4 ms·

>"heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training" Alternatively one can stop being an idiot and ride at s

• thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Safety is conditional to a lot more than speed.
  • 1attice 4y ago
    ...and yet the future continuity of your consciousness itself depends on at least a minimum-viable level of safety! What a diabolical tradeoff :D something-something anthropic principle
• bombcar 4y ago
  People assume a "bike" is safe, and a "motorbike" can be dangerous, but there's no real difference between them. I've reached 35 MPH downhill under pedal power; if I had wiped out I would have been in a world of hurt, or dead, depending on how it had gone.
  • mrchucklepants 4y ago
    I've hit 50 mph downhill on my bike just to say I'd done it. I started thinking of all the ways it could end badly. As soon as I hit 50, I was on the brakes.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    One of my own more indelible memories is of sprinting down a sizeable hill, out of the saddle and over the front wheel, handily pulling away from my buddy whose bike computer was reading 65 kph (40 mph), wearing shorts, cleats, gloves, and a shit-eating grin. Two days later, tooling around on flat ground, my handlebars came apart in my hands, thanks to hidden long-developing stress fractures, a characteristic of aluminium alloys. (There'd been numerous previous falls.) Speed is indeed fun. But its consequences can be extreme. (I've hit 80+ kph / 50+ mph on other rides.) Another factor is rider mass. An elite cyclist at 60--65 kg (135--145 lb) can brake far more effectively than a past-their-prime 115--135 kg (250--300 lb) rider, particularly, again, on a grade. Brakes have only so much stopping power. E-bikes make higher-speeds for less-experienced and less-skilled riders far more attainable. Typical recreational cyclists spend most of their time in the 20--30 kph (12--18 mph) speed range.
  • Shared404 4y ago
    I was almost killed by a downhill max speed bike crash when I was ~12. Wearing a properly fitted helmet, I was knocked unconscious and concussed quite badly by the hit to my head.
  • FpUser 4y ago
    >"People assume a "bike" is safe" Bike is not safe. And it is not even about being hit by the car. Cyclists often fall and often it results in broken bones etc.
    • enneff 4y ago
      If you look at cities where bikes are well integrated then they are way safer than cars.
      • sooheon 4y ago
        Safety is proportional to skilled and educated riders & drivers.
        • enneff 4y ago
          Road design plays a huge role.
          • bombcar 4y ago
            Safety is also more than just "number dead" or "number seriously injured" though that plays a part. Some of it is also "number of incidents that could have been serious" - people walking can bump into each other without any real risk of serious harm (though a mob/crowd crush is a real danger that has to be considered, for example), but many bicycle/pedestrian or bicycle/bicycle incidents have the risk of serious harm. And "depend on people to do the right thing at the right time with the right skill" should be the absolute LAST fallback - only used when there is no other reasonable option.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Motorbikes can easily (<10 seconds?) reach 4x your 35 mph, is probably why. That's why the full-face helmet and racing leathers. The leathers aren't going to help you if you go flying and hit something, which is why you should never ride that aggressively on the street, but if you go sliding for hundreds of feet, hopefully you only need a new suit and not most of your skin. But you're right that even at 35 mph you'd be in a world of hurt. Every time I see a bicyclist going aggressively downhill in a bowl helmet and a barely-there lycra suit, I cringe so hard. You know how they get rid of road rash? They aggressively brush it out with what amounts to sandpaper.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      Yet, the average motorcycle accident happens from speeds less than 30mph. Those speeds are plenty enough to kill. It all depends on what you hit and how.
• Dylan16807 4y ago
  Are you saying that 25mph is inherently unsafe? What's the safe speed then, for a normal dry day? Does this speed limit apply to motorcycles too?
  • zdragnar 4y ago
    Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. If your definition is "nothing is safe" then there's no reason to complain about 25mph in particular. > "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. So give an example. Either specify conditions or assume generic conditions. Don't say someone else's example number is wrong without giving a rough correct number. > Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle. Great. That answers my second question of two.
      • zdragnar 4y ago
        It's not that "nothing is safe" but rather nothing is "inherently" safe. I've crashed several times going roughly 12mph, with only a few scrapes and no broken bones- once because by brake line snapped, once because my tire got caught in a crack in the road I didn't see, and once because a car pulled in front of me. Any one of those could have ended in a broken neck if I'd landed wrong. Going slower might have prevented one or two of those. Going faster wouldn't have caused worse injury in the third case given that I bounced off the car rather than going straight to the ground.
• 1attice 4y ago
  Think of "idiocy" as the lack of intelligence, rather than a separate entity of its own, similarly to how high-school physics (and therefore, contemporary common sense!) understands cold as the absence of heat. This means that you can get rid of idiocy by adding intelligence to a system, in the same way that you can warm up a room with a space heater. But how do you build up intelligence? Put it this way. Your onboard wetware neural network needs to iterate on e.g. pulling out of a slide, and a bunch of other stuff that you won't know how to do unless someone trains you. No iteration means no gradient, and no gradient means 'no smart'. So if you want to defeat idiocy, you need training. Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete. Thus the obvious antidote to e-vehicle idiocy-at-scale[1] is, yes, formal lessons and deliberate practice. Just like driving. Just like piano. [1] a friend from grad school who is Korean told me that there's a word in Korean that literally means "road stupid" and this is the only fact I know about Korean and I love it. So many people are road stupid! I'm one of them! I'm trying to improve!
  • FpUser 4y ago
    >"Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete." Deliberate practice I understand. The proposed "formal training" for this specific case however would not know "if the training is complete" either. They'll just be taking your money.
    • 1attice 4y ago
      Well, they're welcome to it -- at least once a week, I use dodge-skid-stop, a specific skill I formally acquired by trying to do it and dropping the training bike a bunch while a grouchy 65yo biker glowered at my incompetence until it evaporated. Take my money