Research Study Proposal

I sent the following email to Lois Springsteen, RUSA president, a few months ago.   I summarized her response (rejecting the proposal) following the email.


Lois ---

I am writing to you in your capacity as president of RUSA.  I just
finished
my 600 for PBP.   Anyway, lots of time to think and so since I was on the
ride, I thought a lot about safety.   Let me put things into perspective.
Since I have been a member of RUSA there has been approximately 1 death a
year on a brevet.  That is a very very high number, it translates into a
1:5000 annual chance of dying.  If all Americans were members of RUSA,
that
would make brevet riding the 7th leading killer in the country.   And this
is just death, there are probably many more serious injuries that we dont
hear about.

What I would like to ask you to consider is bringing to the board a
proposal
to study the problem.  Please dont misunderstand me.  I know our sport is
dangerous and this goes with the territory.   But what I am asking for is
your co-operation in doing a scientific analysis of the dangers.   As you
know I am a professor, and the one thing my research has taught me is that
you learn when you do a study.  In this case I believe if we were to put
in
the resources (which I think are relatively minor) there is a potential to
make substantive gains.   Before there were seat belts people accepted a
level of risk in driving that we would not accept today.      By studying
the problem we have not eliminated road deaths.  But we have made driving
much safer, with absolutely no sacrifice to the driving experience.   I
would like to see if something similar could be achieved in randonneuring.

OK, so here is my proposal.  If you would like me to write something
formal
up so you can bring it to the board, I would be very happy to do so.
Given
how much statistics you already keep, the additional burden of data
collection is minor.   My proposal is to start tracking major and minor
injuries.  For the minor injuries, what I would like you to consider doing
is adding a piece of paper to the brevet card that is required of each
rider.  I would be very easy to fill out, consisting of a check box for
various minor injuries (numbness, pain, etc, I/we would have to spend time
working out what best to put on in) and  a check box for a crash with a
place for a description.   I presume RBAs enter the brevet information
online, so they would enter this information at the same time.   If not,
you
could just email the pieces of paper to me and I would enter it.   

If we define a major injury as anytime medical personal are involved, then
I
would like you to consider requiring RBAs to fill out a short report
anytime
a rider on one of their brevets suffers a major injury.  Again the report
would not take much time to fill out.   It would contain the brevet id,
the
time and mile of the incident, and what happened.  We could have check
boxes
for the level of severity too.

With this information we could do a detailed investigation that I think
could prove invaluable.  Since I do this kind of thing for a living, I
would
be happy to do all the legwork once the data is collected.  Because
serious
injuries are much less frequent, it might take a long time to get enough
data to get reliable results.   So we could also consider using historical
data --- you have most of it, all we would need to do is ask RBAs to
recall
any major injuries from memory.   Much less reliable than what I propose
for
going forward, but something  to consider.  My own feeling is that safety
is
really very important, the sooner we have data the better it is.

Anyway, please consider this seriously.   I do think the board has a
responsibility to make brevet riding as safe as possible.

--- Jonathan





Lois responded, on behalf of the board, by rejecting the idea.  Citing other statistics, she felt that 2.7 fatalities per 10 million miles rode on brevets was in the "same order of magnitude" at the US national average of 1.3 fatalities per 10 million miles rode.   It was this response that prompted me to run for the board, because even accepting these numbers (I have not verified any of them), brevet ridings is TWICE as dangerous as bike riding in general, which of course includes people much less experienced that brevet riders and so one would expect that our average should be lower than the national average.   What for our current board appears to be an acceptable level of danger, is not acceptable from my perspective.  Surely, as experienced cyclists, we should be able to do better than the national average?

An article I wrote last summer on safety that the American Randonneur refused to publish

It’s Labor Day weekend, and I have just finished my Saturday afternoon ride.  Feeling tired (long week) and with not much to do I decide to read the latest issue of American Randonneur.  As I flip through the pages I am astounded to read yet another obituary to a RUSA member killed on a bicycle.   By my count, four riders in the three years I have been an RUSA member have died actually riding brevets.   The average number of RUSA members in those 3 years is about 5000, so my back of the envelope calculation, based on an admittedly very short (and thus unreliable) sample size, gives an annual probability of a RUSA member being killed while randonneuring of 1:5000.   Let me put this number in perspective.  If everybody in the United States was a member of RUSA, then this mortality rate would make randonneuring the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.  This rate is half the rate for all accidents, that is, as a member of RUSA you chance of dying in an accident is approximately 50% higher than the general population.[1]  Motorcycle riding doesn’t even come close to that.

It’s time to take a step back here.   It is not news to us that the sport of randonneuring is dangerous.  But much more dangerous that motorcycle riding?  Are we really doing all we can do minimize this danger? No, I don’t think we are and I think it is time for this organization to take a hard look at this issue.

