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Adds to the list of reasons why not to cycle which includes erectile dysfunction from pinched pudendal nerve, and traffic accidents where you die and the car ma
by SnowHill9902 4y ago
Adds to the list of reasons why not to cycle which includes erectile dysfunction from pinched pudendal nerve, and traffic accidents where you die and the car may not even notice.
- pdxandi 4y agoThere are saddles you can buy to help with pinching. I personally use the ISM Adamo.
- asdff 4y agoYou aren't going to pinch a nerve from riding the bike 30 mins to work or the store, especially considering with commuting biking you are standing up off the pedals stopped pretty frequently. Traffic accidents sure are bad but you can identify safe routes. For example I avoid arterials and opt for those 25mph residential roads that run parallel, and those are extremely safe. The number of cyclists that have died last year in my city of some 4 million people is also about a dozen people, and its not clear whether confounding factors were involved (e.g. alcohol or drugs or lack of helmet or nonddevensive/lack of awareness biking given the not so small homeless population that rides bikes in varying states of sobriety in my city).
- andbberger 4y agoare you the ghost of john forester or what? blaming cycling fatalities on a mythical vilified population of homeless cyclists who you assume to not be sober instead of the traffic engineers who designed your city is both incredibly misguided and prejudiced. shame on you.
- asdff 4y agoI paint a hypothetically plausible situation that could explain a lot of the incidents given what I see play out on the road surface in my city, I don't blame anyone, I just describe how there could be plenty of confounding factors that lead to a dangerous situation on the road. The numbers at the end of the day are so low. 10 per 4 million people a year does not indicate to me a trend one way or another in terms of safety to me. Again, imagine another hypothetical, maybe just some barhopping dudebros renting lime bikes while blackout drunk then getting into some tragic accident, that could throw the numbers up to 15 that year just from that one freak accident. People might go "wow deaths are up 50% this year" and start all sorts of discussions from that fact, but really this hypothetical increase could be well within the yearly variance of this metric and may not actually be a real trend. Life is bayesian.
- andbberger 4y agothe fundamental problem with your position is in pinning the culpability on cyclists. cyclists and pedestrians don't kill cyclists, cars do. and by extension traffic engineers.
- asdff 4y agoI as a cyclist know how dangerous it is on the road when you do something irregular. At the end of the day human reaction time is what it is, the laws of physics are what they are, and doing something reckless on a 45mph road is going to lead to your death pretty easily on a bike. Defensive driving courses for example are effective because if you start practicing defensive driving, your odds of even being in a situation that might result in an accident go way down. Biking is the same way. No one is taught how to ride a bike on the road, unlike cars where you need to pass an exam with a government official sitting in the car showing you aren't wholly incompetent. People with bikes just go out and do it. That's why I see people biking the wrong way on major arterials all the time, biking at night without any lights, ignoring intersections, and generally not looking around, and people who have lights and mirrors and helmets are much more rare. The people who know how to take a dutch left turn on a bike are also unicorns, I've never see anyone else do it. As a cyclist I see car traffic as like a constant source of death, like a rushing river leading into a waterfall, or a big grizzly bear. It must be treated with care, but with sufficient knowledge it can be made to be nearly totally safe. When I see statistics like 10 deaths a year in a city of 4 million, of course I will assume that a lot of that has to do with the fact that most bike riders have zero education on using the road with a bike and there was probably some recklessness involved with where they were choosing to ride a bike, and that the cases e.g. of people getting killed while riding in a bike lane or on a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph are so exceedingly rare in comparison that I may as well not worry about them personally ever happening to me, much like I ignore the low scale risk of death with just about anything one does in life.
- andbberger 4y agoyou are the ghost of john forester. i don't have much else to say other than that you're wrong and also in a morally compromised position. knowledge can't save you from the rushing river of 2 ton deathmobiles, traffic engineering (ie dutch cycling infrastructure) can.
- carlineng 4y agoGood thing there is an enormous list of reasons to cycle that far outweigh the downsides. Shermer's Neck is a condition that impacts a very small percentage of cyclists, and only those who choose to participate in the most extreme of events like Race Across America or Paris-Brest-Paris.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoI don’t know. I’d much rather walk or run. At least from a paleo argument it’s a better option.
- cycomanic 4y agoWhat is a paleo argument?
- SnowHill9902 4y agoGiven a list of options of ways to achieve a goal, prefer the one which would have been most natural to a human throughout the last 100,000 years except for the last 100. Need to eat 3,000 kcal? Beef and vegetables would be more natural than a Big Mac. Need to go somewhere 3 km away? Waking or jogging would be more natural than cycling or using the car.
- californical 4y agoNeed medicine? Try bloodletting! In all seriousness though, it’s good to keep in mind human history and what’s natural, but unless you’re walking around barefoot on dirt paths, fasting for days at a time, and drinking unfiltered water from mountain streams, it seems kinda silly to arbitrarily draw the line there. There are plenty of modern things that work really well for humans, that may not have been natural 10,000 years ago
- SnowHill9902 4y agoThe paleo argument is not absolute, of course. It’s just a guideline for deciding. Drinking filtered water is a quantitative improvement over drinking stream water. Cycling is qualitatively different than walking.
- seadan83 4y agoMost reasons to not cycle are not inherent to the bike. The same cannot be said about cars, they are inherently dangerous to all road users (and as a society we paper this over to make driving feel way safer than it actually is)
- jacob019 4y agoMy libido and performance has improved 10x since getting into cycling. It's one of the major benefits of being fit. Depending where you live you can ride trails and avoid busy streets.
- freetime2 4y agoGCN put out a couple videos on the subject of erectile dysfunction, and according to them the research suggesting a link between the two is fairly rubbish [1]. In fact, the prevalence of erectile dysfunction and other men’s health issues is much lower than in the general population for the same age group. Reason being that erectile dysfunction is more commonly associated with heart disease, and cycling helps to reduce the risk of heart disease. It’s just one study. And GCN is not the best source for science news, and is certainly going to be biased in favor of cycling. But I think at the very least the risk of erectile dysfunction from cycling is vastly overstated in general. [1] https://youtu.be/Nh2WraVt4JE https://youtu.be/Nh2WraVt4JE
- SyzygistSix 4y agoYour penis gets numb when you have a poorly fitted bike and saddle. Anyone dumb enough to continue to ride like that is welcome to take themselves out of the gene pool as far as I'm concerned. You sit on your ischial tuberosities, not your perineum.