You Can't Spell "Conspiracy" Without "Con," "Piracy," "Ira," or "Racy." Think About It.

Further to yesterday's post concerning Kickstarter, behold the FAT BEE:



"FAT BEE" is a modular bicycle made by Altinsoy Manufaktur. The design was first visualized in a sketch which later developed into a technichal drawing that provided the basis for the prototype. This bike is equipped with a Rohloff-Speed-Hub 500/14 as gearbox and is driven by a Gates Carbon Drive belt. The headset has a King bearing and a Rock Shoxs Bluto suspension. The weight, form and size of the frame which is made out of a special alloy is modifiable at any time. It can be converted to full suspension in just a few steps. So this bicycle can adjust to the needs of its user anytime. 

This will go great with my Delta7 "IsoTruss" bike:

At first I couldn't remember the name of the company that sells this bike (I've seen a lot of dumb crap during my long career as a semi-professional bike blogger after all), so I plugged the phrase "cheese grater bike" into a popular search engine and that was all it took.

Speaking of dumb crap, it's been well over two years since Citi Bike debuted, and you'd think by now that people would acknowledge it as an integral part of the transportation firmament and welcome its continued growth--but you'd be wrong.  First Dorothy Rabinowitz said they were "begriming" the city, then the other Ephron said they were too blue, and now some parents are freaking out because they're putting a station near a school and OH MY GOD WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?

(Via Twitter)

"I've been here 12 years and it's disgusting," said Janine Whiteson, mother of a fifth grader at the school. "We have 650 kids, and most of them are really little. They could knock into the bikes or fall and hurt themselves. Who knows what kind of people will come in. It's disgraceful."

I agree, it is disgusting that you've been there 12 years.  Ever think there might be a connection?  And yeah, I'm sure little Timmy's going to get ensnared by a docked Citi Bike and they're going to have to call the fire department to free him with the Jaws of Life.  As for the thing about "what kind of people will come in," we all know what that means: CHILD MOLESTERS!  Come on, vans are sooo last century--everybody knows that pedophiles love bike share now:

("Want some candy little boy?")

Actually that's motion picture acting person Leonardo DiCaprio, but I plugged "citi bike child molester" into a popular search engine and that's the first thing that popped up.

Go figure.

In any case, you'll be pleased to know the parents of PS 290 aren't taking this lying down, and that a sternly-worded letter is forthcoming:

"I didn't know about it until I saw the truck there," said Ivy Rosen, who has a second grader at the school. "Out of all the blocks to put it on ... I'm sending in a letter."

In fact, I recently obtained a draft of this letter when I snuck into the PS 290 parent association meeting:

Dear Department of Transportation,

By placing a rack of brightly-colored bicycles on the same street as a school you are endangering the welfare of our children.  Did you know that falling over parked bicycles injures two and a half children nationally each decade?  And what if the children are not able to see the bikes due to color blindness, which disproportionately affects caucasian boys?  As a school with a student body that is nearly 75% white this is clearly a case of racial discrimination.  Also, who knows what kind of people will come in to use the bike?  (Hint: it's child molesters.)

Please remove these bicycles and place them in front of a less privileged school immediately.

Sincerely,


Ivy Rosen 

I plan to follow up with a letter of my own asking that they move the station to my child's school right away.

Meanwhile, it's only a matter of time before someone in this town figures out how to slap us with a helme(n)t law.  Indeed, the following story appeared on the local news yesterday, though for some reason it now seems only to exist in cached form:

(Does it count if the straps are open?)

Frangos and his team examined the kinds of injuries that turned up in their ER. The results - obtained by NY1 - found that patients who had been wearing helmets when the accidents occurred were 72 percent less likely to sustain traumatic brain injury than those who didn't protect their heads. And those who wore helmets usually practiced safer cycling behavior.

"Helmeted bicyclists were less likely to have alcohol in their system. Helmeted cyclists were more likely to be using a bike lane or a bike path. Additionally, helmeted bicyclists were less likely to lose consciousness in the event of a crash," says Dr. Frangos.

Okay.  So bike lanes and being sober keep cyclists safer.  No shit.

Frangos says with new bike lanes and Citi-Bike stations making the city increasingly bike-friendly and more cyclists on the streets there should be a re-evaluation of whether a tough helmet law is needed and should be added to Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Vision Zero" plan to end traffic deaths.

"Certainly we here at Bellevue are very supportive of that initiative. I would say that if the intent of 'Vision Zero' is to protect everybody, even a single injury, critical injury or death, is one too many. Certainly we need to find a way to educate bicyclists more as to the protective effect of helmets and encourage bicyclists more to don them," says Dr. Frangos.

Whoah.  Really?  That's the problem with Vision Zero?  Not enough plastic hats?

