So it's high time I link to it in my blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Instead of merely slapping on a helmet and thinking you're bulletproof, though, take a look at this excellent site on bike safety: How To Not Get Hit By Cars.
Whether you wear a helmet or not, the primary goal for safety should be to avoid an accident in the first place. And this site explains the dangers logically and clearly.
I remember being very impressed by the site the first time I found it a few years ago. It changed the way I ride on the streets. I hope it will help improve your safety as well.
I'm not going to concentrate on anything --- I think I might have said this in the show before --- when I, I don't drive that often, but when I do drive... it tends to be the longer distance drive, when we go to inlaws and stuff, and I'm driving for three and four hours, I come away from that drive with the most amazing mental headache. Because I've been concentrating just so much. Because if you don't come away from a long drive with a screaming headache, you've been on auto pilot. If you've been on auto pilot because ``oh, I know those roads!" --- no, you don't, because around the next corner, there's a tractor, there's a trailer, there's a cyclist, there's a pedestrian.
Anything could happen, perhaps even more so, on the roads you're familiar with. If you're on auto pilot in a car, that's a huge dangerous signal. You add in all these other distractions on top --- I don't hate on mobile telephones in cars, I hate on anything that distracts you. Just anything. You should be paying so much attention to that road. Not because you can kill a cyclist. You could kill yourself! You could kill another driver, you could kill anybody, because these are very fast, very heavy bits of machinery going along very narrow, in your analogy of an airplane[2], it's got a very narrow piece of real estate. And you're going so fast, you look down for one second and --- I'm sure if I Google I could find the statistics of exactly how far you travel --- but if you're travelling 70 mph, you look down for one second you could have gone through so many different stop lights, so many pedestrians who are just crossing the road at that point in time. You just can't take your eye off the road for a second.
And I think again on the show, I've mentioned this, another one of my bug bears is when you see TV presenters who are doing pieces to camera, when they're driving in a car. It's now a standard TV thing. You interview somebody while they're driving. And I hate that so much! How can they remember their lines, and do all these things, and drive? And most of the time they're not being pulled along on a trailer like they do it in Hollywood. These are people genuinely driving. And at some point on these blooper shows, you're going to see these cars smashing into stuff, and people go ``Oh, isn't that funny." No, it's not funny. You are distracting a driver by pointing a TV camera at them. Or, in just normal life, you are talking to somebody, or you are asking them to look at you. And you mustn't do that. The driver is driving something phenominally, unbelievably dangerous that could kill your sister, your brother, your mother. It could kill you. You want that driver to be paying 100% attention. Anything, anything! that takes that attention away, whether it's a burger, an apple, a phone call, a text, anything, has got to be absolutely, socially unacceptable.
[1] answering the cell phone in a car
[2] David Bernstein was arguing earlier in the podcast that if he can fly a plane in three dimensions while talking on the radio, he should be able to talk on the phone while driving a car in two.
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