Cycling UK Forum

Again, you are right, statistics can be complex, contradictory and hard to interpret. The problem with relying on personal experience, though, is that in the end that is statistical too - how many accidents in how many rides? Since obviously one person's experience may be unusually lucky, or unfortunate, you need to look at more than one - and when you start adding up all the experiences with two inches of polystyrene, the numbers of lives saved become even more complex, contradictory and hard to interpret than the statistics we started with

I'm no expert but try Chris Juden's page on this for starters.

No, I completely understand. It's just that you can't get away from the following:

1. There aren't enough potential injuries to go around for all this injury-saving that goes on

2. There is some, though far from conclusive, evidence that helmets increase risk

3. Overall, we have to keep it in perspective - cycling is a negative-risk activity, i.e. it substantially increases your life expectancy, with or without a helmet

But you wouldn't think so to read the latter part of this thread

andwags - how definitely, given the statistics?

willie_gunn - I agree 100% - it just seems worth investigating what I have to do in order most to minimise the risk, rather than assuming...

Most of what you need should be on the CTC site. I'm no expert, but as I read it the answer to your first question is no. I believe that the answer to your second is yes, but others will know more.

What I can say is that the JTek ShiftMate mentioned (with link) at the end of that article works flawlessly. I am using it with Shimergo, but according to the JTek site you can also use it to mix and match Campag 9 and 10. There's a UK importer on the JTek site.

LmP is correct except that it is advice not legislation.

What's hard to understand is the number of drivers who park on the pavement when parking on the road would not cause an obstruction.

As a teenager I went into the shops after putting a cheap combination lock on my bike. I came out and rode off, forgetting the lock, which duly broke without affecting my ride in any way.

I recommend buying locks stronger than that one.

And actually of course 63mph is 10% over.

The important things in speeding (braking distance, how "hard" you hit something) depend on the square of your speed.

63^2/60^2 = 1.1025 or 10.25% over the limit.

Our church also runs a computer club intended to allow beginners to pick up basic skills, so it's definitely worth looking around.

My favourite is "This door is alarmed". Always makes me want to write underneath "So what? Mine is terrified."

What about the effect on the rider's body? Four rings would mean feet wider apart. As I understand it effort is going into reducing this "Q factor", not increasing it, because it is broadly undesirable. There must be some here who know more than me about biomechanics.

reohn2 wrote:Why isn't reversing onto a mainroad punishable with points on the driving licence?????????
They should be made to reverse in!!!!!!!!!

It's not punishable with points but it is in the Highway Code.

I understand the principle of feedback, although I couldn't have written down the equation. I think that's more about my memory than about physics vs engineering...

I am not sure however that any of this addresses the issue of whether there is actually no overall benefit - ie how big is the feedback fraction and are we near the threshold. It seems to me that there is no particular reason to believe that measures cannot be effective.

I argued previously that seat belts are effective (although they have side-effects). Some measures are counter-productive (one Scandinavian study showed this for road-side marker posts, because drivers who could see where the road was went faster and hit more animals). Other measures are marginal.

I have not seen evidence to support the argument that ineffectiveness is inherent to safety measures, as opposed to a feature of specific measures. The consequence of accepting such an argument would appear to be a laissez-faire attitude that would be quite alarming.

Fonant - thanks for the clarification.

I'm rather tempted to let it rest at this point. I have a strong feeling of having bored everyone else to tears We seem to be left only with a few sceptics here and all the advocates have gone away. That's never quite happened before.