Fairfax Bike Fatalties and Ethnic Generalizations

Last week, David Alpert criticized the Post story on the deaths of Abdelouahid Chadli and Gary Thorne for the way it veered into an inappropriate stereotyping of Latino immigrant cyclists.

There could be some valid public safety conclusions to be drawn from looking at racial and economic factors in cyclist crashes, but this article doesn't come close to demonstrating any.

And a letter to the editor by Jim Wilson of Warrenton expressed a similar sentiment. 

It is fair to assume that workers who must bicycle to and from work in the dark are from a lower economic strata, but to link cycling deaths to ethnicity is absurd. Were any statistics kept describing the cultural identities of the vehicle drivers who caused these deaths? Perhaps a majority were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Equally absurd.

Update: As noted in the comments Ashley Halsey responded to Alpert's post. He sounds pretty reasonable (and I already knew he was a cyclist). I'm not going to excerpt the comment, as you kind of need to read the whole thing.

Comments

[SJE]

"absurdity" has long described the general tone of bike accident reporting

[SJE]

"It is fair to assume that workers who must bicycle to and from work in the dark are from a lower economic strata" I don't know that this is a fair assumption either. On one sense, it assumes that people ride because they cannot afford a car, not that they prefer to ride for myriad reasons. The number of commuters on expensive bikes suggests that poverty is not the reason. The other aspect is that only the poor work late enough to have to ride in the dark: this is flat out wrong. Income is generally correlated with working hours, and most of the high earners in this region work long hours.

[Washcycle]

SJE, I think the assumption is built in to the definition. "workers who MUST bicycle..." In other words, he's talking specifically about those who can not afford a car.

[SJE]

Yes: but if someone is killed on a bike, working late, how does he know that they MUST bicycle? Is this fundamental attribution error?

[washcycle]

He's not saying that anyone killed while biking home after working late is poor.

What he's saying is that these three men were bike commuting in the dark and we know they were among the working poor. There is no assumption there. Wilson's point is that their commuting choice has more to do with their economic position than their ethnicity and I have to say I agree.

The working poor are probably over-represented among bike commuters and bike commuter fatalities. Especially in suburban and rural communities.

[NeilB]

I don't understand what any of this has to do with Abdelouahid Chadli's unfortunate death. He was not Latino, he was not among the working poor but was rather a high school student, and he was killed when a driver veered off the road and onto the bike path where Chadli was riding. It was inappropriate for the Post article to even mention the factors that (might) relate to Latinos and the working poor since they are not at all relevant to Chadli's death.

[MB]

Has anyone been in contact with the author of that piece? As best I can tell, he's a serious cyclist himself, and I'd like to hear more about the reasoning behind his focus (or lack of).

[contrarian]

If you click on the link to the GGW posting by David Alpert the Post reporter has a response in the comments. And yes, he claims to be a cyclist.

[Chris]

Not to get all political, but...

While I agree that the working poor's commuting choice has more to do with economic position than ethnicity, I don't see how one can ignore that in our area, that ethnicity seems to be primarily Latino. I think this is relavent because this is a population that has unfortunately become a particular political target in our society. If you're Latino, and you're poor, the assumption by many is that you're illegally in the United States (even though a huge percentage of the Salvadorans living in the DC area are here legally). The current political climate dehumanizes these people, and frankly, encourages resentment (it's not just in Arizona).

For these reasons, although I don't have any statistical evidence to back this up, I would assert that there's a strong likilihood that this demographic is noticeably more vulnerable than the rest of the cycling public - as cyclists, they are invisible; as the working poor, they are disregarded; and as Latinos, they are de-humanized.