Accident on Vanderbilt

oh my stomach...i see this happening in my head every day i ride vanderbilt. it's a treacherous road and nothing but morons racing the lights...in their supped up crappy hondas and crotch rockets. i hate people...i love bikes.

hope she is ok.

Just got an anonymous tip. The woman is doing fine. The streets are still unsafe for bikers, though.

cool thanks. I can handle $50 Did they chase you in a cruiser?

Subject: Sidewalk riding

As a pedestrian, I have to say, although I understand your fear of the open streets, I can't stand it when people ride on the sidewalks. Especially when they do it without helmets, which, to me always signifies (rightly or wrongly) that they had no intention of even trying the streets.

I'm all for more bike lanes, strict enforcement of helmet laws (there is a helmet law isn't there?) and strict enforcement of no-cell-phones-while-driving rules.

It makes me bananas the number of people I see driving while holding a cell phone and the people I see riding bikes without helmets.

Subject: cell phone road paste

Did she have a helmet on?

Please, don't you dare blame the bikers. If she gets hit by an errant car or truck the fact that she had a skirt on rather than, what, leather chaps? Snowsuit? will make no freaking difference whatsoever. So she was talking on her phone? Cars, beware! Come on!

And a helmet wouldn't have helped *at all* if she were crushed under a truck. Jeez.

There are too many cars/trucks and not nearly enough room on the roads for bikers. Period.

I think dave was just saying that bikers should take the necessary safety precautions and I agree.

sje wrote: And a helmet wouldn't have helped *at all* if she were crushed under a truck. Jeez.

There are too many cars/trucks and not nearly enough room on the roads for bikers. Period.

i couldnt have said it better myself.

and all this "helmet! helmet!" bullshit is tangential....

you may or may not know that the NTSB released a study which determined that your typical "glorified coffee-cup" styrofoam bicycle helmet is only useful in preventing minor bumps and abrasions stemming from a collision/fall of TEN mph or under... and thats great for 99% of americans... who are riding in subdivisions, parks, their driveway, whatever.

but its not so simple in nyc... where cyclists are considered second-class by our car-centric road culture. the odds of getting hit at above 10 mph are, well, 100% unless youre lucky enough to get tapped by a car waiting at a light or something.

hell, i have a friend who spent three days in the hospital with a concussion because a car backed into a parking spot that he was standing in, clipping into he and his bike. the ~5 mph collision was enough to split his helmet...

my point? dont proselytize us about helmets. i know your argument is well-intentioned, and i can appreciate that... head-protection is nice and that youre only saying it for our own good... but telling nyc cyclists not to forget their helmet is tantamount to your mom telling you not to go in swimming until an hour after you eat... well intentioned but largely not-very-helpful advice.

better advice would include activisim or at least being more visible as you legally bike around hte neighborhood. when cyclists are out in numbers, riding legally and being nice, the yshow the rest of the people on teh road whats up, raise awareness, and hopefully lead to the sort of increase in visibility that results in fewer people getting clipped by drivers who are never charged with anything, claiming they "didn't see" teh cyclist.

and, no, there is no helmet law in nyc for adult cyclists cycling on city streets.

my advice: if you feel like cycling with a helmet, or like thinking that youre doing much good covering your head with some flimsy styrofoam, at least get a bmx/skater helmet... you know, the kind that are covered in a thick layer of high-impact plastic over the styrofoam. these crack less easily than your typical cycling helmet, and can withstand impacts up to 25 mph... still bad odds, but 2.5 times better than the alternative.

cycling is dangerous. any of us who do it on a non-recreational daily basis know the risks, accept them, and dont need to get preached at about helmets.

...and by all means, for those of you whining about cyclists on cells or whatnot, man, i could tell you 500000000 stories of stupid motorists for every one stupid cyclist story

ana.log wrote: [i think the point is just that responsibility exists on both sides. you can't be reckless on your bike and expect the world to adapt around you.

totally!

the problem is, when youre reckless on your bike, you might dent/scratch someone's paintjob, at worst.

when a car is reckless, people die.

bear in mind that most of my contributions to this thread are colored by feeling like a second-class citizen when i ride.

i particularly love it when cars honk at you and yell at you to get on the sidewalk... that one always cracks me up :roll:

When I see people on bikes talking on their phones I'm more concerned about them then the harm they might cause to someone else. That said, I was hit my a bike messenger on a cell once and it fricking hurt.

I've been hit twice by bicyclists going the wrong way against the light--once two days before I gave birth. Luckily both times I escaped without major injury, but had there been a split second of difference I or the bike rider would have certainly sustained major injuries. I've been almost hit countless times.

Obviously the cars are a greater danger. Obviously. But as someone above stated, the bicyclists have to respect the road, too. I now (thanks to this thread) understand more why bicyclists ride on the sidewalk, but it still angers and upsets me when I'm walking with my toddler and suddenly a bike whizzes by and barely misses us.

rhodamine wrote: hell, i have a friend who spent three days in the hospital with a concussion because a car backed into a parking spot that he was standing in, clipping into he and his bike. the ~5 mph collision was enough to split his helmet...

The helmet did exactly what it was supposed to do. By breaking, it absorbed a lot of the impact. You may be interested to note that there is something of an uproar going on right now in the motorcycling world about Snell ratings on helmets. Snell is a private rating that is considered the gold standard for helmets. One of the tests that it takes to get Snell certification is that the helmet must survive TWO high joul impacts with a steel ball bearing in the same spot. This of course leads to highly impact resistant shells on the helmets.

Studies of accidents have shown that this type of impact almost never happens. Usually the rider gets binged once hard, then slides. And this is for motorcycles, where the rider is often moving at high speeds.

It turns out that having a helmet that is so hard doesn't always help the rider, as the helmet survives the initial impact, translating a lot of the force directly into the head of the rider where it sloshes their brain around. Think of a boxer getting hit hard. Not a lot of abrasion or incursion, but it scrambles your brain.

So now the Snell rating is being questioned as to whether or not it really is the best way to test helmets. So in short, just because a helmet is "hard" doesn't mean it will protect your head better. When I was little we all had hard plastic bike helmets. As the technology changed so did the helmets, and there is a reason for that.

Adults can make their own decisions about what to wear or not, but to say a helmet won't do much good because it cracks on impact is incorrect.