Comments on: Collecting bike statistics

By: .

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:36:46 +0000

Race: Yogurt (bicycle) versus Gasoline (motorcycle) in NYC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwT2k9tE_SE&feature=play er_embedded

By: Milan

Milan — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:59:28 +0000

Speaking of bike-riding robots: Joules robot rides shotgun, helps pedal on two-person bicycle.

By: Milan

Milan — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:59:20 +0000

Apparently, the Tesla Model S has a drag coefficient of around 0.27. Halfway through this video there is some explanation of why. For instance, the flat bottom.

By: .

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:08:44 +0000

That there was a conflict between motordom and traditional street users should come as no surprise. According to the Millennial Edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States, between 1909 and 1923, the number of automobiles registered in the U.S. grew by a factor of 43. The same source indicates that the number of traffic fatalities grew by a factor of 16 over the same period. Initially, when pedestrians were killed by motorists those deaths were cast as murder. The presumption was that the child or adult walking in the street had the right to be there; the motorcar was the trespasser. Moreover, the “overwhelming majority” (p. 29) of accident victims were children and a large proportion of the rest were young women. Cities throughout the country began erecting monuments to memorialize the deaths of innocent children. Norton argues that the deaths of so many women and children gave the traffic safety movement a “feminine” face. Evidence for this can be seen in the many posters showing mothers grieving over children lost to automobile accidents.

By: .

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:07:59 +0000

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution.

Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users–pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”–a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.

By: Milan

Milan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:06:22 +0000

In Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City it is argued that the large number of child fatalaties associated with cars was one of their biggest early barriers to adoption. In response, car companies invented the crime of jaywalking, established urban playgrounds as a way to help make roads exclusively for cars, and effectively shifted the blame for many child deaths to carelessness on the part of the child, rather than the fundamental dangerousness of cars.

For quite a while, cities were erecting large concrete monuments engraved with the names of children ‘murdered’ by motorists.

By: Tristan

Tristan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:00:38 +0000

The claims are corroborated by this site: http://www.whatstherush.ca/\

The site, however, provides no links to statistics.

By: Milan

Milan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:13:21 +0000

Do you have some actual sourced stats? I don’t doubt that this could be true, but it would be nice to have some data to examine.

By: Tristan

Tristan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:57:59 +0000

Pedestrians – a child hit by a car at 30km/h is something like 15% likely to be killed, compared to 80% likely at 50km/h.

By: Milan

Milan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:31:43 +0000

One issue with the combination of drag coefficient and area (as mentioned by Tristan, but originally eaten by the spam filters - one risk of using fake email addresses) is that it is far more dynamic for a bicycle than for a car. Things like posture and cadence have an effect, as mentioned earlier. A car, by contrast, presents pretty much the same profile to the air at all times.

By: Milan

Milan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:38:20 +0000

That seems like a bit of a misleading way of describing the study, though. Based on the rural and urban tables, it seems the speed increases increased the number of fatal accidents (not deaths) on rural roads by 15-16%. On urban roads, it was about 37%. I doubt people increased their speeds to 75 mph (120 km/h) on the urban roads where most of the extra deaths arose. I wonder how much the limits rose by in urban areas.

By: Milan

Milan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:34:56 +0000

This page seems to refer to the study you linked: "A recent study examined the impact of higher travel speeds on US rural interstates after the repeal in November 1995 of the national speed limit. Researchers found states that had increased their speed limits to 75 mph (120 km/h) experienced a shocking 38 per cent increase in deaths per million vehicle miles than expected, compared to deaths in those states that did not change their speed limits. States that increased speed limits to 70 mph (112 km/h) showed a 35 per cent increase in fatalities."