There are more falls, no question. But any given fall shouldn’t be any worse on a uni, given the same circumstances. If Jamey had been on a bike and biffed on that same section, the fall would have been just as bad or worse. But most mountain bikers don’t ride stuff like that.
My comment about not having a Schlumpf wasn’t aimed at you Ben - I know you’ve ridden one, and you’re probably significantly better than me on one, so have more to back up your claims than I do.
Though IIRC the original question was about the relative danger when travelling at the same speed - this is after all a Schlumpf thread, not a general unicycle safety one, and I think somebody was speculating about riding at bike speeds given a higher geared version. Do you dispute that a guni would be more dangerous when travelling at the same speed as a bike?
There’s a disconnect there – could become a problem if you don’t work on it. 
In other words, back in my earlier (and younger) days of riding when I was a lot more experimental, there were plenty of falls at (ungeared) speed. I trained myself to tuck and roll when appropriate, and it became reflexive enough to reduce the damage on many occasions.
Sure you can. All you need is a bunch of statistical data, which is what we don’t have. Of course you would also have to define what is meant by “safer”, which would be a big part of the equation. High injury crashes are usually associated with either speed, or height. Riding really fast, being hit by a motor vehicle, or falling down a steep slope, for instance. Bikes go faster, but unicyclists can still fall off cliffs and get hit by cars.
We don’t know that. One hopes we would hear about it if it happened, but that’s probably up to a rider’s family more than anything else. A unicyclist who dies on a mountain trail in Japan, and whose family doesn’t want publicity, we might not have heard about it. That said, I would accept an assertion of MUni = ~0.
I don’t agree, because of the way the rider attaches to the vehicle. Bike crashes usually put riders down in different positions than unicyclists. So the types of injuries are likely to be different, even at an equal speed. Both could be bad.
All else being equal, the GUni rider will have more falls, but I see no reason to believe that those falls would be worse than the bike falls.
Here’s some data. I estimate that Ride The Lobster had about 1800 exposure-hours of road racing on unicycles, with one abandonment due to injury (broken leg). 1800 hours is about two days’ worth of the Tour de France, so a similar rate would suggest about 10 riders would abandon due to injury. In 2013, 27 riders abandoned the TdF (not counting two who finished outside time limits). I’m not going to go back and try to dig up previous years, but 27 is not an unusual number. And these are the top pros; in the lower levels of bike racing there are a lot more crashes.
I’m willing to assert that at current speeds, road bike racing is several times more likely to result in injury than road unicycle racing.
What do you mean by all ‘else being equal’ and ‘current speeds’? Is that the current avg speed of a bike vs the current avg speed of a unicycle in a race?
You are comparing two sports with vastly different avg speeds and concluding that the slower one is safer because the rate of abandonment is lower in the slower sport? Isn’t that what you’d expect?
The mechanism of falling would be completely different, because their body position and landing position is different.
It would be like saying that if a tennis player biffed whilst trying to hit a ball on that same section, it would have been just as bad or worse. We simply can’t make that supposition.
Ok, I referring to either mountainbiking or road cycling vs MUni and road uni.
Freestyle or flatland BMX would be closer to unicycling in terms of lower leg and ankle injuries.
Firstly, why don’t we compare injury rates per mile rather than per hour if we’re wanting to compare the dangers of different ways of covering distance - after all, it’s not really much of a benefit to the unicycle rider if he has half as many injuries per hour if he has to spend twice as long riding to cover the same distance. This year’s TdF was 3404km - 198 started, 169 finished, so if we assume the DNFs did half the race that’s a total of 624634 bicycle km. According to available info RtL was an 800km relay with 35 teams - now it appears 21km was a TT which all riders took part in, so I make that a total of 800x35 + 21*70 = 29470 unicycle km. In other words the TdF this year had a bit over 21 times the number of person km.
