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New research points to risky moves people on bikes make, especially at busy intersections. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Be Careful Out There
Warm weather means more people on bicycles. But bike riding can be risky behavior; each year, more than 700 people in the U.S. die as a result of bicycle-related injuries, and children are at particularly high risk. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reports that in 2001, children 15 years old and younger comprised 59 percent of bike-related injuries in the U.S.
"We were interested in looking at how development influences the decisions they make and their capabilities to get across intersections, to see influences of growth and development on what is really very important health issue," says Kearney. "There are about 500,000 treatments every year in emergency rooms for bicycling injures, so we knew this was an important problem and provided us an opportunity to get at it in a way that's hard to do in the real world."
Rather than taking to the mean streets, the 60 study participants, consisting of ten- and twelve-year-olds and adults, each rode a stationary bike through a life-sized computer simulation of busy roads and six intersections. With continuous car traffic coming at them at 25 or 35 miles per hour, the riders had to wait for gaps they judged were okay for crossing.
image: University of Iowa
Kearney and his team found that children and adults chose the same gaps, but children left less time between themselves and the approaching vehicle when they crossed the intersection. Compared to adults, kids took longer to reach the roadway. These results, published in the journal Child Development, suggest that kids find it harder than adults to coordinate their own movement with that of cars. "They're slower to initiate their motion and it takes them longer to get up to speed and cross the intersection, and this leaves them less time to spare," say Kearney. "It means it's a more risky operation for them than for adults."
Ronald Hughes, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center, says the simulator technology provides a safe way to study these potentially dangerous traffic situations. "Doing these studies in the street, there is risk," he points out. "Simulation for bicyclists and motorists represents a way to exert control over the environment and not expose the subjects to a level of risk present in the real world."
But this control over the environment is also a limitation to using a simulator. "Moving through simulated traffic is not the same as moving through real traffic," Kearney points out. "In real traffic, you're very aware of the dangers, whereas in simulation, even though they take it very seriously, it's not the same as real traffic. One of the things about crossing traffic in real roads is drivers see you, and if drivers are aware of you and you're crossing the gap, they'll hopefully slow down for you as they get closer. In our experiment, we programmed the cars so they go at a constant rate, very tightly controlled circumstances, so the cars continue on at constant velocity and won't slow down for you. We have to do more research to look at the perceptual motor basic skills and the relationships between them to understand the detailed causes that underlie this."
In the meantime, Kearney recommends that parents make sure they coach cycling kids to be cautious when they cross intersections. This research appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of the journal Child Development and was funded by the National Science Foundation.
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