Ian Walker wrote:
> Some similar issues came up on the UK Cycle Planning group last year.
> I published a very short summary here:
>
> http://philica.com/display_observation.php?observation_id=8
Thank you for this. It points out how difficult it is to account for
cause and effect, i.e. are people safer because they wear helmets or do
safer people wear helmets? The same thing occurs with statistics
regarding vegetarians, who tend to live longer, but it isn't clear
whether this is due to nutritional or other factors.
I did a study once on Velomobile safety (including electric vehicles).
One conclusion was that, a priori, the higher the ratio of perceived
risk to actual risk, the better. An extreme case is the faired
two-wheeled velomobile. It appears extremely unsafe yet may actually
objectively be the safest vehicle (certainly safer than standard
bicycles except when going downhill). Unfortunately the extreme
perceived danger also means that such vehicles are hardly used. The
opposite is of course the SUV, objectively dangerous vehicles perceived
to be safe by many timid users.
Theo Schmidt, Switzerland
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