EDIT: Don’t bother reporting people criticizing others for not wearing a helmet. It’s not victim blaming, just like criticizing someone for not wearing a seatbelt isn’t victim blaming.
Wear your helmets people: Of course nobody deserves to get hit by a car but the reality is people are getting hit by cars.
The reporting of ebike news articles should always be treated with a healthy grain of salt, for there is a lot of implicit bias that slips in. Even this fairly tame headline by NPR is falling into the trap, teetering on the suggestion that helmets are the sole preventative measure for avoiding head injuries.
The study – not very long to read; mostly has tables of data – details the rate of injuries observed in emergency rooms between 2017 and 2022, showing some monumental increases in that time period, split out by age, sex, hospital type, injury type, and helmet use.
What’s not here – as the study admits – is the nature of the collision, which is rather important because grievous head injuries involve an impact with someone or something else. There is a substantial difference in how public policy would address head injuries involving: 1) solo bicyclist rider error, 2) stationary motor vehicles, 3) moving motor vehicles, 4) pedestrians, 5) collision with other bicyclists, or 6) stationary object collisions.
At best, this study tells us that bicycle collisions are up, but not the flip side: are pedestrian collisions up? Motor vehicle collisions up? More collisions with stationary objects? We simply don’t know.
And in the absence of data collection to even attempt to answer that question, the wrong conclusion is often drawn: that ebikes are inherently more dangerous, which draws further legislative action by confused towns and cities, which eventually prove futile because they’re not following any data.
There is reason to believe that these increasing rates of collisions are due in part to popularity of ebikes – as the NPR as article mentions – but in larger part by motor vehicles.
A Google Search for “ebike collision causes” sadly turns up mostly ads for lawyers, but I did find this 2017 study of Corvallis, OR data on all bicyclist collisions. Table 2 shows that the top cause is “motorist fails to yield while turning” at 42%. This study notes that their data did not identify ebike vs acoustic bike, but it’s hard to see how that would make a difference if it’s an error by the motor vehicle driver. The next three causes are faults of the driver as well.
Going down that table, the non-zero collisions attributable to bicyclist behavior are: running red lights, going the wrong way, not yielding while turning, no lights, darting into the road, lane changes, and intoxication. None of those, except maybe that an ebike can dart into the road quicker, are substantially amplified by an ebike compared to an acoustic bike.
IMO, the trend of increasing ebike head injuries is from: 1) motor vehicle collisions where the auto driver is at fault, and 2) insufficient infrastructure to separate bicyclists from pedestrians. Proper infra means bikes and pedestrians are protected from cars, and pedestrian and bike flows are separated.
Additionally with ebikes being so popular, more time on bikes with more people on bikes equals an increase in opportunities for accidents. Not to mention increase range for many people therefore more likely to find people bicycling where they were less likely to be before.
While I love the use of acoustic to describe non-powered bicycles, does no-one but me just call them pushbikes?
Not in the US wr don’t. Pushbike is weird to me anyway, it sounds like it should be used for a bike without pedals. And also we already have a word for a non-powered bicycle. It’s bicycle.
Except people will bend over backwards to put a word in front of bicycle to denote that it is not electric
lemmy.ca/post/11038826
I never heard the term pushbike until I moved to the UK.
Crikey, you’ve discovered my Aussie identity
Here in California, if you said pushbike, this is what many people might envision: a two-wheel craft with a floorboard like a scooter, and the handlebars and wheels of a bicycle, but with no gears or chains. To be ridden by pushing off the ground and gliding for a distance.
But pedalbike here would indeed refer to a bicycle, albeit maybe with a connotation of a child’s bicycle.
that is incorrect analisys. Ebikes are typically faster and that is a factor in head injuries. Bike helmets do little in car crashes, but they are very good when you fall.
Speed does not – in and of itself – somehow create more collisions. What makes a collision is a difference of relative speed.
From my list earlier, absolute speed would tend to exacerbate scenarios 1, 2, 4, and 6. But would make little difference to scenario 3, and scenario 5 would depend on the speeds of other bicyclists. My analysis points out that if scenario 3 is what has been drastically increasing in the past decade – which is corroborated by the Oregon study linked earlier – then no, speed is pretty much irrelevant. Being struck by a motor vehicle driver making a turn is going to be bad, no matter what speed the bicycle, ebike, or motorcycle was going.
What I cannot show – nor can anyone show otherwise – is the prevalence of those scenarios in proportion to overall collisions. We simply have insufficient data, which should be a call to action for better information from collision investigations.
You might be missing practical experience of falling off a bike. Happened to me. Speed makes a difference in any situation where the bike falls over or the rider falls off the bike. why? because speed is a major source of kinetic energy when colliding with the ground (the other source is the difference in height). You listed 6 different possible causes for falling off a bike, and all of them result in more energetic falls if the bike is going fast.
Are we concerned about an initial impact, the probable falling-off that occurs afterwards, or both? I personally care mostly about the reasons for initial impacts because without colliding with anything, falling off a bike becomes much less frequent and less severe.
Even the circumstance of falling off a bike without a collision with anything else is improved for everyone by good infrastructure: grass-lined paths, telephone poles placed far away, a buffer between oncoming bike path lanes, full separatiom from cars, etc… All those infrastructure changes benefit everyone, irrespective of whether a particular rider falls while wearing a helmet or not.
This fixation on helmets is a case of missing the forest for the trees.
if you change the perspective like that, yeah, safer bike infrastructure is very important.
But again, just because helmets are not useful in one situation does not mean that they are worthless in all. They are very helpful in a subset of situations and should be worn for those situations.
Who was arguing that helmets are worthless? I don’t see that thread.