Coroner blames headphones

[wearwell]

Very odd all these doubters who think you don't need to hear what's going on around you.

Try riding with ear plugs, on a busy road - you will soon get the idea.

I have another question (which you will no doubt consider stupid): If you cannot (as you say and I agree) determine where a vehicle is from the sound, are you not better off just looking (in which case the sound is irrelevant)?

Yes a stupid question. Obviously, having heard an approaching vehicle, you will want to know from which direction it is coming and will have a look around, if you can't already see it.
The point is - if your hearing is impaired you may not hear it, as well as not seeing it.

In point of fact good hearing is also directional - you get a good idea about the direction of the source, naturally. The ears are cleverer than they look.
When your hearing goes, even with hearing aids, this directionality is lost.

[landsurfer]

I spent the first 23 years of my adult life working in an extremely high noise environment.
Ear plugs where worn under hard shell ear defenders.
Every day .. and night .. was spent in a multi vehicle environment, where being hit by one of the vehicles was the lest injurious option.
You learnt to rely on training and spatial awareness to stay safe, you where trained to operate safely in an environment where the noise was all around you, to the point where it was a blanket over everything.
And we worked safely, hugely complex machines, munitions, support equipment.

As i think about my previous posts on this subject i have to say that we where efficient and safe ....

So the lack of hearing had very little effect on our safety.

But the noise was not distracting, it was not music, pleasant, engaging, it was just noise.
.....

[Bez]

We seem to be bogged down in the idea that using headphones completely blocks sound. For some, that's pretty much true. For others, it's certainly not.

And we still seem to be discussing reduced auditory facility when the coroner in this case never mentioned it, he speculated in a quadruply-qualified statement as to the possibility of distraction. Remember that the lorry was not behind the victim, it was in front: it would have been visible. This seems from all the evidence not to be a failure to detect the lorry but—for whatever reason—a failure to correctly judge the movement of it and/or of the victim's own vehicle.

And yes, I realise that doesn't mean that any discussion of reduced auditory facility, but here's the thing: this is just another incident where there is no evidence that reduced auditory facility contributed in any way. Where are the incidents where there is?

[wearwell]

..
So the lack of hearing had very little effect on our safety......
.....

But the roads are an entirely different environment.
The only serious threat to a cyclist's safety is other vehicles.
Vehicles are also the only source of noise on a typical road.
Hence the noise is closely associated with the hazard.
To hear the noise is to be aware of the hazard.
To not hear the noise is to be unaware of the hazard if it also happens to be out of sight.

I don't mind wasting my evening spelling out these glaringly obvious facts - it's in a good cause!
Who knows - our dead cyclist might have been reading baloney about it being safe to use ear phones.

[landsurfer]

Well you could go somewhere else ... if this site is wasting your time ... feel free..
Do something positive with your life ...

You "cherry picked " that post well ....

[meic]

Riding with headphones on doesnt give you licence to ride on to a traffic roundabout without looking.

There are three things that are wrong with the "earphones are insane" THEORY which are shown through practice.

People can actually still hear quite well with headphones on, I can pick out motorvehicles probably half a mile away, if they are accelerating. I get no more surprises wearing than without.

The music does not remove your mental faculties, I could perform any cycling task just as well with or without headphones on. If it got a bit taxing, the one telling thing would be that I could not tell you which songs had been played because it would have been totally ignored by a brain concentrating.
Just like when people are driving their car of HGV.

That the information provided through hearing would actually improve your safety.
If it is something from behind and I am trusting them to pass me, I am not going to deviate from my path because I am aware of their presence. If I was going to deviate, I would look first.
If it is from infront, then I use hearing to tell me that things are clear for further than I can see, if I cant hear (on my motorcycle or car) then I have to believe that there is always a vehicle about to burst into view at the extent of where I can see, so I have to progress more slowly because of this.

Hearing does enable me to stop way before a bend etc when I hear a vehicle coming, so that we dont meet actually on it. If somebody was in that position and had earphones that prevented them hearing this, do you know what? They would lower them, either physically or audibly, to have a listen.

[Bez]

If somebody was in that position and had earphones that prevented them hearing this, do you know what? They would lower them, either physically or audibly, to have a listen.

That seems a huge assumption and, to my mind, a rather unrealistic one.

[meic]

You mean that you wouldnt do that?
Next thing you will be telling me that motorists dont roll down their windows when approaching blind bends.