I wanted to learn more about Dr. Frangos's study, so I consulted the same popular search engine into which I typed "cheese grater bike" and "citi bike child molester," and I found the following abstract:

Of 699 patients, 273 (39.1%) were wearing helmets at the time of injury. Helmeted bicyclists were more likely to have a GCS of 15 (96.3% [95% Confidence Interval (CI), 93.3–98.2] vs. 87.6 [95% CI, 84.1–90.6]) at presentation. Helmeted bicyclists underwent fewer head CTs (40.3% [95% CI, 34.4–46.4] vs. 52.8% [95% CI, 48.0–57.6]) and were less likely to sustain intracranial injury (6.3% [95% CI, 2.6–12.5] vs. 19.7% [14.7–25.6]), including skull fracture (0.9% [95% CI, 0.0–4.9] vs. 15.3% [95% CI, 10.8–20.7]) and subdural hematoma (0.0% [95% CI, 0.0–3.2] vs. 8.1% [95% CI, 4.9–12.5]). Helmeted bicyclists were significantly less likely to sustain significant TBI, i.e. Head AIS ≥3 (2.6% [95% CI: 0.7–4.5] vs.10.6% [7.6–12.5]). Four patients underwent craniotomy while three died; all were un-helmeted. A multivariable logistic regression model showed that helmeted bicyclists were 72% less likely to sustain TBI compared with un-helmeted bicyclists (Adjusted Odds Ratio 0.28, 95% CI 0.12–0.61).

From this, they conclude there should be a "re-assessment of helmet laws:"

Despite substantial road safety measures in NYC, the protective impact of simple bicycle helmets in the event of a crash remains significant. A re-assessment of helmet laws for urban bicyclists is advisable to most effectively translate Vision Zero from a political action plan to public safety reality.

Now, I wanted to read the entire study, but the publisher wanted $31.50 for just 24 hours access.  This seemed unreasonable to me, and it appears I'm not alone:

Criticism and controversies
In recent years the subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticised; some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000, far above average,[15] and many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually.[16] The company has been criticised not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices. For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as among those which might be "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value" and which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[17] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University and Duke University.[18] The elevated pricing of field journals in economics, most of which are published by Elsevier, was one of the motivations that moved the American Economic Association to launch the American Economic Journal in 2009.[19]

Not only that, but you can buy a lot of beer for $31.50.

So I decided "screw it."

I was, however, able to access this study for free:

And hey, look who the principal investigator is--it's Dr. Frangos!

This study reveals some important differences between helme(n)ted and non-helme(n)ted riders:

In particular, significantly more helme(n)tless cyclists are:

1) Salmoning
2) Running lights
3) Drunk

Now, here are helme(n)ted and non-helme(n)ted riders across the Injury Severity Scale, and as you can see the outcomes are pretty similar:

In fact, given that non-helme(n)ted riders are more likely to be salmoning, running lights, or drunk, it certainly looks like the helme(n)ts themselves are almost irrelevant--which is in fact the conclusion of the study:

It certainly makes sense to me that, by and large, the sort of cyclists who wear helme(n)ts are more likely to ride safely.  However, as the study shows, this has little to do with the helme(n)t itself, which is really more of a signifier--basically a big foam "safety kippah."  Otherwise, as far as the stuff you can control, basically you shouldn't salmon, run lights, or ride drunk.

Duh.

I wonder to what degree drunken salmoning and light-running were factors in the more recent study as well, and if I've ever got $31.50 burning a hole in my jersey pocket maybe I'll check it out.

By the way, I'd think Dr. Frangos would have a more pragmatic view of Vision Zero given that he was the surgeon who amputated the leg of the British tourist who was maimed by that taxi driver--you know, the one who blamed it on a bike messenger:

(BBC calls a maiming that is "still being investigated" an "accident.")

You may recall the cabbie's chilling words:

Mr Himon said: "I am praying for her and her family. But it is not my fault. It is just an accident.
"This is what cab drivers have to deal with every day.

"It could have happened to any of us."

Mr Himon, who launched the fund for Ms Green with the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, claimed the cyclist had pounded on his car and yelled at him.

Wow.

Dr Spiros Frangos, a senior trauma surgeon at the hospital, said replanting her left leg had not been an option given its condition.

He said she was "likely" to regain the use of her right leg, which had "sustained multiple deep lacerations".

"This would not have happened if the messenger had been wearing a helmet," he added.

Lastly, moving on to life imitating bullshit, the actor who plays Lance Armstrong in the Lance Armstrong movie also doped:

“Doping is not the reason why Lance Armstrong won but it did shape a culture at the time, and it certainly shaped him, and I wanted to understand — on a personal level, on a cellular level — what that experience is like.”

Sounds intense.  I understand the actor who played Levi Leipheimer spent a lot of time shopping at the Gap, watching JAG, and listening to Third Eye Blind for similar reasons.