It's not safe for a kid to ride a bike anymore...

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Statistics are major fail, but personal experience is black and white perfection. Hi kettle.

Your entire position that I am wrong is based on opinion and personal experience and "if". I could just as easily counter your personal experience with me seeing kids on bikes all over my area of town and the full bike rack at my kids' school can testify to that. Does that mean that more kids are riding bikes because of my personal experience? Does it trump yours?

I would bother citing further stats that more bikes were sold in 2000 than ever before or that show that younger people are more likely to be riding bikes than older people, but what would be the point? You have personal experience that fewer people are riding bikes than ever before and IF they ride 90% fewer miles than ever before it must be more dangerous than ever before.
 
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Psudopod

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I agree as far as that goes, but when you are comparing "Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among those age 5-34 in the U.S." to "630 bicyclists died on US roads in 2009 (718 in 2008, 1,003 in 1975) 74 were 14 or younger, a reduction of 58 per cent from the 178 killed in 2000", I think the numbers themselves DO speak for themselves. Leading cause compared to 74 - a number which is falling.

But leading cause of death because it is more dangerous, or leading cause because more people spend more of their time doing it?

I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying you cannot make that claim from the numbers you have posted.
 
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But leading cause of death because it is more dangerous, or leading cause because more people spend more of their time doing it?

I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying you cannot make that claim from the numbers you have posted.

The problem is that there is no equally reliable way to prove how much bike riding people are doing. Vehicles track the number of miles that are driven, but bikes do not. However, on that note, there is no reliable way to track how many of those miles are driven with the kids in the car.

According to several sites out there, passenger cars average 15,000 miles per year, but how many with kids in the car?

What I am mainly objecting to is the idea that bikes must be more dangerous when the only basis they have is that they don't see kids on their bikes any more, so any death is perceived as being 1 of only a few. I don't buy it and I think the premise of this topic that it is neglect to allow a child to ride a bike is utterly without merit.

But I do thank you for taking the time to ask for clarification politely rather than the "epic fail" approach I've received thus far.
 
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DaisyDay

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Elizabethton, Tennessee

Population (2010) - 14,176


Dangerous? Ummm -they're kidding right? Thats a tiny country town for goodness sake.

I rode to school in a city of 3,500,000+ people for many years and somehow survived. As did all my friends.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket.
My sister lived in a quiet rural town - but bikes were dangerous to ride on the road there as the roads were narrow with no shoulders or sidewalks and huge trucks would barrel down them day and night.

It was much safer to walk in NYC than there.
 
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keith99

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Statistics are major fail, but personal experience is black and white perfection. Hi kettle.

Your entire position that I am wrong is based on opinion and personal experience and "if". I could just as easily counter your personal experience with me seeing kids on bikes all over my area of town and the full bike rack at my kids' school can testify to that. Does that mean that more kids are riding bikes because of my personal experience? Does it trump yours?

I would bother citing further stats that more bikes were sold in 2000 than ever before or that show that younger people are more likely to be riding bikes than older people, but what would be the point? You have personal experience that fewer people are riding bikes than ever before and IF they ride 90% fewer miles than ever before it must be more dangerous than ever before.

No, you misused statistics and when others pointed that out you flat out ignored their points. I cited my personal experience and also pointed out it is not just mine. I have seen scores of others point out the same things.

There is an excellent chance the news piece that started this thread is a few weeks old. I saw one like it on the cycling board I frequent a couple of weeks ago.

Personally I think cycling for kids is more dangerous than before, but mainly because one thing has changed. Fewer kids are out there and that makes it far more likely that for any given kid they will be the first one seen by any driver in a considerable time.

That and so many people decide they simply have to drive their kids to school, no matter how short the walk.

A school where scores of kids are coming in on bikes is pretty safe for the kids, even when they mess up. A school with scores of moms driving their kids, all trying to find a place to pull over and let the kid out and only one or 2 kids on a bike are not nearly as kid on bike friendly.
 
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Cute Tink

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No, you misused statistics and when others pointed that out you flat out ignored their points.

