Leisesturm

I've never been to P&R, but I have been in the P&R basements of other multi-topic discussion forums. Nothing gets solved there. Especially when race becomes part of the discussion. Since race kind of IS the point of this discussion, it cannot take place here, or anywhere, in the U.S. That's just the way it is. I deleted a post last night that might have added nuance to the dialogue. I mean, when it becomes a point of debate as to the capitalization of Black, but not White ... ... eef. We still have a long way to go. But I do have a point to make before I leave this thread to its fate: without numbers, the main study misrepresents the significance of the findings. I mean ... NYC has 16M on any given day. 6,000 or fewer cyclists, and 100 or fewer black cyclists. NYC has 25% black population. Even if black cyclists are, in fact, 4x more likely to be involved in a fatal crash, it is still a majority of white cyclists that are impacted by the careless operation of motor vehicles by a ... come on, let's be fair, white majority of drivers. If you take care of the problem of cyclists vulnerability you also take care of the vulnerability of any subset of race, gender or national origin.

livedarklions

Where did you get those numbers? They're not even close to right.

NYC has an estimated 550,000 bike trips per day!

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bi...nthecity.shtml

As to the rest of your post--garbage like those numbers in, garbage out.

Leisesturm

You're doing your own cherry picking. It's more likely the 110K commute trips most likely to put a cyclist in danger of being killed. And during the time most cyclists are commuting the pop of NYC is closer to 25M than the 16M I posted. How many car trips do you think? It's the disparity between the number of active cyclists and active motorists I am pointing out. It's not even close so individual breakdowns within the cycling cohort by race or anything else is just distraction.

livedarklions

You said 6000 or fewer cyclists, period., and you're going to quibble with which of those 500,000+ rides count?!?!?! Regardless of the number of cyclists, a factor of 4.5 is an awful lot to pooh away. BTW, your whole post is a complete non sequitur, especially the last sentence.

Koyote

This is one of the many pages that answers your first question; as for the second, I suspect the OP ran out of characters for the thread title.

Why do you think the "database" is deficient?

Oh, good grief. This is deliberately obtuse. Do you not understand that Black people are more likely to walk and ride in predominately Black neighborhoods -- which is where pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are higher? And can you not understand the second graphic in Post #3 that mschwett provided?

I-Like-To-Bike

Race baiting headine is useful for getting the attention of some of the usual suspects from the General discussion list to post some allegedly socially aware wisdom on A&S.

Bmach

Are you saying that a white person riding in those areas would be safer? Once again it is the area that is not safe not whether you are black or white. Not very hard to understand.

Koyote

I posted a rhetorical question (copied below)...At least I thought it was rhetorical. But it seems like you really don't understand this rather obvious fact.

urbanknight

No, they weren't. Try to keep up.

livedarklions

Wow, it's literally like you have nothing but ad hominem attacks.

BTW, you should switch to digital audio at this point, it's a lot less prone to skipping than vinyl.

curbtender

Not everyone learns to ride a bike as a kid. Imagine getting your first job across town and the family only has one car. You could walk 5 miles or get a bike. Now you are learning how to ride on city streets and who tells you how to maintain a bike to make it reliable? Infrastructure is needed but proper bike education trumps that. The SF area has a lot of bike programs available but that is not how it works everywhere.

Calsun

One needs to be able to review articles such as this in a critical mannner even if it requires a little more effort. The people conducting their "study" ESTIMATED average fatality rates using the FARS and National Household Travel Survey and defined URBAN areas as a SMSA with more than 1 million people. Easy to pull out these numbers and then having made this gross assumptions generate a report with very little real effort expended.

A problem too is that people read that it is by the NY Times and overlook that it was probably written by someone with a degree in English and no background in statistics or study design and no knowledge of how to extract data or even what a confidence level is or why it is important. This is even more true today as newpapers have cut their staff of experienced journalists by more than half in recent years.

