My mother wants to know if a road bike is dangerous to me. David wonders if carbon frame bikes are dangerous. Good questions.
The best/only decent write-up of cycling risks I found so far is by Ken Kiefer, who pro-biking advocate did break his hip in a bike accident. His take on the limited data out there is that cycling isn't particulary risky, either for death, incapacitating injury or other accidents. I can't (yet) judge the quality of his analysis, or how it applies to the type of biking I'll be doing (which probaly isn't typical for the US or the world in general, though it might be typical for males in the 40s around here -- I see quite a few fancy road bikes every day, mostly at the W&OD trail crossing on my commute, but also occasionally going by in front of our house, and barely any other bikes at all).
Fron Kiefer's write-up:
I have no exposure via friends to serious bike accidents, but I've seen multiple contact sport related ends of the ability to run. Okay, I'm aware of one death from a biking accident, not clear how it happened, I think he went into a ditch and ruptured his spleen, but didn't realize the injury at the time. Oh, one childhood acquainance, a neighbor's kid at my grandparents, was killed on a bike when someone ran a stop sign.
Bottom line: cary medical insurance ID and a cell phone for emergencies. I don't carry either right now when I run.
As things go, I don't think I'm risking more biking than driving to work. Not that either is riskless.
My last bike crash was in sixth grade, when I went into a ditch in the Verseille palace garden and didn't come out on the other side. Very embarrasing and I was a bit shaken up for having misjudging my weight (which is what took me out, a year younger and smaller I would have been fine). A few close calls biking before that, involving one hit against a stone barn wall evading a car while on a wet street going the wrong way in a low visibility old city one way street and also drafting a friend and almost hitting a pole I didn't see because of that. Both situations I'd not get myself in now.
Catastrophic carbon frame breakage seems like a minor issue if you follow the recommended cautions about not using frames that have been in crashes and looking for cracks. Manufactures will replace cracked frames. Finally, I assume some of the initial carbon frame manufacturing defects are now resolved.
Now on to the real questions, like what do I make of compact doubles vs. triple cranks?
Comments