Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm not sure how true that is, even when the cause is distracted/aggressive drivers

Very.

It's possible to make no mistake and still lose.

My wife got hit-and-run when bicycling to work and she's exceeding careful and defensive in her riding.

Her carefulness is probably what allowed her to catch a glimpse of the car in the corner of her eye and swerve at the last minute to not be caught head-on by the car and sent flying hundreds of meters away.

She's "lucky" to even have made it, suffering debilitating neck pain every day and night, abated only by roughly a half through invasive surgery, a pain she will have to endure for the rest of her life which at the current rate of life expectancy is the next fifty years.

Meanwhile the distracted and hurried driver who didn't bother to check around their A pillar blind spot drove away scot-free.

That's one example. I have many such stories of cyclist and biker friends alike, many of which don't ever ride between lanes.

> It's possible to make no mistake and still lose.

Sure, no doubt about that. But again, if people (60% of the riders in my case) manage to never be in an accident, and that's including a wide range of people, then surely the odds are greater of never being in an accident if you're careful.

Still, sucks she had that experience. But it's important to realize that for every accident, there are thousands of people riding every day without a single accident in their life. But of course it's harder to think about that when you had someone in a accident and that person is close to you, I understand that.

I don't think anyone's disputing that being careful increases your odds of avoiding accidents.

Instead what I wanted to call out is that even if infinitely careful and drive defensively without fail you can still get into an accident, and you don't need to be hunted down or intentionally collided into+.

Ultimately at a large enough scale it's all about odds, and it takes but one occurrence to go from "I've been fine so far" to "my life is upended".

And like all statistical things, with a low enough sample size you're going to get an unbalanced result one way or the other.

+ On that note I wish drivers were made aware of CBDR

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bearing,_decreasing...

> Instead what I wanted to call out is that even if infinitely careful and drive defensively without fail you can still get into an accident, and you don't need to be hunted down or intentionally collided into+.

And again, seems to be massively different depending on the country. Locally, ~60% of motorcycle drivers claim to never have been in any accident, and that's including even careless people, so surely the claims of "even careful motorbike drivers will be in a accident" are over-exaggerated.

> (60% of the riders in my case)

60% of the riders still alive?

I won't ruin the surprise for you, go ahead and read the source I put :)

If she was obscured by an A-pillar she was likely riding too far to the side of the road.

There's a reason that we have safety classes, and it's that being safe is emphatically not intuitive.

You're much, much safer on the center wheel track.

I don't mean to be rude or accuse anyone, it's just that this kind of blind confidence gives everyone the wrong ideas.

> If she was obscured by an A-pillar she was likely riding too far to the side of the road. [...] You're much, much safer on the center wheel track.

I won't spend time detailing the whole situation but you could not be further from what happened.

The situation is extremely clear cut: someone speeding around a turn and running over another who had both the green light and right of way, impacting in a way that cannot possibly be ignored, then crossing two red lights is 100% responsible.

It's precisely good safety practices that _saved_ her life.

What if the mistake was riding a bicycle? You don't seem to be coming at this from the perspective of someone who is really thinking about safety.

Sorry to be callous about it. You're understandably angry. It's one thing to say you accept the risks of a risky behavior, and yet another to declare nothing could have been done.

It’s absolutely sick that we think of cycling as being dangerous and risk seeking behaviour.

I’m coming from a part of the world that doesn’t needlessly look down on cycling (its common for nearly everyone to cycle in Copenhagen/Malmö) and the idea that people should become drivers because its safer is a total tragedy of the commons and would not hold much weight here - the cities would be crushed under the necessary weight of roads and cars.

Other parts of the world need to get some more cars off the road by making safer infrastructure, it’s ridiculous.

There's no judgement. It is dangerous, as the grandparent's story illustrates, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. If your kid's life is on the line, and you absolutely have to get the answer right, and you cannot unilaterally effect public policy, what do you need to do?

> It's one thing to say you accept the risks of a risky behavior, and yet another to declare nothing could have been done.

By that metric you end up doing exactly nothing (UK data):

- riding a bike for 20 mi / 32 km: 1 micromort

- walking for 17 mi / 27 km: 1 micromort

- riding a motorbike for 6 mi / 10k: 1 micromort

- taking a sit on a chair: 1.3 micromort

- taking a bath: 0.3 micromort

- night in hospital: 75 micromort

Yes, walking is actually worse per unit of distance. I hope you don't sit on chairs too much, nor routinely enjoy taking baths.

> If your kid's life is on the line

Oh but would you even take the risk of having one?

- Giving birth (micromort): Sweden 50 , UK 80, USA 170

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