“Your 25-pound bicycle is no match for a 10,000 pound truck.” You’ve probably heard that before.
So, if you collide with a 10,000 pound truck, the impact will be much, much worse than if you collide with a passenger car, or another bicyclist, or a pedestrian, because the truck weighs so many times more than your bicycle.
By the same reasoning, you should be much worse off yet if you simply fall and collide with the planet Earth. It is so much heavier than that truck…
Hmm, but we’ve all fallen off our bicycles a few times, mostly without serious injury.
I don’t want to collide with a truck — or a car, or another bicyclist, or the planet Earth. But let’s look at some basic physics.
First of all, the mass of the bicycle isn’t the issue. The rider accounts for most of the mass of the bicycle/rider system.
But also, the severity of a collision doesn’t increase directly with mass. It depends on the severity of the impact.
Consider two bicyclists, a perfect match for each other, riding toward each other at the same speed and colliding exactly head-on. They will both come to a complete stop. This impact would be the same if you put a brick wall, or a sheet of paper, between the two bicyclists.
Now, suppose that the truck is headed toward the bicyclist at the same speed as the other bicyclist. How much more severe is the impact?
Not hundreds of times, but four times. The energy dissipated in a head-on crash is as the square of the speed. The square of 2 is 4. The truck is so much more massive that the bicyclist is pushed back at almost the truck’s speed. It’s almost the same as riding into a brick wall at twice the bicyclist’s speed.
Severity of impact is much more about speed than about mass. The severity of a bicyclist’s collision with a motor vehicle is almost entirely in proportion to the square of closing speed, all other things being equal. The only exception is if you go underneath and get run over. Then, the vehicle’s mass does matter. Getting run over either by a car or a or by a truck is very likely deadly.