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NYPD needs to crack down on dangerous driving like what killed Mathieu Lefevre, but it’s not just dangerous drivers who are at fault. Felix Salmon points to studies finding that 2/3rds of bike accidents happen because of unsafe cycling and safer biking would surely keep people alive.

Doh. A very nice call to action on traffic danger had to be watered down at the last moment by the irresistible urge to be the most reasonable man in the room by reminding everyone that “both sides” are inevitably “at fault”.

Here we have two studies uplifted by their association with the great Felix Salmon. Each time they are cited their results can be exaggerated and their credibility bolstered by their prior esteemed repeaters. Salmon quoted a book that quoted one clause from each study:

According to Mapes, a 1996 study by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic,” and a 2003–2004 Orlando, Florida, study found that “nearly two-thirds [of bike accidents] involved riding on the sidewalk or another unsafe choice by the cyclist.”

Do you spot the gross errors in Drum Major’s paraphrasing? It is like a game of telephone, except with adults who feign themselves more reasonable the more they garble basic facts. It is not “2/3rds of bike accidents”: in one study it is “as many as a third” and in another it is “nearly two-thirds”. (The average of that is less than half, which sounds rather different.)

And just as fundamentally, the studies do not find that accidents “happen because” of cyclist error: they “involve” some reported cyclist error. Traffic crashes often involve poor choices by several parties. This doesn’t mean that you can’t say anything based on studies of some classes of cycling error, but it does mean that you can’t assign fault based on them. To do that you would have to conduct a more detailed analysis than anyone above has had the interest to conduct. They want to declare fault but they don’t want to be bothered with the chore of determining it.

The cost of this sloppy citing is that myths undermining the Drum Major’s advocacy are reinforced. They think they are strengthening their message by sounding extra-reasonable, but really they are giving readers a reason to dismiss it: the belief that killed cyclists are usually at fault for their own deaths. It’s not some minor side question, it’s our society’s primary rationalization for the fatal status quo. It is the engine of the “culture of accepting traffic deaths”, and it has been given a shy squirt of gasoline by the same people saying it must be shut down.

Victim-blaming is the only way we can morally tolerate the regular killings of pedestrians and cyclists. When we have the courage to stop blaming the dead, the system of imperiling the living will unravel.

Interestingly, Morrongiello, B. A. and Major, K. (2002) Influence of safety gear on parental perceptions of injury risk and tolerance for children’s risk taking, found that parents tended towards the same biases. Thus, parents allowed their children to engage in greater risk-taking in activities such as bicycling when wearing safety gear than when not, and the parents’ explanations showed that they assumed the gear would fully protect their child – including even parts of the body not covered (e.g. a bike helmet would protect limbs) – and prevent injury regardless of the child’s level of risk taking. This optimistic, almost magical, reasoning seems to be shared by children and their parents during periods that may be formative in the development of safety orientation.

He says those pictures will be examined along with video of the collision, which according to NYPD records shows that the truck driver dragged Lefevre and his bike for several yards as he made an unsignaled right-hand turn.

If there is one thing I would ask NYC motorists to do just out of the goodness of their hearts, it is to use their turn signals.

Every other day I have to guess if a slowing car is going to turn right or go straight, because its operator is unwilling to lift a finger and activate the device installed expressly for that purpose. Every other week I guess wrong, and I’m caught in a bad spot.

Sometimes, the motorist will honk to indicate their displeasure with me for continuing straight through the path of their unsignaled turn. Yet I am the one in extreme danger while they are only briefly inconvenienced as a direct result of their own poor driving. The situation is completely avoidable.

Most cyclists are perfectly willing and able to pass right-turning vehicles on the left—we just need to know that is what they are going to do.

Today more than 12 percent of trips are made by foot or bike, yet less than 2 percent of our nation’s transportation funding goes towards biking and pedestrian infrastructure. According to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, bike commuting increased 57 percent between 2000 and 2009. Instead of increasing investment in transportation options that Americans want, the House bill appears to funnel more dollars towards roads…