I do actually have a very similar decision to make on a regular basis because I am frequently going downhill on such lanes fast enough for wind noise to drown everything out. I do the trick of turning my head to remove the wind noise to get a listen "around the corner" routinely in such situations.

That doesnt stop me from going slow enough to stop if something appears around the bend but if I hear them I can be slow enough to cope with their stupidity.

[mjr]

Perhaps the most ridiculous post I've ever read on here.

Why? Do you think wind rushing over thick straps is always silent?

Thick straps ...are you being serious? A properly fitted helmet will have close fitting straps...they are certainly not thick and they don't contribute enough wind noise to block out traffic noise...pathetic excuse to divert a thread from the real subject in question.

I thought this place was the last bastion of sanity, clearly efforts are being made to change this.

So how do you explain the market for products like cat ears, then?

This is one of the last bastions of sanity, where such statements of the bleeding obvious don't get shouted down or moderated out immediately for questioning the almighty Helmut.

[pwa]

I spent the first 23 years of my adult life working in an extremely high noise environment.
Ear plugs where worn under hard shell ear defenders.
Every day .. and night .. was spent in a multi vehicle environment, where being hit by one of the vehicles was the lest injurious option.
You learnt to rely on training and spatial awareness to stay safe, you where trained to operate safely in an environment where the noise was all around you, to the point where it was a blanket over everything.
And we worked safely, hugely complex machines, munitions, support equipment.

As i think about my previous posts on this subject i have to say that we where efficient and safe ....

So the lack of hearing had very little effect on our safety.

But the noise was not distracting, it was not music, pleasant, engaging, it was just noise.
.....

Curiously, my own experience at work led me to the opposite conclusion. Some years ago I led a team of people doing landscaping and grounds maintenance jobs. One of our regular tasks in the milder months was mowing, strimming and trimming hedges around the grounds at my employer's base, an iron works dating from the 1830s. I did some of the physical work myself, but I also supervised and made sure Health and Safety was kept at the top of everyone's list of priorities. I was instructed by my line manager that the people using the Honda lawnmowers should be using ear defenders as a precaution. The mowers were not noisy enough to make that a necessity, but it was thought wise to err on the safe side. But I observed that occasionally the operators, wearing ear defenders, would step off the kerb and onto the driveway without noticing passing vehicles. I concluded that the ear defenders were actually putting people at more risk, so I changed the way we did things so that they were not worn when mowing adjacent to the drive. It seemed to work.

[wearwell]

Well yes. If noise is a cue to a possible hazard you need to be able to hear it, but this could be a trade-off against ear protection in a very noisy environment.

[pwa]

Well yes. If noise is a cue to a possible hazard you need to be able to hear it, but this could be a trade-off against ear protection in a very noisy environment.

Of course. With the mowers there was no real worry. They were not noisy enough to do harm. The use of ear defenders was optional and a bit OTT. With the much noisier strimmers the ear defenders were essential. So we ditched ear defenders for mower operators working close to traffic.

[reohn2]

The reason I don't use earphones when cycling is
a)because I'm acutely aware of being at the bottom of the food chain,vulnerable,and therefore feel I need all my faculties,simply because some nutters in motors simply don't pay attention to their driving,especially in the vicinity of vulnerable road users such as cyclists.A small minority even choosing to intimidate cyclists.And the problem is I can't tell the good guys from the idiots.
b)I cycle for pleasure -which if I'm honesty is diminishing as traffic increases and driving standards sink- so I when I'm cycling I'm cycling and nothing else.

I take Meic's point that doesn't find any conflict between wearing earphones/listening to music and cycling and I suspect many won't,but that's not to say many do.

[tykeboy2003]

And as we know, speculation from someone with a heck of a lot of weight behind them and said in the way it has (& all too often is) is then taken as being an actuality. The evidence for this is absurdly abundant and I think it's irresponsible of the coroner personally

Totally agree mate, the coroner has done a huge disservice to the cycling community and given ignorant motorists another reason to criticise and abuse cyclists. Is there a professional body that reviews such things and can rebuke coroners?

[pwa]

And as we know, speculation from someone with a heck of a lot of weight behind them and said in the way it has (& all too often is) is then taken as being an actuality. The evidence for this is absurdly abundant and I think it's irresponsible of the coroner personally

Totally agree mate, the coroner has done a huge disservice to the cycling community and given ignorant motorists another reason to criticise and abuse cyclists. Is there a professional body that reviews such things and can rebuke coroners?

Are coroners not supposed to mention things that might have contributed to a death? I did think that was part of what they were supposed to do.