There is quite a lot of lip service paid to safety.   For example, there are a host of night riding requirements.  But has anybody questioned why we ride at night at all?  Surely the safest way to ride at night is to avoid it?  I am well aware that the longer brevets require some amount of night riding, I am not questioning that.   But how often to RBAs minimize the hours of night riding?   Based on the number of start times that do not coincide with first light, not often enough.[2]

What about route safety?  When you take a step back and think about it, it is unbelievable that there are no safety requirements whatsoever in route design.   The only thing stopping an RBA from sending riders down I80 is his or her own judgment.   We don’t leave opening and closing times or light requirements up to the RBA to decide yet we allow them the latitude to have riders ride at night on a shoulder of a road with cars whizzing by at 80 mph.

Then there is the weather.   Riding in the wet and cold for hours on end is not safe. Obviously an RBA has no control over the actual weather, but some things are predictable.   For example, in San Francisco in the summer, the coast roads are almost always shrouded in heavy fog in the early morning.   Yet on a recent brevet we found ourselves riding, first thing in the morning, along the coast in completely predictable heavy fog (on a road with cars averaging 65 mph). 

So little attention is paid to the effect of fatigue on the bike that as far as I can see most riders take the possibility of falling asleep on the bike as one just one more hazard.   Falling asleep while riding. Can you imagine what your friends would say if you approached car driving this way?   In fact, to my mind, continuing to ride when falling asleep is a possibility is equivalent to riding will intoxicated.   It is utterly irresponsible.   The finish at all cost mentality that dominates our organization indirectly encourages this behavior.  I wonder how many of the deaths on brevets were indirectly caused by fatigue? My guess is that some of the accidents, at least to some extent, were attributable to the bad decision making that inevitably sets in when our body needs a rest but we ignore it.

Of course, I can hear most readers now --- there is no “finish at all costs” mentality at RUSA.   But is that really true?  Take the article by Paul Johnson about finishing a brevet in the latest issue of American Randonneur.   I hate to pick on Paul because his article was one of the better ones on this subject in that is actually does mention safety.  Yet, even so, safety is relegated to the end of the article as a bit of an afterthought.   The main message is keep riding.   Don’t listen to your brain.   Sure there are low points in any long ride, but not listening to your brain is a bad idea.  If your brain says stop, then often stopping is the best (and safest) thing to.   Rather than finish at all costs, we should finish safely.   And if we are serious about that, that means that if we are not sure, we err on the side of quitting.   Let’s be honest with ourselves, that philosophy is not the ethos of our organization.

Then there are all the other injuries that riders sustain riding brevets.  Numbness (fingers, toes and reproductive organs), saddle sores, neck injuries, knee injuries to name a few.  Although obviously not as serious as a bike accident, these injuries are still nevertheless serious and in most cases preventable.   We should be encouraging riders to quit once they get these injuries, not turn them into heroes for persevering though and compounding the damage.    Better yet, we should work harder to prevent them altogether.  In the lead up to the last PBP, the American Randonneur had article after article on preparation.  It even had an article on learning French.   Yet I cannot remember a single article on safety.  Now I am sure some of this is me --- safety was not high enough on my priority list, so perhaps there were numerous articles, but I didn’t read them.  But that is symptomatic of the problem ---  like most others, I didn’t take safety seriously enough.   In fact, I did not even realize one of the most common injuries (and the one I sustained) --- numbness in the fingers --- was even a concern.   To make matters worse, ACP exacerbates this problem by outlawing aerobars.   The fact is that I did not meet one rider after PBP who did not sustain some form of injury on PBP.  Many of these injuries are preventable and we should do more to educate ourselves on how to prevent them.

Ok, enough bitching.  What can be done?   Well, I would like our organization to stop paying lip service to safety and really make safety the highest priority.   My guess is a lot can be done to bring the danger of injury down.  First we (as in our club, RUSA) should initiate a research study using the available data with the object of determining how extensive the safety problems are and how best to address them.  (As an academic researcher, I am happy to volunteer my services in this endeavor.) Second, we should get rid of the prejudice in the U.S. against personal support.  I see this as symptomatic of a misplaced macho attitude to long distance biking.   Self-support is fine if it does not interfere with safety, but that depends on the individual.  To make people feel second class for having support, as RUSA does, is irresponsible.  For some people support can make the difference between a safe and unsafe ride.   Often when fatigue sets in your own judgment becomes seriously impaired.  Having somebody who knows you who can tell the difference between a low point and a serious problem can literally be lifesaving.  Third, put some resources into finding true experts (not self-proclaimed experts whose only qualification is that they ride a lot) who know about and hopefully contribute to the research on the injuries ultacyclists sustain and pay these experts (if necessary) to educated the RUSA membership on injury prevention.  The same is true of fatigue prevention.

There is no guarantee that any of the above suggestions will improve safety.   Nor do I wish to claim that they are the only possible improvements, or even the best place to start. But I do think it is time to at least start.  An annual probability of dying of 1:5000 is too high to just accept. 

---

[1] Source: Melonie Heron, “Deaths: Leading Causes for 2004,” NVSS, Volume 56, Number 5, Table 1, available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_05.pdf

[2] Of course, the implicit assumption here is that night riding is more dangerous than riding during the day.  Although I believe it is quite likely to be true, I have no evidence on this, although in a private communication with our president, Lois Springsteen, she informed me that at some point RUSA looked into this and could find no relation between accidents and night riding.   That, of course, suggests that riding at night is more dangerous because there are many more hours of day riding than night riding.