I don't see them as comparable.
I know. This is why your suggestions (while well intentioned) are quite inconsistent. Your suggestion has more to do with your perception than with reality.
Walking usually occurs on the sidewalk and there are rules to walking, following the walklights, only crossing at crosswalks, etc.
Obviously, given the huge number of deaths every year caused by pedestrians and automobiles, the rules you're referring to don't increase safety enough.
You keep coming back to 'being on a sidewalk' as though that guarentees safety somehow.
Being on a sidewalk is an
illusion of safety (one that you're clinging to rather hard in this discussion), particularly while cycling. As I've mentioned before, it's significantly safer to cycle on the road:
"Bicyclists on a sidewalk or bicycle path incur greater risk than those on the roadway (on
average 1.8 times as great), most likely because of blind conflicts at intersections. Wrongway
sidewalk bicyclists are at even greater risk, and sidewalk bicycling appears to increase
the incidence of wrong-way travel." - Risk Factors for BicycleMotor Vehicle Collisions at Intersections, Alan Wachtel and Diana Lewiston
"Bicycling on the sidewalk eliminates the relatively small danger to cyclists of crashes
with overtaking motorists, but increases the potential for more common intersection
collisions." -
http://www.bike.cornell.edu/pdfs/Sidewalk_biking_FAQ.pdf"Results to date suggest that sidewalks and multi-use trails pose the highest risk [for cyclists]" -
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-8-47I have no problem requiring walkers to be required lights if they are walking on city street not on a sidewalk. (This would be city areas and not applied to suburbs).
Hang on. Nobody (or at least very, very, very few people) goes for a walk down the middle of the street. Yet we know that pedestrians are regularly hit by cars (about 6.5 times as many pedestrians than cyclists -
http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm). Walking is obviously an inherently dangerous activity due to dangers posed by automobiles, regardless of whether someone is walking down the street or not. You have indicated that you don't believe pedestrians should be required to wear lights, despite the fact that this would make them more visible to cars (on or off the road doesn't matter, people are being hit by automobiles regularly). Can you explain this reasoning?
Is it really that crazy to have special requirements for any using the road to improve safety?
Requiring lights front/rear is about as crazy as requiring every pedestrian walking on the sidewalk to have lights front/rear. Both will likely improve safety by making people more visible to automobiles. You seem really opposed to one and pro the other though, which does seem a bit crazy.
Can I also see your stats? My guess is that more people are killed walking because there are more of them. If we had as many cyclists, my guess is that is that deaths would be higher.
"For 2010 (the most recent full year for which data is provided), the fatailty rate for cyclists was 22 per billion kilometers travelled compared to 23 per billion for pedestrians. The average from 2001 to 2010 showed the cyclist fatailty rate at 28 compared to 35 for pedestrians." -
https://fullfact.org/news/it-more-dangerous-be-pedestrian-cyclist/That posted, most countries don't collect enough data and enough depth of information on the data to conclusively show that cycling is more dangerous than walking or vice-versa.
I don't think a cop warning me to have a bike on my light scares me as much as getting hit by a car.
Fortunately, we don't have to guess what people will do based on what you say. We can look at how other regulations forced upon cyclists in the past have impacted cyclists on the road. Helmet law introduction for example has been extensively studied:
"The first year of the mandatory bicycle helmet laws in Australia saw increased helmet wearing from 31% to 75% of cyclists in Victoria and from 31% of children and 26% of adults in New South Wales (NSW) to 76% and 85%. However, the two major surveys using matched before and after samples in Melbourne and throughout NSW observed reductions in numbers of child cyclists 15 and 2.2 times greater than the increase in numbers of children wearing helmets. This suggests the greatest effect of the helmet law was not to encourage cyclists to wear helmets, but to discourage cycling. In contrast, despite increases to at least 75% helmet wearing, the proportion of head injuries in cyclists admitted or treated at hospital declined by an average of only 13%." -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8870773"The benefits of cycling, even without a helmet, have been estimated to outweigh the hazards by a factor of 20 to 1. Consequently, a helmet law, whose most notable effect was to reduce cycling, may have generated a net loss of health benefits to the nation.
Despite the risk of dying from head injury per hour being similar for unhelmeted cyclists and motor vehicle occupants, cyclists alone have been required to wear head protection."-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8870773I wear a helmet when I bike. A cop warning me to have a helmet on bike would therefore not scare me at all. It does however, reduce the number of cyclists on the road. Now, what is the impact/effect of reducing cyclists on the road?
"A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking and bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling." -
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/3/205"The more cyclists there are on the road, the safer riding becomes for all cyclists." -
http://home.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bike-ridership-safety.shtml"Bicyclist safety significantly increases when there are more bikes on the road" -
https://www.cudenvertoday.org/more-cyclists-on-road-can-mean-less-collisions/So, we know that introducing new regulations/requirements has the effect of reducing the numbers of cyclists on the road, and we know that when fewer people cycle it becomes more dangerous for cyclists. If your goal is to make things safer, it seems like your well intended suggestion is a bad one.
Like I said before, you can encourage bike safety and promote it at the same time. I fully encourage bike lane projects and people riding their bikes in a safe manner.
Not the idiots that don't have lights or reflective gear on a crowded street at night. Those are the people that make the perceived danger real. (I say all of this as someone who commutes by bike 50% of the time)
Partly agreed. Personally, I try to encourage people to ride their bikes safely by riding my bike safely. I always wear a helmet. I wear bright reflective clothing and use lights (using lights at night is the law, and it's a reasonable one) when it's dark. It makes sense to do so.
Now for the part where I'm not so much in agreement:
The idiots who cycle on the sidewalk are getting into accidents at higher rates than those of us who cycle on the road . . . and yet we never have threads where people are demanding better laws to force cyclists onto the (safer) road. Again, it comes down to (incorrect) perception of safety. I think that your jump to legislate (particularly to legislate stuff of minimal real benefit - like a requirement to run lights when it's cloudy out) is probably a step too far and has a chance to cause a net decrease rather than increase in safety for cyclists.