Much the same type of analysis confounded sociologists trying to understand patterns of crime in the United States. The problem was that crime was related to those most suffering from brain damage from lead in gasoline and so the correlation was where people lived in relation to freeways and inner city streets and not based on other factors other than poor people are least able to keep freeways and heavy motor traffic out of their neighborhoods and are usually in what is termed a "sacrifice zone" as we see with the chemical plants in Texas and Louisiana.

livedarklions

And again, you think it's just coincidence that the "not safe" areas happen to be where the Black people live and ride? That's the deliberately obtuse part.

Areas don't get killed, people do. Not very hard to understand..

livedarklions

The gist of the article is that Black people live in places where bicycle safety is sacrificed because there's too much emphasis on cars getting through.. Pretty much the exact same phenomenon as the "sacrifice zones" you are describing.

Someone already linked to the study the article was based on. Why did you see it appropriate to do the "degree in English" bit yet again rather than actually saying anything substantive about the article or its conclusions? Seriously, you don't even actually specify anything wrong with the methodology, you just put the word "ESTIMATED" in all caps and claim that "little effort" was expended. My guess is you don't have the chops to really say anything substantive about methods, but figure if you just make everything sound sleazy, we'll think you know what you're talking about.

This is supposed to be a safety and advocacy forum. Obviously, if one group is systematically less safe than others doing the same activity, that calls for a) an explanation and b) a search for whether that information can help us make people safer.

Black people ride fewer miles per capita than whites, and get killed at a higher rate when they do. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's likely a connection between those. I don't know about you, but if my odds of getting killed while riding were 4.5 times higher, I'm pretty sure I'd be doing a lot less riding. If this is a geographic features phenomenon, it really should suggest where you might want to focus some efforts to make cycling safer and promote riding. We can leave it to P&R to discuss the reasons that may have stopped that from happening, but half-assed methodological quibbling isn't particularly helpful to any discussion.

Koyote

The study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, which means that the statistical methods have been checked and vetted by several (likely two or three) other scholars who work in this area, and possibly also by the journal's editor. And if you think that using estimates (of miles traveled, not fatalities) is, ipso facto, damning, then it's obvious that you don't understand much about this sort of research. As livedarklions wrote, you haven't offered an actual critique of the methodology.

This statement reinforces the fact that you have little (or no) understanding of how refereed journal articles actually get published. (Hint: it takes a great deal of effort, generally.)

​​​​​​Ahh, the credentials fallacy -- this is hilarious! It's a fallacy (very close to a classic ad hominem attack), and you're not even using it properly! There ought to be a special award for this! Bear in mind that the NYT writer is simply reporting on an article which waswritten by two highly credentialed (MPP and PhD) scholars, whose work has gone through a journal's editorial and refereeing process. It's also obvious that the NYT writer accurately summarized the journal article. So this argument of yours is utterly irrelevant.

Leisesturm

I don't know ... I kind of doubt its because black people know that their odds of getting KIA are higher than for other demographics why they ride less. You know there was this study involving stuntmen and women that jaywalked in a variety of neighborhoods and the findings were clear. Drivers did not instantly get on the brakes when they saw a black person in the road. The microseconds of dither can be life or death to someone not trained in acrobatic maneuvers. Tell me you haven't noticed that when black people do something boneheaded and stupid ... like jaywalk. A drivers reaction is usually anger. Any other race and the reaction is neutral, or annoyance. The difference is (obviously) lethal. Black people ride bikes less for the same reason they do everything else less: the black gestalt is insular, walled off from the rest of society. Not by choice. Every other race has some amount of mixing with and picking up hobbies and interests and fads and such from the Dominant Culture. So the rites of passage of learning to ride a two wheeler, learning to swim, learning piano, learning another language ... black people also drive less. Who is hitting all these black people?? I could go on and point out more fails of logic and insane assumptions made in recent posts but I will leave it lie.

curbtender

And being fatality, is there any mention of healthcare/insurance?

