jppe

We had yet another rider hit by a car this week. Young Pro Rider with badly damaged leg and brain surgery required. It’s our 4th in about a month.

Apparently Garmin and others might have gadgets available to let someone know if there’s an issue.

Anyone using something like that or even a remote mapping feature.

Asking for my wife.....she’s getting pretty nervous with all my solo adventures.

skidder

Can you explain it a little better? Are you looking for historical accident records to see where they occur, where they are most concentrated? I can get that from the local government's records. Not sure a company like Garmin would track that.

berner

There was a post in the last week about incidence detection but I don't remember where. I'll hunt for it and reference or link to it if and when I find it.

jppe

if you were to have an accident someone would be immediately alerted. I’d also be interested in gps tracking too.

maybe I could use the find my phone app??

rumrunn6

I don't, but that sounds useful. I recently had a fall in the woods & hit my head on hard ice, but was totally OK, just embarrassed, even tho no one saw it happen. But if I were unconscious & no one came by to find me, it could have been a different situation.

I let Wifey & Daughter know where I'm going & when to expect me back. Daughter & I share location using the "Find My Friends" iPhone app. But that requires someone checking your location regularly & then doing something if they see your signal stop moving. We recently discovered this is not a great plan when Daughter was driving w/ Boyfriend in Colorado & I saw her signal go off the highway & stop on a random isolated dirt road. I panicked & went to our local police station for advice. They interrogated me had me call Wifey & the Boyfriend's parents & tracked his phone to a nearby hot spring. Wifey didn't tell me the kids were going to do this, so I panicked needlessly. I'm sure I'm not the 1st Dad to call the police to help find out where his Daughter was, but this was most embarrassing.

Ogsarg

On the iphone, you can share your location with someone else with an iphone and I do that with my wife when I take long rides on the weekend. I often end up being gone longer than expected so now she can check to see where I am. I suspect something similar is available on Android phones and probably Garmins as well.

caloso

I have the Road ID app on my phone but rarely use it. Instead I just text my wife my route. She can see where I am with Find My Friends

fooferdoggie 

the apple watch works for this. I crashed on my e scooter and my watch was asking if I had fallen. firsttime it happened and I was a bit dazed and was like what the hell is my watch making this noise.

pdlamb

I don't worry about it in town. I figure there's enough people around, someone will eventually call 911 and they'll call my wife when they find my cell phone or ID.

I normally run Strava or RidewithGPS on my phone on local country rides, and share it with my wife. I'm gradually training her not to hit the panic button. First ride with Strava (I think it was) I stopped for a snack, sitting by the river on a park bench. And had to answer the phone to tell her what I was doing, because my icon on her map was spinning around in circles.

It's a security blanket, or a bit of security theater, for her. When I go out of cell range, well, don't expect either a map update or an incident report!

rseeker

I hate to hear that. What a tough month.

Biker395 

No, but my daughter has suggested it. I use an I phone, and it's my understanding that the apple watch has that feature. I don't ride alone in the mountains very often, but it would sure come in handy for that.

Unlike just about everybody I know, I don't ride with a GPS device. I kind of wish I had been when I had my crash. At least, I would know how fast I was going in precisely where I crashed. At this point, I'm gonna have to rely on getting that information from my good Samaritan friend when I finally take he and his wife out to dinner.

Oso Polar

Garmin navigators, at least some of them (e.g. my Edge Explore), do have incident detection. You can program a few phone numbers and in case device detects a crash, it'll send SMS texts to these numbers. I believe device detects crash by sudden deceleration - if it happens, it starts beeping and shows a countdown on the screen (1 minute AFAIR) during which you can cancel sending of the alert - if you'll not cancel it on time then it'll be sent. It happened to me twice (in more than a hundred rides, so this is not frequent) that Garmin thought the accident happened and started a countdown but these were just fast (real fast!) emergency stops from high speed. It'll not detect anything and not alert if you'll fall at low speed, at least this is my experience.

jppe

Thanks! That feature sounds exactly like what a local was using when he was hit by a car. His wife was immediately sent a text and the text might even have included a location.

hanknstein

This is pretty much my experience too, with the Garmin Edge Explore 820

Moishe

I cycle a lot of untravelled roads, and I use Cyclemeter, an iphone app that sends an email to my wife and daughter (and anyone else's email address I could add) with my location at regular intervals I specify, anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour. It's also an awesome cycling app.

