To be fair…we got those in the 70s. I certainly had my share of jabs. (happy I got them…just saying)
Seatbelts and helmets existed back then too. We just didn’t use them as much.
Pretty sure child molesters have always been there but “stranger danger” wasn’t taught as much.
People were unaware it was not strangers at all- “Stranger danger” turned out to be a bad idea- but someone you trusted- uncle, swim coach, pastor, etc.
Another factor is that cycling has become more acceptable to the mainstream. it used to be that an adult who rode a bike was either a loser without a car or an exercise obsessed weirdo.
The problem with all statements that recount personal dangers taken by individuals “back in the day” where the speaker says “…and I turned out just great, so I don’t see the problem!” is that the individuals who did come to harm don’t usually get to tell their side of the story.
Good point. Although, as an uncle, it bugs me that uncles get a bad wrap. Not my fault I am an uncle.
Yeah, classic Survivorship Bias.
The “I stood up in the back of an open pick-up while my Dad drove drunk at night with the headlights off, and I turned out just fine!” Argument.
Reply: " How do you know if your whole life hasn’t been just the last flailings of a dying brain?"
My partner is a pediatrician and spent some of her career in a local public health department managing the rebuilding of playground equipment to safer standards. She says much of her motivation came from the constant flow of horrible injuries she dealt with at the local children’s hospital.
By coincidence, just yesterday she directed me to deal with a big bucket in the yard that had filled with rainwater, before the grandchildren came over.
Ah, yes-The Jacob’s Ladder Gambit.
I feel like this is a big missing piece of the puzzle. It’s hard to make sense of the fatality statistics without knowing the corresponding ridership in those years. If ridership increased faster than the fatalities, then bicycling has actually gotten safer over time. But those numbers don’t seem easy to come by.
One thing that jumps out is that the total number of bicycle deaths hasn’t really changed much, staying roughly the same around 900-1000 a year from the 70s till now. What did change is the age distribution… more and more 20+ males got killed, but fewer and fewer males under 20.
Other stats suggest that the bicycle fatalities are usually in urban areas, overwhelmingly male, later in the evening and at night, on major roads outside of intersections, sometimes without helmets, and sometimes involving alcohol. Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be any big change in the number of people who bike to work.
All this suggests that maybe it’s some other phenomenon rather than car design or helmets… like maybe increased urbanization rates of male working age people who go drinking at night and end up riding bikes to their deaths…? Hard to say.
This is all kinda a tangent, but also maybe not… like if more kids were simply staying home and not wandering around on their bikes as much, it makes sense that there’d be fewer child bicycle deaths, even if it’s become deadlier for older men.
Shrug. Interesting to think about.
Whew.
I have to note: we cannot and should not make all things for kids completely risk free. They are going to get hurt. But we can limit the chances that those hurts will kill or disable them. And have to some degree of success.
When I was in grade school in the 1970s, I can’t remember a time when at least one of my 30 or so classmates wasn’t wearing a cast. Fast forward to the 1990s, as a teacher, a kid in a cast was a rare thing.
Improved healthcare is a factor, but I really think that improved automobile safety, which includes car seats, is the main reason.
The #1 killer of people from the ages of about 1 week, to the mid 40s, remains automobile accidents. This does change in some demographics, but overall, that’s the reason.
The American number of car crash fatalities peaked at about 56,000 in the mid 1970s, when the population was maybe 2/3 of what it is now. That number has stabilized at around 30,000 a year.
The problem with car crash (please don’t call them “accidents” because that presupposes an unavoidable situation with no fault to be levied) statistics is that they don’t tell you much without breaking down in-vehicle versus out-of-vehicle victims. In other words, drivers/passengers (occupants) are safer than ever, but pedestrians, cyclists, and bystanders, are not. Both groups had been declining for a while, but the latter has seen a noticeable uptick in the last decade.
The sad thing is that a large number of Americans want to bike, and the sort of distances most people cover in a day-to-day basis are very bikable. However, decades of automobile-only development policy has made made it nearly impossible to be anything other than a drive-to recreational activity or limited to the fearless. Even in urban areas, many an apartment bike room is littered with dusty bikes that were tried once or twice and given up on because their owners found the reality to be unpleasant at best, and terrifying or injurious at worst.
The statistics are skewed by this as well. Fewer pedestrians and cyclists are out and about because most of America is a shit place for them to be in without a car. “We drive little Johnny to school because it’s too dangerous with so much traffic around.” So there’s fewer of them to get hit as non-occupants, except in highly urbanized often downtown or near-downtown neighborhoods. I’m sure that lack of people also makes the danger seem less than it actually is. Unfortunately there’s no statistic telling how many vulnerable road users were injured/killed versus how many were potentially able to be injured/killed. We have per-mile-traveled stats for motor vehicle collisions, but not for the rest of road users. If ped/bike deaths are down by 50% over some period of time, but there’s only 25% as many of them out there as there used to be, then it’s actually twice as dangerous now as it was before.
My mother ALWAYS made us wear seatbelts and we were very used to it. But friends who rode with us in carpools and stuff NEVER wanted to wear their seatbelts and griped about being made to do so.
People just didn’t think they needed them–that maybe wearing them was ever MORE dangerous than not wearing them. Many people didn’t believe or trust the safety information available. They did this because they just didn’t want to wear belts so they started making up shit (like wearing a seatbelt might trap you in a burning car, etc.).
It’s like during the pandemic folks just didn’t want to wear masks so they ignored good science saying why they should and “did their own research” to find idiots on the web supporting their view with no supporting evidence. We haven’t changed.
Yeah. I sat in the middle of the front bench seat while a friend of the family drove us at 70 mph down the highway in the 1970s at least once. I didn’t regularly wear a seatbelt until I was in my 20s
A good friend of mine in grade school and high school was like that. Once we were old enough to be driving, he adamantly refused to wear a seat belt, because he was more afraid of being somehow trapped in a burning car than of being injured by being thrown around inside a car in a collision.
(He died in his late 40s, under tragic circumstances, which had nothing to do with automobiles or seat belts, but a lot to do with poor life choices. 
)
You can Google seatbelt bruises. It’s what you get in an accident when the seatbelt saves your life.
They are awful looking (NSFW) but also a reminder that it saved that person’s life. A small price to pay in the bigger scheme of things I think.
I was stupid as a teen and not wearing a seatbelt. Now it is a rule I (almost) never break (back seat of a taxi going a mile or two I might not bother when in city traffic that barely ever gets above 15 mph.)