Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

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The odds are in your favor to be honest. I live in a city of 4 million people. 10-20 cyclist die a year. I'll roll those dice when the variance is that high. I figure I bike safer than the average biker I see on the road anyhow, so my odds of survival go up even higher. Probably not a small number of those accidents involved intoxicated bikers or mentally ill; I see a lot of people, clearly out of their mind through mental illness or addiction or both, biking the wrong way into traffic, or otherwise not being aware of anything at all and blithely riding (sometimes pedestrians just walking on the freeway too). Things I do to be safe while biking that I rarely see others do:

- taking the lane

- wearing a helmet

- using lights

- filtering to the front of the intersection

- opting for those 25mph residential roads that hardly have any traffic whenever possible

- "dutch left": instead of cutting over across traffic to turn left as a car would, I instead go straight almost all the way through the intersection on the right hand side, turn right in front of the stopped perpendicular cars, and then angle myself to go straight on that perpendicular road when the lights cycle to green.

Something else that improves your QALYs: cycling. Of course, it's about exercise more generally, but if you don't have time to exercise only, doing it while commuting is clever!

In most locations in the world -- my null hypothesis includes the US here too -- people who commute by bike (for all its risks) live longer and are sick less than those who do not.

Your null hypothesis has been born out by study after study.

I probably would have given this a full-throated endorsement just a couple years ago, but after years of improving safety standards that drove down the number of automobile fatalities, we've seen two years of massive increases (7% in 2020 and then 10% last year [0]). And that pairs nicely with my anecdotal experience, which is that people have lost their fucking minds on the roads. (And also, more controversially, coincides (with utter predictability, in my view) with a massive drop in traffic stops by law enforcement.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

10% increase in my city with the numbers it sees could mean just two additional cycling deaths a year. That's the thing with these statistics, the numbers are so small to begin with, that just a few more events are liable to lead to huge percent increases. These few more events could well be within the variance of this measure you observe year over year, and may not be a real trend.

The numbers actually are not small. There were 42,000+ automobile deaths in the U.S. last year. This isn't a phenomenon of small numbers.

And across the entire nation of 400 million people, there were 900 cycling deaths last year. Like I say, in my region, there are usually only a dozen or two.

Sure, people are afraid to bike anywhere, because our roads are so unsafe :)

What is QALY?

Quality-adjusted life years. Sometimes used as the unit in which to measure interventions aimed at improving health.

my understanding of helmet studies is that wearing one might help when you fall, but makes it more likely for someone to hit you.

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