Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Bicycling for (crash test) dummies
As most of the people that tried to ride a car in a Dutch city know, driving a car in The Netherparts is something definitely not comfortable.
In spite of the fact that the traffic is not so heavy (compared to other European cities), that people usually drives neatly and following the rules, and that the streets are very well maintained, you have to pay a lot of attention to a series of obstructions and barriers (chicane or asverschuiving, verkeersplateau, or the bastard bussluis, that you can see also here).
But soon driving a car will will also embarrass yourself: your car will soon wear a nice external airbag like this.
In fact the national cyclist association claimed that this method would save at least 60 life per year in The Netherlands.
An accurate study has been made by the TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) over a sample of 12000 simulated bike-car accident. The results show that cyclists in most of the collisions touch the windshield with their head, whereas pedestrians do not reach generally that height.
The reason for the research was the fact that while the total number victims in street accidents decreased steadily the previous years, the number of cyclists that perished by accidents remained constant. In 2006, 216 cyclists died on the street, of which 106 for collisions with cars.
The cyclist association says the number of badly injured cyclists can decrease with installing windshield airbags on cars.
Moreover the association pleads for discouraging the use of cars with a high hood, such as SUV's.
So the questions are:
1. What about the other 110 wounded cyclists? How did they die? Did they fell in the canals?
2. What about the pedestrians that do not reach the airbags? Minced meat for bitterballen?
(BTW I agree with this solution, it was just funny to me.)
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1 comment:
... e poi mi si dice che le moto sono pericolose....
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