I have since addressed the only actual point stated against me, that there are no stats on how far bicyclists ride, so there is no way to determine what the actual danger per mile ridden there is for bicyclists. However, there are really no stats on the danger per mile ridden in cars for kids. We only know the total miles cars travel, which says nothing about how long kids are in the car, in turn making the number of child deaths per total miles equally meaningless.

The rest of the posts against my point are largely opinion and guesswork. That doesn't make it any more valid than my opinion and guessing, other than the fact that I actually looked up the numbers pertaining to the discussion and added that to my own personal experience before freaking out because a handful of children get injured or die on bikes each year and entertain the idea that it qualifies as child neglect to let your child ride a bike.
 
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Saving Hawaii

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All of which is irrelevant to this discussion, since you did not give us the distance the girl would have had to travel.

This is a completely irrelevant argument that you make. The distance the girl would have had to travel doesn't change the fact that accidents/mile and injuries/accidents statistics are both worse for bicycles than for cars. If she travels said distance in a car or a bus she is subject to the risks inherent in that travel. If she travels said distance on a bicycle she is subject to the inherent risks of that modal form.

In the end, yes, cars are driven more than bikes are ridden, but the numbers are the numbers. To argue that bicycle riding is more dangerous than riding in a car when far, far, far, far more children are killed in cars than on bikes is nothing short of ridiculous. I cannot get behind your position on this topic.
Driving your child around in a car results in far more fatalities than letting a six year-old play with a loaded handgun. Which activity do you think is riskier though?

Look, you're forcing me to make an argument that I don't want to make. I'm a huge advocate of cycling, that's why I posted this thread. More than half my trips away from my house are taken on my beloved bicycle. My car is only used for work (and only because my employer requires that I drive my car to work). When I've discussed this issue with my parents who feel that cycling is quite dangerous I've emphatically argued that their perceptions are overstated. I will make that case to anyone, anyday. But you're staunchly contending that bicycling from point A to point B is just as safe as riding in a car from point A to point B and the numbers don't lie. Accidents/mile and severity/accidents both suggest that bicycling is a somewhat riskier activity. That's a reality that I can't dispute as much as I'd like to.

I have to disagree. The officer is not well-intentioned. The officer is over-reacting and has some random agenda that he gets to enforce because of his position of power and blatantly abusing his authority.
Most people have that agenda. Even a lot of good people who are very sympathetic to cyclists ultimately suffer from an ideological agenda that condemns cycling. Until I got into commuter cycling I suffered from those very sentiments. I didn't understand how hazardous cycling could be, I didn't understand that cyclists have excellent safety reasons to routinely ride out in the traffic lane. I'd always ask why they didn't just ride on the sidewalks and I often joked about lobbing slurpees at them. I was ignorant, like most people including this officer. That doesn't mean that I wasn't well-intentioned or that I wasn't trying to do the right thing and respect those cyclists. I just didn't understand.

He's not "abusing his authority". He's trying to do the right thing. Public safety personnel tend to suffer from a certain bias that they rarely acknowledge. Cops and firefighters alike heavily weigh immediate consequences of actions and ignore the long-term effects. There's a reason for that: their jobs expose them to the immediate consequences every single day. I've been there when a little kid went under a 4-door sedan. I've seen, felt, and smelt that. It's a horrific thing to see. Cops and firefighters deal with other calls, many more calls, to help out old ladies with chronic health problems. They don't generally make the connection that the chronic health problems are a result of the fact that this older person didn't take small risks and live a healthy life when they were younger. They just don't make that connection. Public safety personnel (cops and firefighters) view the promotion of the public safety as a sacred duty that they must uphold. Sometimes their perceptions are wrong. They're only human.

In this story the police officer, mother, and daughter are all doing what they think is right. They're trying to be good people, immanentizing the eschaton, so to speak. The folly is that their perceptions are often wrong. Nobody is omniscient and every involved party is wrong in some respect. I'm very, very sympathetic to the mother. I think that the police department is probably wrong to challenge her decision to allow her daughter to ride a bike to school. For reasons we've discussed earlier it's understandable why police officers feel this way, even if their sentiments are ultimately flawed. They're trying to do the right thing.

