[LINK] "The Anatomy of Misinformation"

[rfmcdonald]

I'd like to thank Jerry and Mike on Facebook for pointing me to this analysis of the Freakonomics post I linked to previously. To wit:

The chain of stupidity begins when cyclists see “Drive Out at Controlled Intersection” as the leading cause of injuries and incorrectly assume that this means the driver is at fault in all of these accidents.

But actually reading the report yields the exact opposite conclusion. A close reading of the report shows that the crash types are also associated with a table of “Possible Contributing Factors.” The most common contributing factor – “cyclist riding on sidewalk or crosswalk.” (Which also happens to be illegal for riders over 18 years of age.)

The blogger goes on to quote from the report:

A cyclist crossing a roadway from the sidewalk, even at a moderate speed, can enter the motorist’s field of view much more suddenly than a pedestrian would. Motorists scanning for pedestrians as they hastily negotiate an intersection may not expect to encounter cyclists in this part of the right-of-way.

Cyclists on the sidewalk may not be able to see approaching motorists until the last moment, or may mistakenly assume that motorists have noticed them.

In almost thirty percent of all collisions, the cyclists were riding on the sidewalk immediately prior to the collision.

The most frequent type of crash involved a motorist approaching or proceeding into a controlled intersection and colliding with a cyclist who was crossing the intersection in a perpendicular direction. Roughly half of the cyclists in this category were riding on the sidewalk and collided with the motor-vehicle within the crosswalk area.

Finally:

For the most serious category of crashes (Type 1), all of the crash types in Dr. Cavacuiti’s chart are associated with cyclist contributing factors more often than motorist factors with the exception of “Motorist Overtaking.” In that category, drivers are executing unsafe or improper lane changes in 16% of the crashes. However, cyclists are still at fault for some of these accidents too.

Overall, reckless driving only appears to be minimally responsible. For example, the highest percentage of motorists disobeying traffic signals for all crash types is 7.4% (under Drive Out at controlled Intersection – and disobeying traffic signals only appears in association with one other crash type – 2% for Motorist Left Turn Facing Bicyclist). To put that in perspective, for this same crash type, the biggest contributing factor was “cyclist riding on sidewalk/crosswalk” with 51.1% followed by darkness (18.3%), rainy weather (10.9%) and wet road surface (13.6%). In other words, contrary to Anon’s assumption, motorists aren’t running red lights, cyclists are riding illegally or unsafely.

In fact, of the top ten accident types on Dr. Cavacuiti’s chart, six don’t list any motorist contributing factors at all, and all but one of them have cyclists as the largest contributing factors to the accidents.

FYI.