A significant proportion of automobile collisions with cyclists occur because automobile drivers do not see the cyclists until too late to prevent an accident. In the United States, despite years of flawed utilization of traffic safety technology and procedures and waning interest in the increase in traffic fatalities, cyclists remain very vulnerable, with little improvement in safety on the road, and they are dying preventable deaths. For example, even though Americans drove less in 2020 during the Pandemic, fatalities of cyclists on the road in the United States increased five percent to 891 in that year [1]. Why is it worth studying the subject of decreasing cycle crashes with automobiles to decrease the mortality and disability of cyclists in the United States? I believe it is more than a casual attitude toward cycle safety on the driver's part but a general attitudinal malaise to traffic safety on the part of the American public. The United States had 38,680 fatalities on the road in 2020, up from 7.2% of fatalities in 2019 [2]. By contrast, the European Commission reported that 18,800 people were killed on the road, a decrease of 17% from 2019, making Europe the safest region in the world in traffic safety [3]. There has been almost no awareness of this on the part of the public, nor has there been a public outcry in the United States. The only way that cyclists can increase their chances of surviving on the road is to proactively take action to make themselves more visible to motorists because, according to Laurie Beck, an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 'Nationwide, you're more than twice as likely to die while riding a bike than riding a car, per trip,' in the United States [4]. [From: Introduction]
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:82475 |
| Date | 28 December 2022 |
| Creators | Robert, Denis L. |
| Publisher | Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:conferenceObject, info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-813602, qucosa:81360 |
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