My OP was an attempt to accept the rational judgment of the officer as well as the sentiments of the mother. What I want to discuss is this: Why are we building cities where children can't safely ride a bicycle to school like they could when we were children? Our parents built a world that nurtured and fostered us, that gave us opportunity and freedom. I think that we are building a world for our own children that stifles innovation, freedom, and opportunity. Why are we doing that?
 
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Umaro

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I for the life of me can't figure out why people prefer cars for most of their day to day activities. I can understand things like going to work, most people don't want to bike in a suit for instance. But by and large 80% of your day should be able to be biked to. When I was growing up in FL, the closest grocery store was a 20 minute car drive. Now that I'm on my own I specifically found a place to live that let's me walk or bike there, throw stuff in my backpack, and walk or bike back. I would never drive regularly again if I could get away with it. Cars are drastically more expensive than people usually realize, and often take more time away from you than people realize. I still have to drive to work due to company policy (though they provide and pay for ALL of the cars needs, which is awesome), and it kills me that I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 7:45, unless it's a day where I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 8:30 for absolutely no reason traffic. When I'm biking everywhere else in my life (company car is only for company business), I know exactly how long it will take me every time.
 
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OdwinOddball

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I for the life of me can't figure out why people prefer cars for most of their day to day activities. I can understand things like going to work, most people don't want to bike in a suit for instance. But by and large 80% of your day should be able to be biked to. When I was growing up in FL, the closest grocery store was a 20 minute car drive. Now that I'm on my own I specifically found a place to live that let's me walk or bike there, throw stuff in my backpack, and walk or bike back. I would never drive regularly again if I could get away with it. Cars are drastically more expensive than people usually realize, and often take more time away from you than people realize. I still have to drive to work due to company policy (though they provide and pay for ALL of the cars needs, which is awesome), and it kills me that I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 7:45, unless it's a day where I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 8:30 for absolutely no reason traffic. When I'm biking everywhere else in my life (company car is only for company business), I know exactly how long it will take me every time.

You are young, single, and apparently live in a relatively temperate, urban area. Biking may make sense for you, but does not for many others. The closest grocery store to my house is 4 miles away. And with two children, 3 cats and a dog to feed, using a bike to get groceries is out of the question.
 
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Why are we building cities where children can't safely ride a bicycle to school like they could when we were children? Our parents built a world that nurtured and fostered us, that gave us opportunity and freedom. I think that we are building a world for our own children that stifles innovation, freedom, and opportunity. Why are we doing that?

Since this is what you want to focus on, I will simply drop the rest of the discussion and focus on this.

It's not as if it is a bad idea to make it safer to ride bikes, but for the government, there is no financial benefit to it. Streets are paid for by continued use of gasoline. There is no such income from using bikes.

People hate bicyclists too. I've heard discussions on the radio and read the articles about people throwing things at cyclists, some more damaging than slurpees. Some even swerve their cars at them. Because of that attitude, those people are not going to be willing to pay more taxes to make cities safer for them. They might if it is pitched that it will get them off the roads, since that seems to be what they want, but I doubt it.

I think that the attitude has changed toward children's safety. Instead of allowing them to learn the same lessons that we did as children, we are trying to shelter them from anything and everything that could potentially cause pain, discomfort, hurt feelings, etc. Why make it safer to ride in the sense that you won't get hit by a car if you could still fall and break an arm? Safer to some to keep the kid locked up in the house in front of the TV...
 
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keith99

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You are young, single, and apparently live in a relatively temperate, urban area. Biking may make sense for you, but does not for many others. The closest grocery store to my house is 4 miles away. And with two children, 3 cats and a dog to feed, using a bike to get groceries is out of the question.

A problem here is a large part of the population has some often extreme biases.

I'm not young, but I could cycle just about anywhere. I'm out of shape right now, but in the past I have done 4 double centuries (200 mile rides). Two of those were back to back in the Land Rush. The first day of that ride actually included a downhill section on the freeway, not the shoulder of the freeway, the regular traffic lanes.

