A statistician I am not. Which is why I am having a hell of a time evaluating the relative risk of these unregulated bicycle baby trailers I am seeing all over the place.
They look like this:
Only the one I saw yesterday was piloted by a helmetless dad towing an equally helmetless baby down a busy street in downtown Ann Arbor.
Let me admit my bias. I am a non-parent libertarian who believes in allowing people the greatest amount of freedom possible, and I think that if someone wants to ride a bike towing his baby around in city traffic (like the irresponsible-looking man I saw yesterday), so be it. It is his child, and his risk, right? Life is tough, survival of the fittest, the laws of nature, and all that crap.
Yet still, accidents can happen, and as a driver, my selfish worry involves what my car might do to a baby trailer in the event of an accident, as opposed to what my car might do if the same baby were in a car and securely strapped into a car seat. Or for matter, even sitting in a regular car seat with the seat belt securely fastened. The latter, of course is considered “unsafe.” So are car seats more than two years old, and the laws are now requiring car seats for children as old as twelve!
So what explains this inconsistency? By what logic can a baby be towed around in city traffic with virtually nothing between him and moving cars, yet if he is inside a car he has to be strapped into something built to withstand a crash landing?
I don’t know, but I am baffled, and I am even more baffled by the statistics.
You’d think, for example, that walking would be the safest way to get around. But no! Some studies claim that walking is 36 times more dangerous than driving. How accurate that is I don’t know, but trying to analyze stuff like this boggles the mind:
Almost 175,000 pedestrians died in all motor vehicle crashed between 1975 and 2001.
The 2001 FARS data show pedestrian fatalities from all crashes:
• Accounted for about 12 percent of all highway fatalities involving motor vehicles;
• More than one-fifth of all children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old killed in traffic crashes were pedestrians;
• Forty-five percent of the 484 pedestrian fatalities under 16 years of age occurred between 3:00 PM and 7 PM;
• Most pedestrian fatalities occurred at night between 6 PM and 6 AM (64 percent);
• Most pedestrian fatalities occurred in urban areas (69 percent); and,
• More than two-thirds (68 percent) of the 2001 pedestrian fatalities were males. In 2000, the male pedestrian fatality rate per 100,000 population was 2.35 – more than double the rate for females (1.05 per 100,000 population).
So if walking is more dangerous than driving, you would think that bicycling would be more dangerous than walking and therefore more dangerous than driving, but you’d be wrong. Bicycling only kills around 700 people per year.
OTOH, there are a lot of injuries:
Approximately 20% of bicycle commuters experienced a traumatic event and 5% required medical attention during 1 year of commuting. Traumatic events were not related to rider demographics, safety practices, or experience levels. These results imply that injury prevention should focus on improving the safety of the bicycle commuting environment.
Like maybe not allowing the baby trailers?Or perhaps treating children more akin to the way we treat dogs?
…In Maryland, it is illegal to leave a cat or dog in a car on a warm day or back of a pickup truck. In these situations, any police officer, public safety officer, fire fighter or animal control officer can forcefully remove any dog from a car or truck if the dog’s safety or health is at risk.
Table 7. Devices used during SCI from diving12.Device Injuries %
None 142 76.8
Low diving board 16 8.6
Competition blocks 9 4.9
Ladder or steps 8 4.3
Other 7 3.8
High diving board 3 1.6
Unknown 11 5.6
Comments
12 responses to “Paralysis”
Everybody (except the bed bound) is a pedestrian virtually everyday.
Only a small number of people are bicyclists.
You need to analyze the accident and fatality rates per mile traveled for a good comparison.
And have you every tried to bicycle while drunk? While half of all pedestrian fatalities are due to the pedestrian being drunk (miss-remembered but accurate statistic), most drunk bicycling attempts result in immediate scrapes and bruises, but not an impact with a moving car.
The guilt is not yours. Please let Darwin run his course. Do unto yours as you wish, let others do unto theirs. Their stupidity is not your fault.
A risky world is risky. Who knew?
In all seriousness, I get frustrated like you do, Eric.
I especially get frustrated with those stories that tell us that by doing behavior “X” you are “Y” times more likely to develop terrible disease “Z” vs. the guy who doesn’t engage in behavior “X”. Rarely do they tell you what the overall risk rate is for the terrible disease “Z”. That might be important in order to judge just how truly risky behavior “X” truly is, no?
Hard being a libertarian. Sort of puts you in a morally hazardous situation. Just wondering how you can justify coming off that position in this case?
There is risk in all situations. If some people are responsible for their actions and others not, where are you going to draw the line. Will you take the child and raise it yourself?
Just stick with the compass you have chosen, and let nature sort it out.
Statistics like these become even more mind-boggling when you compare them to the population at large. In the last few months, off and on, for example, I’ve been looking at murder and gun-death statistics. Have you seen the actual murder rates of Vermont? In 2009 about 7 people were murdered, out of about 620,000. The high, was 26 in 1976.
If we look at all the various ways to die–accidents, disease, etc–we’ll see similar numbers. Yet we’re told that we need regulation–ban guns and knives! tax fast food! require seat belts and helmets!–and then all these problems will go away…
When looking at things like this, all these petty laws just look stupid.
In our rapidly becoming more socialistic society, “their stupidity” is, or will be our responsibility.
With a blindfold on, that thing looks wicked dangerous.
Assuming that there is a parent/child on the bicycle and trailer, there is a phrase that may provide guidance and perhaps comfort:
Think of it as evolution in action.
They might be smart enough to live in spite of their apparent risk.
I’m a marathoner, but I bike a bit as cross-training. I don’t bike where cars are. Some of my triathlete friends do. Two have been hit by cars within the last three years. They suffered significant injuries and took six months to a year of rehab before they could resume.
Towing children behind a bike is probably safe if you are on a bike trail. Add cars and you aren’t safe. A collision between two cars in an urban environment is unlikely to hurt either driver. Car and bike? Very bad news for the biker.
I used to be a life guard when I was in high school. The reason the low dive has a higher injury rate than the high dive is because the low dive is used more. I didn’t ever count but I’d bet that for every dive/jump off the high dive there would be 7 to 10 dives/jumps off the low dive.
It’s a population error. None of the activities are dangerous.
In a 300 million population, you have some deaths from all of them. So you have
1. Political gains to be made from declaring a public problem and taking ownership of it
2. Material for news programs (film at seven) on new dangers in your own neighborhood, brought to you from 1700 miles away where it happened.
They all fail to divide by the population to get the risk, which is always so small as not to be worth consideration.
The bike trailer one doesn’t happen to be a real attention grabber yet, but somebody will get down to it eventually.
My favorite thought experiment is imagine you’re the only person in the country, working out your daily existence and daily chores; are tornados a problem? No. They never happen. There’s no TV to bring them to you so they don’t come up. You compute the odds pretty successfully, namely you know what happens in your neighborhood and what doesn’t.
TV puts everything in your neighborhood, and so you get the odds wrong.
What about the neighborhood that the tornado happens in? That neighborhood computes the odds wrong, but nobody else does, if TV doesn’t intervene, and so the country doesn’t go crazy with public problems.
Dobermans in bike trailer
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhhardin/tags/tanjor
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