BlazingPedals

I've been looking around for something like this, too. My problem is, my bikes don't have seat posts; and virtually all of them are designed to mount to one.

rumrunn6

maybe you can rig a flag pole or something?

jppe

Looks pretty good! I wish it were text vs emails as my wife doesn't check emails too often....but maybe she would if the app were running. It looks like it's about $10 a year. Sound about right? I'm assuming a phone service is needed for the prompts? What if you're in a remote area without a carrier?

Moishe

Yes, $10/yr. I've been paying for it many years and it'd be worth it to me at five times the price. If you carry an iphone anyway, there's no better cycling computer. However, if you're in an area too remote for email or if your wife refuses to check her email, then the cops will have a hard time finding your body.

mr_bill

The lone wolf dilemma.

Background.

So, thankfully our friend did not die in the crash. Somebody saw them crash, and they got to the hospital and subsequently made a full recovery. But there were too many hours where their fiancé did not know where they were. (They were unconscious and non-responsive and subsequently put into an induced coma.)

So, yeah, that is a legitimate spouse spook. We discussed each other’s concerns.

So back when I watched the Concours de Pharmacologie, there was an ad for Road-ID, and my spouse casually said that’s a really good idea. No brainer. I’ve worn one ever since.

But still, every couple of hours when I was out I would get a call on my cell phone, how ya doin?

So, once I got a smart phone, I installed Runkeeper (a Boston based app with live tracking, small subscription fee, plus it is “multisport”), and set it up to post a private link on my spouse’s Facebook page, and the calls stopped. Even though the link rarely was clicked. (And, redundantly, in addition to the Road-ID, keeping ICE contact info on my phone too.)

So, on to the question of things like ICEdot. If I were frequently riding in isolated areas, I’d consider it. But I don’t expect my spouse to be first responder, and where I ride I think that far more likely than not that somebody would see me. (What saved our friend’s life.) And frankly I’m more likely to crash unobserved in my car.

So I don’t have any specific advice, but there are accommodations the two of you can make, and it’s a spectrum of responses for the two of you to work out.

-mr. bill

mgopack42 

I have the Edge 520, and it has the incident detection turned on (on the Connect app). The way it works is with an accelerometer in the head unit. I saw DC Rainmaker test this when it first came out, by throwing his into a field (didn't work). I find when I am stopped I tend to nervously "bounce" my front tire, and that sets it off. Once (well twice in a row) at a rest stop at a century, my bike fell over and I had to explain why my jersey pocket was wailing loudly. I was very red faced.

If you dont cancel it, it will send a text message to your contact.
For tracking, my wife and I use Google maps, with location sharing so she can see where I am. Sometimes after a long ride I will cruise up to the house and she has the garage door open for me already. She was wondering where I was for so long, and she sees I am heading that way.
This of course only works where there is a cell signal, and DOES NOT work for cheating or lying husbands (or wives), but we have nothing to hide!

Iride01 

Specialized S-works sells a crash detector called ANGI. It can be purchased along with many of their helmets both MIPS and non-MIPS or you can purchase it by itself for about 50 bucks and attach it to your helmet strap. Works through your phone and you create the list of who it should contact.

Sounds like a decent deal to me as there are no subscription or additional fees. I've already got a Garmin Edge 500 that does everything I want of a GPS. So I'm not wanting to shell out for a more expensive Garmin, Wahoo or Lezyne if they even do such things.

While I don't use it or know any that do, I think I'll have one when I start riding again soon. While the Google maps location sharing would have worked well for my crash last summer, it's only because I was running late getting home that my wife was checking on me. If I'd crashed earlier in the ride on a section that's not traveled a lot by others, then who is to say if I'd be around today.

As far as helmets I've been looking at, cooling is important to me. The Specialized helmets look and fit good, but I'm wanting to try a Giro Aether, but no one locally is selling Giro anymore. The Bontrager wavecell fit extremely well, but I'm iffy on how well it'll cool in our hot summers of high 90's F and sometimes 100 F plus riding days. ANGI will fit on any of those.


https://www.specialized.com/us/en/stories/angi

GeneO 

I use it on my Garmin 520. I got struck by a car at an intersection a couple years back car and it called my wife. I wasn't badly injured, and after getting up. before I got off of the street, she called me.

fooferdoggie 

my Garmin does not always stay connected to my phone. sometimes I get notifications sometimes I don't. seems kinda random.

GeneO 

Mostly works for me. There have been a couple of versions of the app/firmware that were issues for me - mostly with providing the live tracking and once phone connection, but for the most part it has worked for me, though not 100%. Can't tell for the incident detection, haven't wanted to test it again, though it did make a detection on hard braking once.