Yea I can handle just about anything. But I'm similar to you. No kids, no cats, 2 fair sized does (80 and 100 lbs). I could dig out the panniers and rear rack for my mountian bike. That would allow me to take 2 bags of groceries each trip. Since an average trip is 3 or 4 bags where not getting Dog food that means 2 trips. And if done during the day it would be pushing things for time for any frozen items.

To me the roads I'd have to take would be OK. To 95% of all people they are far to scary. Oh yea and this last week if I shopped anytime between 9:30 and 7:00 it would be over 90 degrees out, over 100 a lot of that.

It is not reasonable to expect someone living where I do to shop by bike. But the other side is my 'neighbor' directly behind me is actually a park. I'd bet that there are people in the neighborhood who when they do use the park drive rather than walk or bike to it.

Neither extreme makes sense.
 
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AceHero

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I for the life of me can't figure out why people prefer cars for most of their day to day activities. I can understand things like going to work, most people don't want to bike in a suit for instance. But by and large 80% of your day should be able to be biked to. When I was growing up in FL, the closest grocery store was a 20 minute car drive. Now that I'm on my own I specifically found a place to live that let's me walk or bike there, throw stuff in my backpack, and walk or bike back. I would never drive regularly again if I could get away with it. Cars are drastically more expensive than people usually realize, and often take more time away from you than people realize. I still have to drive to work due to company policy (though they provide and pay for ALL of the cars needs, which is awesome), and it kills me that I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 7:45, unless it's a day where I leave my house at 7:00 and get there at 8:30 for absolutely no reason traffic. When I'm biking everywhere else in my life (company car is only for company business), I know exactly how long it will take me every time.
You are young, single, and apparently live in a relatively temperate, urban area. Biking may make sense for you, but does not for many others. The closest grocery store to my house is 4 miles away. And with two children, 3 cats and a dog to feed, using a bike to get groceries is out of the question.

If you take the distance variable out of the equation, even with two children and two pets, it's totally doable. Courtesy of Copenhagen, a city Saving Hawaii would probably love to live in:

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2113010527_685e37b84b.jpg


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It's not as if it is a bad idea to make it safer to ride bikes, but for the government, there is no financial benefit to it. Streets are paid for by continued use of gasoline. There is no such income from using bikes.

Gas taxes don't pay for all of it. Much of it comes out of property taxes. Most Americans who ride bicycles own cars, so they're paying for the roads. Even if they were carless, investing in bicycle infrastructure is good because it keeps more cars off the road, so there's less maintenance needed.

People hate bicyclists too. I've heard discussions on the radio and read the articles about people throwing things at cyclists, some more damaging than slurpees. Some even swerve their cars at them. Because of that attitude, those people are not going to be willing to pay more taxes to make cities safer for them. They might if it is pitched that it will get them off the roads, since that seems to be what they want, but I doubt it.

Well, they're going to have to get used to it because the automobile is going to become less and less relevant as the decades go by. Just because they don't ride a bicycle doesn't mean one shouldn't support such infrastructure. I'm don't own a bike; I mostly walk and take the bus, but having better bike infrastructure will take more cars off the road. So the people who continue to drive will even benefit.
 
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Umaro

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It is not reasonable to expect someone living where I do to shop by bike. But the other side is my 'neighbor' directly behind me is actually a park. I'd bet that there are people in the neighborhood who when they do use the park drive rather than walk or bike to it.

Neither extreme makes sense.

Part of that is the way we've designed our cities though, which is what Saving Hawaii is saying. When I was living in Chicago, my grocery store was a 4 block walk. That could easily be done with kids, dogs, anything really. We could have designed our culture around that sort of model, but we chose cars instead, meaning that as of now you're right, it isn't reasonable. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way always.
 
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Cute Tink

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Just because they don't ride a bicycle doesn't mean one shouldn't support such infrastructure.

I was just bowing to reality. If you tell people you need to increase a tax to make adjustments, people aren't going to think about how they benefit from it in the long run, they think about the money they will lose and whether they are personally going to use the new option. It's the same with schools - if people don't have children, they don't consider the benefit of having an educated population. They only consider that they are not personally benefiting from the use of their money and get angry about it.
 
