If small cars are unsafe - what about bicycles? #cars #safety

An insurance "institute" crashes big cars into small ones and declares: ...that while driving smaller and lighter cars saves fuel, “downsizing and down-weighting is also associated with an increase in deaths on the highway”. Yet they don't actually nominate how many extra deaths will result, presumably because the crash scenarios are quite rare and the increase statistically difficult to pin down. Or maybe they are just scared to say.

Perhaps they also realise that big cars use more resources to start with - in manufacture alone - and that combined with their fat-car petrol consumption they will drive us to our destruction anyway. Dead is dead, no matter how we get there.

Now everyone has an axe to grind, and it's hard to know the truth. You could be forgiven for thinking that an insurance-funded body may actually want to see fewer crashes, and lesser-value claims. However the insurance companies may also just want to instil some fear and trepidation, in hope of raising premiums on smaller cars. Who can tell? In this instance they nominate small cars as the "compromise", suggesting that people are trading some measure of "safety" for better fuel consumption. Perhaps they should have turned it around and suggested that people who buy larger, thirstier cars are compromising the safety of smaller vehicles and their passengers? So why are small cars seen as the compromise?

Ahh, fact is, there is no absolute "truth". There are no guarantees, nothing is truly "safe" and all is relative. If a big car hits a truck, they are in the same position as the small car. And if a small car hits a bike rider, well you can see where that will lead. So should we ban bikes and small cars and run out of gas a whole lot quicker? I don't think so.

So if we accept that they are disadvantaged in size, why not propose a new deal for small cars? Or for bike riders, for that matter? Currently we only get the vehicle safety features we are offered - crumple zones and amazing exploding bags - rather than the roll cages, helmets and harnesses that would make cars truly safer. Indeed, car manufacturers compromise our safety by offering only complex, heavy and sub-optimal passive safety devices that are least likely to reduce car sales. And we are complicit in this by accepting these compromised solutions. Most likely because we don't want to have helmet hair after a drive to the shops. But in many places (including Australia) bike riders are compelled to wear helmets. It could be time to even up the score.

Chinese stimulus package trades bikes for cars #auto #bicycles

Economic stimulus packages are all the rage right now - imagine what could have been achieved with a similar global effort on global warming, instead of the lukewarm drip-fed effort we have seen so far? Anyway, the financial collapse threatens economies, and thus jobs, which would be of immediate harm to most incumbent governments... so what hurts most gets most attention.

In China's case the stimulus package includes support for car makers, effectively tying the consolidation of the industry to an economic imperative - to drive local growth by swapping bicycles and the like for locally-made cars. Now this is great for the car makers, consolidation will save costs and make for increased efficiencies, driving down per-unit cost and ultimately, once the fall-out has settled, adding jobs - but only if growth can be sustained and exceed where we are now. To do that means exporting more - many more - of those cars. Given that right now is not the right time to be exporting cars, they had better have a compelling sales pitch - and that means low-cost, as in really cheap. Hopefully they will be reliable, serviceable and efficient. Otherwise I'll stick with my bicycle.