Wednesday sees me off to the second Active Travel National Conference in Perth, Scotland. Lots of stuff i'm interested in and also quite relevant as i attempt to convince my daughters school to lift its ban on cycling. Yes that's correct, they dont let children cycle to school as its unsafe! Dying of obesity related diseases in later life is apparently fine, but cycling to school is out. We are at least some way to changing the policy so the conference should help me to load up on amnuition. In terms of cycling the risk of fatality is fairly low as risks go, Macdonald (2006) reported that the health benefits gained from daily or regular cycling outweighed the loss of life years through cycling fatalities by a factor of around 20 to one. Another study, Wardlaw (2002) reported that the actual risk is one cyclist death per 33 million kilometres of cycling.
References
Macdonald, B. (2006). Valuing the benefits of cycling. Draft Report to Cycling England. SQW Ltd.
Wardlaw, M. (2002). Assessing the actual risks faced by cyclists. Traffic engineering & control, 43(11), 420-424
No comments:
Post a Comment