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keith99

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I was just bowing to reality. If you tell people you need to increase a tax to make adjustments, people aren't going to think about how they benefit from it in the long run, they think about the money they will lose and whether they are personally going to use the new option. It's the same with schools - if people don't have children, they don't consider the benefit of having an educated population. They only consider that they are not personally benefiting from the use of their money and get angry about it.

Bike infrastructure has some additional problems. There is not agreement on what it should be.

What is best, bike paths or bike lanes? Those who do not ride or do not ride much prefer bike paths. Some of thsoe are great. The Santa Monica beach path, The Los Angeles River path and the San Gabriel River path all give miles of riding with absolutely no interaction with cars. (and miles more with reasonable interactions. The new path next to the orange line looks great, but has repeated road crossings, many of them 15 - 25 feet from the nearby street, just far enough away that any drivers are not expecting cross traffic.

Then there is the bike lane near me. It is on a major hill, a stand alone hill that almost every cyclist goes around. It happens to be on the route between my home and my mothers home so I end up driving it about once a week. Rare to see a cyclist and of the few I see 1/3 to 1/2 are walking their bikes up the hill. It wasn't put in for bikes, it was put in because hte road was 2 lanes each way and locals complained about the fast traffic. Adding the bike lane let them cut it to one lane each way.

Also sometimes bike infrastructure simply gets overwhelmed by cars. Near work there is a bike lane. It is very well done. But where it crosses the freeway entrance it is hopeless, not that the lane is poorly done, it is not. It is that there are 2 traffic lanes, heavy traffic and people are crossing from the left lane at the last minute to make the onramp. After going over the freeway one can go a long block farther past office buildings and make a right for the only other road in that direction. The bike lane is beautifully done. Proper merging sections. It shoudl be fine. Except people start getting over for the right turn 200 feet early, driving in the bike lane.
 
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Cute Tink

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^ Agree.

I think bike paths would be best whenever possible, but many places have no space to put them in, so bike lanes would be the only option. The problem I have seen with bike lanes are people using them to pass cars or get to the intersection and turn faster. They often aren't treated as bike lanes by cars.
 
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keith99

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^ Agree.

I think bike paths would be best whenever possible, but many places have no space to put them in, so bike lanes would be the only option. The problem I have seen with bike lanes are people using them to pass cars or get to the intersection and turn faster. They often aren't treated as bike lanes by cars.

Most places I've been in Los Angeles the cars respect teh bike lanes. Problem is the places cycles need them respected the most is where they are respected the least.

The problem with most bike paths is that they still have to cross streets, which often means cyclists coming into the street at speed where not expected. That forces any rider to either be unsafe or turn into a pedestrian (at least speedwise) at each street crossing. It also (somewhat reasonably) creates teh expectation in drivers that bikes belong on hte bike paths and not the street. That can create the situation where a street that previously was fuine to ride now has hostile drivers. (Which is exactly what happened with teh Orange line Bike path).
 
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keith99

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I thought some of the people here might like a bit of the inside story about this.

When I first came into this thread I considered it old news. I now realize it is not nearly as old as I thought. The thread on hte other site a frequent started BEFORE this was news and was started by the mother of the girl involved.
Police "judgement" versus Law
 
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WalksWithChrist

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A question...forgive if this has been addressed.

At what age can children legally ride their bikes around town?
I'm wondering because what if the kid was riding her bike to her friend's house. Would she have still been taken back home?

I don't live in a bike-friendly neighborhood myself but I did grow up in several. Heck, I WALKED to school on the second day of Kindergarten. And I never got lost. I walked to some of my schools (we moved a lot...I went to many schools) for what seemed like forever. I'm wondering if there was a bus or something this kid wasn't taking.
 
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She rides her bike for an mile every day.This seems like a long way for a 10 yearold,to do by her self everyday.I could see why a police would believe it's dangerous.For all we know,she could have got many complaints in the past.Also it's against the law for us to ride bikes on sidewalk,so if she's riding where cars are driving,it could be very dangerous for a 10 yearold,that may swerve thru traffic.
 
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