livedarklions

Seriously? You casually toss off an assumption that Black people don't learn to play music and then accuse others of insane assumptions?
You're arguing with a straw man as usual. You don't need to know the statistics to notice that the roads where you live are scary to ride on. People learn to ride as kids, usually in relatively safe parks, paths and low-traffic roads. This is like expecting people with no access to pools and lakes to learn to swim. If you ride on a MUP in a thick urban area, you will see lots of families teaching their kids how to ride safely.
This walling off you're describing also includes a very long unbroken history of housing discrimination. You could be right that some of the 4.5x factor is due to driver attitude, but the availability of infrastructure differences are glaring. Infrastructure is also something that could be addressed rather directly, as it's being done again and again in more affluent areas.

Koyote

What kind of dressing would you like with this word salad?

livedarklions

Keep in mind that this is the guy who just posted confidently that fewer than 100 Black people cycle in NYC on any given day, then has the temerity to criticize the "assumptions" of other people's postings. He really is the classic GI/GO poster, before it was garbage statistics, now it's garbage sociology.

Koyote

Yeah. The funniest (as in, sad) part is this post from him, which demonstrates that he didn't even open the link to the actual journal article. And yet, he knows exactly what's wrong with the data.

​​​​​​

Leisesturm

That wasn't even me you are quoting. Can we get this thread over with. I've seen less controversial ones locked much sooner.

Leisesturm

A more honest debater would know that I never meant that there are no black musicians period. So if that is how you start a counter-argument it reflects badly on you. I've seen you smacked down time and time again for treating people like they are idiots. When are you going to learn? I could be right that ... ... gee, thanks. Way too late in the game though.

Zara Sp00k

question, since males are disproportionately more likely to die by firearms than females (6 times more likely), is it sexism at work? IOW, people don't like males, or males receive fewer funding than females, people discriminate against males, males are second class citizens.... or is it something else?

Question #2 Blacks are also disproportionately more likely to die by gunshot than whites, is it racism at work? hint, the shooter is also highly likely to be black, in fact if it isn't you can bet it will be on the news

Statistics don't lie, but the people that use them do.

"This isn't a "racial thread", whatever that means anyway. It's an article about the lack of safety on bikes being experienced by certain members of our community, pointing out that one of the reasons for this is the way we as a society have invested differently in different areas when it comes to infrastructure development.

and there we go, I don't know about where you live, but where I live the inner city schools spend far more per student than suburban schools, yet the outcome is far lower, which in turn is proof to the do-gooder that the inner city schools need even more money. And yet 60 years has proven it is NOT the money spent (or as liberals like to say, ... invested)

really, this thread belongs somewhere else

livedarklions

Again, are you serious? Then, what the hell did you mean by this?

"Every other race has some amount of mixing with and picking up hobbies and interests and fads and such from the Dominant Culture. So the rites of passage of learning to ride a two wheeler, learning to swim, learning piano, learning another language ... black people also drive less. "

SO are you saying that Black people are less likely to learn to play music or what? Citation please, that's an absurd assertion. And while we're at it, the reference to swimming to refute the importance of available infrastructure is just plain bizarre.

An honest debater doesn't just randomly accuse people of "fails of logic and insane assumptions" and not even bother to say what they are.

As usual, you never actually explain or defend your absurd statements, you just attack me. I'd think a certified genius would figure out by now that trick never works.

And speaking of dishonest debating, pretty sure that when you wrote " don't know ... I kind of doubt its because black people know that their odds of getting KIA are higher than for other demographics why they ride less. " you were responding to my statement that:

"I don't know about you, but if my odds of getting killed while riding were 4.5 times higher, I'm pretty sure I'd be doing a lot less riding."

An honest debater would recognize that he's straw-manning when he does that, especially when the context of that statement was the issue of the places where Black people are more likely to ride being disproportionately dangerous. He'd also probably realize he needs to take some grammar lessons. My Lord, that is some terrible writing.