Dr. Chris Cavacuiti, a Toronto physician who cycles competitively, started doing some research into how most bike-versus-car collisions happen while recovering from a nasty bike-versus-car collision. His findings:
While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 percent of bike-car accidents in this study.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to me, or probably anyone else who’s ever been a cyclist, but I’m glad someone bothered to do the research!
file under: very important things for proving me right in arguments
it fucking shits me when people say “yeah yeah you’re saving the planet but I see you cyclists IGNORING the ROAD RULES ALL THE TIME what about some mutual respect” etc etc etc. the fact is that following the road rules to the letter can actually be really unsafe, because roads are not made with an eye to cyclists and motorists do not respect cyclists. like — cars will pretty much never give right of way to a bike, so if you’re in a busy intersection and you want to turn it’s almost always safer to do it before the lights go green. or they’ll try and shove you into a gutter that’s too cobbled to ride on, or push you into a 5cm gap between traffic and parked cars, or expect you to overtake over tram tracks. (tram tracks in Melbourne are exactly the right width to catch most bike tyres, so it’s incredibly dangerous to ride over them unless you’re at like a 90 degree angle.) so you have to ride on the pavement for a few metres until traffic calms down.
I just wish people would ride a bike on the road at rush hour before they spouted off about entitled cyclists. seriously, it feels like everyone is trying to kill you.
(Source: tanacetum-vulgare, via upmountains)
