not necessary to respond. maybe start another thread. only interested in those who creative, intelligent ideas on such a project.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I THINK if you could get to deaths per year among USAT members while cycling outside of competition it gives us some basic data. But really basic in the order of "deaths per 1000" in USA. I don't think it gives you any real idea on how to assess your personal risks riding. There are a zillion reasons why your own stats may be better or worse based on time of day, traffic, lighting, weather, your own awareness of the road, the awareness of that one stupid guy about to kill you or not, your own bike handling skills, were you riding tri or road bike or mountain bike, road surface, biking lane or not. I can personally play with most of these odds to improve my personal stats orders of magnitude better than the overall deaths per 1000 USAT members while cycling outside of competition....or I could make my personal stats worse by doing stupid things. Your findings would spread/normalize all these factors, however, one could say that all the deaths you come up with, the rider+terrain+traffic all worked in a perfect storm to result in death.

When I was in the Air Force and we were trained on flight safety investigations, it was all about the contributing factors in digging up "what happened". At the end of the year's annual flight safety briefing from the Director General we'd get all the weighing factors that applied to each accident/crash and you'd see a lot of patterns emerge. Since there is no traffic in the sky, the most important factor was pilot/human/aircrew misjudgement. In the case of cycling, we have the pilot of the bike and we have the pilot of the car...you just need one to do something stupid and the rider dies. If even one does 1 thing less stupid, often nothing happens.

All this to say, please collect the overall number and then it's up to us to make our odds better when we hit the road. Sometimes shit happens and you get hit. Hopefully nothing fatal happens. I've been hit by cars 5 times, 4 were pretty bad, but most of the nonesense happened commuting to work downtown by bike.

Since I started working in suburbia 20 years ago, I only got hit once, and of course it was at rush hour, in low light by someone late for work, in a congested spot and the guy hit me head on on a narrow road when he pulled out to pass the van in front of him and did not see me coming at him. My spider sense told me something bad was going to happen when I felt that car that pulled out in front of my face, accelerating and closing the gap on the vehicle in front. By then, the only thing I could do was vertically eject....thanks to years in Armed Forces vaulting shows, I kind of knew how to clear the pommel horse...but hard with a bike attached to your legs, so I saved my head, core upper legs but the lower legs clipped by the vehicle...I just found the thread from 2005:


http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...%20pocket%20#p444322


It's an example of "you can't do anything" at some point even when you do your best to reduce risk...I guess that's when the average stats kick in. Also that's my 39 year old self. My 50 year old self, on the same road at the same time, riding the same bike at the same speed, probably does not have the athleticm to pull off that life saving vault. On the one hand older more experienced riders have the smarts and more spider sense on the road. But young riders have better reflexes and general athleticism to pull out of near death jam with better chances of survival.

"I THINK if you could get to deaths per year among USAT members while cycling outside of competition it gives us some basic data."

i agree. but we can't get those stats. they don't have those stats. so we'd need to develop the stats ourselves.

"There are a zillion reasons why your own stats may be better or worse"

of course. i was wondering how long it would take to state the obvious, that depending on the roads you ride, your skill level, etc., your odds of a problem would be better or worse than the mean. i've now seen that 3 times in the first 12 posts. can we stipulate to that? can we get that out of the way? can we stipulate that if i wear dark clothing, ride at night, every night for 50 years, in the middle of the road, that my chances of dying are higher? if so, then perhaps we can get past the first batch of inane and useless posts. i understand it's the internet. i understand we need to wade through the bullshit before we get down to the good stuff the internet can be used for. i'm just hoping we can push through this quickly.

look, here's the point of this. people are actually deciding to not ride the roads anymore for one reason: the success of communities like this of letting us know every time one of us dies. people aren't swimming anymore, for the same reason. i'd like to quantify the risk. we have people making decisions on whether to fly on an airplane or run in a state park because of airline crashes and mountain lion attacks they've read about. people are afraid to rough water swim because of shark attacks they hear about. but when you do the math, the odds are low.

yes, if you decide to specifically swim only in shark infested waters, when sharks are infesting them, your chances go up. yes, there are things you can do to make YOUR chances of not getting hit on a bike better than the mean. but we still, i think, for the good of everyone, would feel better if we did actually establish data on things like bicycle deaths, heart attacks in the swim, and so forth. then we'd know the risk for ourselves and for new folks who might contemplate joining this sport.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Dan, related to my last post, if you could group the deaths by age group it may provide an additional layer of useful info. If you can possibly categorize the deaths further by urban vs rural it would be an additional useful bit of data. If you could group by "before 9 am and after 4 pm" as one group and 9 am to 4 pm as another group, this would further be useful data. Finally if you could group by Mon-Fri, vs Sat/Sun/Stat Holiday, this would be really useful.

Perhaps we'd see that the worst stats are before 9 am or after 4 pm, Mon to Fri, in urban areas, riders 50 and over. At least intuitively I'd expect that to be the case

If you want to take it further and divide your USAT numbers in percent males and percent females and then look at the death stats for each per 1000, maybe we might learn whose behavior is more risky on the road.

Hi Dan, see my last post. Let's work to compile the data and then let's see if we can further categorize them in buckets mentioned in my last post. Then you have the averages and then you can see when they get worse or better. If people see that the odds of riding in rural setting on weekend are really good in terms of not dying but Wed after 4 pm in downtown are bad, maybe they stick to the trainer during the week but at least get out on weekends because the odds are 100x worse in the weekday example.

I think you and I are aligned that we want people out there riding and true risks are already really low and we can make them even better with precautions.