Washington Post Sounds the Alarm on Bicycle Accident Medical Costs—Loudly
When I bicycled in DC and suburban Maryland more than a decade ago, I got used to the Washington Post’s editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor being, on average, biased against bicycles. Now the Post has knocked cycling again by publishing a story headlined: “As bike commuting soars, so do injuries. Annual medical costs are now in the billions.”
(The byline was Ariana Eunjung Cha, and I’d put money on a bet she doesn’t commute by bicycle. But I wouldn’t put money on the likelihood of her having written the headline; that was the work of some editor in the vein of “cycling is a pain in the ass” Washington Post editorial culture.)
Billions of dollars a year! A number that sticks uncomfortably in the mind. Never mind that Ariana threw a sop to the bicycling community by saying “Bikes have transformed urban landscapes throughout America. . . and most of us agree it’s a good thing.”
To give Ariana credit she also mentioned that “researchers said they still thought cycling’s health benefits outweighed the risks.” [Italics mine.]
It’s more than “Thoughts” that confirm cycling’s net health benefits.
Thankfully, one of the Post’s respondents gave us a link to a study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that concluded “Cycle commuting was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all cause mortality.”
Net health benefits of cycling
Three caveats in regard to this study:
(1) The study data came from the UK. It’s safe to assume that the UK is more bicycle friendly than the US. I have seen designs for their roundabouts where bicycles and motor vehicles use completely separate roadways (how cool is that?). Also that health costs(!) are smaller in the UK.
(2) Embedded in the “Conclusions” is the phrase, “The findings, if causal. . . . ” (Italics mine.) Note that the carefully chosen term “associated with” skirts the issue of causation. Obviously, the most significant confounding variable is lifestyle: healthier people commute by bike more than unhealthy people, so their health costs are almost certain to be lower regardless of whether they bike, walk, drive, crawl, or fly to work.
(3) Study subjects were “recruited.” We don’t know what the recruitment incentives were.
Authors of the study allowed for the confounding variables, and appear quite thorough in their methods and types of statistical analyses, therefore I’m inclined to trust their intuition that the “associations” make a very strong case for the health benefits of bicycle commuting.
So, it’s not conclusive that the net health costs for bicycle commuters in the U.S. will be lower than for the general public. Still, Ariana Eunjung Cha might have cited some study in favor of bicycle commuting’s health benefits. If she did, the same bicycle-averse editor cut it.
Bike Friendly Policies Needed
Both the BMJ report and the Washington Post article agreed that new policies to make cycling more safe are called for. Amen. Bicyle commuting is a trend that isn’t likely to slow down no matter how dangerous the Washington Post makes it out to be, so policy changes must follow. Unfortunately, in the U.S. we are not going to find much support for new policies on the national level—more likely the reverse.
A personal unscientific aside: One last health conjecture:
Half of fatal heart attacks in the U.S. are the victim’s first and only heart attack. It is my hunch that cycling, or any form of regular strenuous exercise, might provide an early warning system. I base this on one subject: me. Hardly a statistically robust sample. But it is a fact that I discovered my heart condition on account of angina when out on the bike. If not for the angina, I might never have gone to a cardiologist, and I might have ended up like my brother, my mother, and my mother’s father, dying of their first and only heart attack coming out of the blue. I had no angina when sitting, standing, or walking casually—I don’t know when I would have gotten a signal prior to a serious heart attack, if not for the riding.
When I first experienced the angina, I searched the web for my condition, and lo! dozens of hits on men my age who cycled or ran and had nonfatal angina, which prompted them to see a cardiologist while they were still alive. Interestingly, they also had the same experience of starting a workout with angina lasting 5-10 minutes and then it went away for the rest of the ride/run. Symptoms repeated for weeks. I only stopped riding when the angina didn’t go away after 10 minutes, and in fact started getting worse. My cardiologist was happy to see me again.
(My final health conjecture: since runners obviously have fewer bad crashes when exercising, accident health costs for runners have to be lower—much lower. If not for my knees I’d run more and cycle less. [It is remarkable that I can literally ride for hours with no knee trouble, but if I merely walk for more than 45 minutes, I get inflammation of ligaments that continue for days.] So those who can, get out and run! (And forget the genetic misfortune of Jim Fixx, R.I.P.)