Should Shawn Bradley's accident make us anxious to ride?
 

Really devastating news. Prayers to Shawn Bradley. That's gotta be hard for him. He was just a block away from his home and some driver hit him. Does this make you nervous now? What can I do to make my mind feel more at ease?

Not any more nervous. It can happen to literally anyone... he just happens to be famous.

I do, however, think it's long past time to stop calling crashes like this "accidents".

Cambridge English Dictionary:
It seems to meet the definition.

Bad things happen to people every minute of every day, but you gotta keep living your life. Frankly, I feel much safer on my bike than behind the wheel.

Whenever I feel a little nervous I find that posting inane drivel on an Internet forum always makes me feel a bit safer :thumb:

I am very lucky to be living in place now where, on the whole, drivers are very considerate. Probably has to do with the prevalence of outdoor sports, so most drivers are either bikers or roller skiers, and know what it's like to be on the other side.

Still, always assume you're invisible when biking on the road.

PS: The one exception to this are taxi drivers. They're *******s to cyclists everywhere I've biked.

Agreed, as accident implies that nobody is at fault which seems unlikely in this case. I believe the guidance for UK police is to refer to them as collisions.

best wishes to shawn and his family/friends. may he see a complete recovery.

Negligence: Definition. A failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances. The behavior usually consists of actions, but can also consist of omissions when there is some duty to act (e.g., a duty to help victims of one's previous conduct).

You can look to this guy... Volusia County sheriff hit by car while riding bike for second time since 2017

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...c6b6b0b02b.jpg

what is the reason to believe that calling accidents crashes will reduce crashes?

it’s all seems rather silly, IMO. I mean, I get AAA has a political agenda, it’s just rather silly cyclists get taken in by it.

no.
Only real time i might be nervous is if I couldn't produce a morning loaf before a ride, even after a strong jolt of coffee.

Xanax works well. Otherwise, this may be the nudge needed to abandon this pursuit. Cycling isn't a good fit for everyone.

No. Same way Tiger Woods' car accident doesn't make me nervous to drive. Buck up, buttercup.

No, if every bike wreck made anxiety increase, none of us would be riding. We'd all be in therapy, or on some r/x.

A couple of years ago I was side-swiped on a canyon road with no shoulder. I managed to stay upright and only had a bruise on my hip and no bike damage. Long story short, I no longer ride on that road.

I route all my rides to be as safe as possible knowing that my next ride could be my last. I pray before each ride for safe travels knowing that I only have control of what I do. I wear high vis clothing and use a front and rear blinking light. I obey all traffic laws. If I get hit, I know I did my part to avoid it.

Am I anxious? No, I did what a reasonable safe cyclist does to prevent getting hit.

Get a mountain bike, or gravel, and you don’t have to deal with it. I imagine a lot of the appeal to riding gravel is not having to deal with drivers who are more distracted than ever.

John

Agree!! Before I moved, I lived in an area with lots of good mtn.bike trails and rail-trails. Didn't own a road bike then.

You've got that backwards. The recommendation by the AAA to refer to car accidents as car crashes is a very recent development and can be seen as ironic, given the historical background.

From this page:

Using the word "accident" to describe car crashes might seem natural. But early coverage of crashes in the 1910s and 1920s depicted the vehicles as dangerous killing machines — and their violent collisions were seldom called accidents.

In response to the emerging public backlash against cars (which were, at the time, largely owned and driven by the wealthy), automakers and other industry groups pushed for a new set of laws that kept pedestrians off the streets, except at crosswalks.

This view influenced legal proceedings, too. Before formal traffic laws existed, judges typically ruled that in any collision, the larger vehicle — that is, the car — was to blame. In most pedestrian deaths, drivers were charged with manslaughter regardless of the circumstances of the crash.

To get people to follow these laws, they tried to shape news coverage of crashes. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic collision, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for crashes to pedestrians — and almost always used the word "accident."

Bingo on the Gravel thing. That is exactly why I got a Gravel bike. So I could ride the roads that cars tend to avoid. The gravel roads are just a byproduct of that.

And while you wreck far more often riding MTB than road, MTB is less likely to kill me or leave me with life-altering injury than road riding IMO.

But to the OPs point.... how does this accident change anything? This is sadly nothing new. It just happened to a famous person.

I've been hit on a bicycle 7 times. A couple of those resulted in ambulance rides, but no serious injuries. I've also been hit (and I can't even begin to count the number of near misses) on my motorcycles a few times.

If I stopped riding and only drove, I would be miserable though. I try to improve my safety awareness and learn lessons, but all but one of my bike accidents were literally 'out of the blue' and the driver was just being an idiot.

Several years ago a participant in the GDMBR was hit and killed by a pickup truck while on a gravel road.

of course riding gravel is not zero risk but most gravel routes have far less or zero traffic so fewer vehicles is almost certainly going to mean lowering one’s risk of getting hit while riding.