{"id":4931,"date":"2009-06-16T07:25:24","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T12:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4931"},"modified":"2009-06-16T07:27:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T12:27:07","slug":"strength-in-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4931","title":{"rendered":"Strength In Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it.<\/p>\n

Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby:<\/a><\/p>\n

…as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike injuries and fatalities has dropped.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That means the rate of accidents has dropped from roughly 4,000 annual casualties per 80,000 daily riders to well under 3,000 per 160,000 riders \u2014 about a three-fold improvement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which I’d suspected would happen, but this is the first empirical evidence I’ve seen.\u00a0 It’d be even more interesting to break that into accidents per rider mile – since I’d suspect as the number of bikers doubles due to gas prices, the lengths of their trips do as well.<\/p>\n

The most interesting thing to look at of all, though?\u00a0 I started looking at this a few weeks ago, but haven’t had time to follow through:\u00a0 Compare the number of person\/years lost to bike fatalities to the number of person-years gained by previous non-riders getting into better shape from the exercise they get from biking.<\/p>\n

Example:\u00a0 Say in a typical year (1992, in this case) 459 cyclists above the age of 20 died in bike\/vehicle accidents (we’ll discount children, since they’re not likely to be commuting or biking for fitness).<\/p>\n

Let’s break ’em down by age group:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
20-29<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
30-39<\/td>\n117<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
40-49<\/td>\n83<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
50-59<\/td>\n58<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
60-up<\/td>\n93<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Now, let’s figure how much life expectancy was lost (taking the US average life expectancy of 78 years\u00a0<\/a> and the average age in each bracket (let’s assume that the years spread evenly in each age bracket; there’ll be as many below the midrange of each bracket as above it) to figure the total person\/years lost.<\/p>\n

The result?\u00a0 Bike accidents claim 15174.4 person\/years (using the figures above).\u00a0 A ghastly toll?\u00a0 Certainly.<\/p>\n

But what do we gain from having thousands more people being in better – much better – physical condition?\u00a0 Say, having a bunch of formerly-sedentary mid-forty-something suddenly getting into the best shape of their lives?\u00a0 Or a bunch of twentysomethings go through <\/em>their lives never falling out of shape in the first place, since biking is, along with swimming, the the most sustainable form of exercise (and a lot <\/em>less likely to bore you to death than swimming)<\/p>\n

How many person-years do we gain?<\/p>\n

Let’s extrapolate from New Yorks’ numbers: growing from 80,000 to 160,000 bikers out of a population of 12,000,000 extrapolates a rise from 2 million to 4 million bikers nationwide; let’s arbitrarily lop those numbers in half, just to be very (what else) conservative and allow for those who live where biking just isn’t tenable (say, people who commute 60 miles to work, or farmers, the handicapped, everyone), and say that the American recreational, fitness and\/or commuting biking population has risen from 1 to 2 million in recent years.<\/p>\n

Thirty minutes of (aerobic) exercise a day adds four years to life expectancy<\/a> compared to sedentary people.<\/p>\n

So let’s say that one percent of those two million bikers rides half an hour a day (which, by the way, I do): it’s a hopelessly-low 20,000 – which translates to 80,000 person\/years of life expectancy added.\u00a0 Ten percent (200,000 daily riders, 800,000 person\/years) seems on the high side of plausible; let’s split the difference, say 100,000 Americans, like myself, ride at least five days a week for at least half an hour a day.\u00a0 That’s 400,000 person\/years added to life expectancy (using a formula that fudges sharply toward the conservative),<\/p>\n

But even if you take the lowest feasible figures it’s a 6-1 skunking: Biking saves 80,000 person\/years to 15,000 lost to accidents, even if we take comically-low numbers, 30-or-more to one otherwise.<\/p>\n

Some biking critics say (chant, really, more as an autonomic response than a considered position) that biking is a “dangerous hobby”.\u00a0 But when you look at actual numbers, it seems that not <\/em>biking is the risky frippery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it. Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby: …as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}