fluffybunnyuk wrote:No i'm saying the biggest risk to a cyclist of an incident regardless of the magnitude is human error, followed by equipment malfunction.
Incident of what? Danger is defined by some as "the condition of being susceptible to harm or injury" (source: wordnet) so can we restrict this to injurious incidents?
We really need to stop with the paranoia about being hit by a car. Cycling is a relatively safe activity.
Yes, it's relatively safe and has many benefits. However, the impact of being hit by a car can be so much higher (far more than your 25 times the impact of making an incorrect decision and 8-9 times of having an equipment failure) that what you're insulting as paranoia seems like a reasonable risk assessment to me! That sort of thing is why I sometimes yield at junctions where I should have priority, when I decide that a motorist about to make a conflicting movement probably hasn't seen me.
... However just to check this I will record tomorrow on a cycle into london, and back how many cases of human error i see by a cyclist, how many of equipment malfunction, and how many cyclists i see being hit by a car. If the posts on here by others are to be believed I should see carnage on the road with cars hitting cyclists more than every 10minutes. I think that scenario unlikely, but good data being the source of all hypothesis means I should check anyway.
Recording that will give you estimates of the relative probabilities, not contributions to risk. Who here is saying you should see cars hitting cyclists more than every 10minutes? I think most people seem to be saying it's very improbable but can be high impact.
I'm quite sure that your human error estimate will be at least 90% of what you see, but in most cases, they will be harmless and in most of the rest, they will have little impact.
That brings me to the probability problem with that risk calculation earlier: just because you observed no cars hitting you in a year, you evaluated it as if it were impossible (zero probability), which it obviously isn't.
I hesitate to mention this, but I did get a first class degree in this sort of stuff, did postgraduate study, taught it in a uni and a college and still have some textbooks handy. I mess up sometimes but I did know it once...