Now let’s look at the reasons for people abandoning the TdF - I started at the end and immediately found that Westra who pulled out on the final stage was ill, not injured. Stage 19 - Boeckmans was exhausted not injured. Stage 18 - Bonnet sick and exhausted, Lutsenko feverish. Stage 16 - Pinot ill, Van Poppel pulled out by team due to age. Stage 9 - Dennis withdrawn due to lack of experience. I’ll stop there -that’s 7 riders who didn’t abandon due to injury so we’re already down to at the most 20 abandoning due to crashes and I’m only about halfway through - I know that some of the others I haven’t checked were also ill, and didn’t find any info for some, I’ve also not included a couple who withdrew because they were struggling but had crashed earlier in the race. So we’ve already proved that the TdF has a lower withdrawal rate per km due to injury than RtL (I’m assuming you weren’t trying to prove that bicycle riding is more likely to make you ill) - your final assertion is incorrect.
So then we look at the differences in the riding - in the TdF riders are shoulder to shoulder at high speed in a situation where it’s easy to touch a wheel - I presume that wasn’t generally the case for most riders in RtL? Most of the crashes and injuries come about due to a difference in circumstance between the events, not the danger of riding a bicycle.
Finally we come back to the point Ken made - I was interested in a comparison between riding a unicycle at the same speed as a bike, something your data spectacularly fails to provide.
Of course I could have always just pointed out that 1 injury in the RtL does not make for good statistical significance - you’ll find that the error bars are pretty big!
…this whole strand appears to have started on page 88, with discussion over a higher geared Schlumpf to do bicycle type speeds, some suggesting that would be dangerous and that if you wanted to go fast you should get a bike, and somebody suggesting that it would be no more dangerous than a bike to go at bike speeds on a uni.
I think we all accept that in general current unis are safer than bikes because of the lower speed (though that’s not certainly not a given, because some of us never fall off bikes, but we almost all fall off unis - personally I do fall off bikes when going to the BMX track or riding off-road, but not for many years on road, which certainly isn’t the case for riding a Schlumpf on the road).
Yes, because unicycles are slower, I personally would expect falls to be less injurious.
Yes, it’s what I’d expect. But it sounds like it’s not what you’d expect. You have asserted numerous times that unicyclists are more likely to be injured when they fall.
Injuries/deaths per exposure hour is generally the way to assess risk. It would only make sense to asses risk per mile if the miles were held fixed, for example if you are trying to figure out who is more likely to get injured, the guy riding across the country on a unicycle or on a bike. For a given event, or a person’s given lifetime, exposure hours usually make more sense.
I think it’s safe to assume that at the same speed, unicyclists would experience more injuries than bikes, because they experience more falls.
Obviously. But it’s better than n=1.
Perhaps it wasn’t clear what I was referring to. It’s worth separating out ‘minor’ orthopaedic and soft tissue injuries with life-threatening ones. One occurs frequently, one (hopefully) doesn’t.
You’re more likely to die or have a life threatening injury from high speed crashes on a bike- but that’s from head and visceral injuries. If you include these, then of course bikes are more dangerous. They go faster and they’re more commonly used for commuting alongside motor-vehicles. The majority of injuries are not in this category
For the soft tissue or orthopaedic injuries I’ve seen unicyclists with- they’re more likely to occur and more serious. They’re weighted towards lower limb injuries, and happen at much lower speeds that bikes.
Yes, you’ve asserted that. I don’t think it’s true. It’s certainly not supported by any data.
None of the MUni riders around here have crashed out with lower limb injuries, in the 10+ years we’ve been riding. On Rob’s Ride in Santa Cruz, a 20-mile big wheel ride done every week by a mixed group of bikes and unicycles, all the significant injuries have been to bikers. And in RTL, with 105 riders, most of them “Crash-5” level riders, we had one crash out in 1800 exposure hours. And frankly, I would have been surprised to see much more than that, because my experience riding with hundreds of different unicyclists is that they don’t get injured very often unless they’re playing basketball (and those injuries tend to be similar to foot basketball injuries; fingers, wrists, and ankles).
Not when you’re comparing modes of transport it isn’t.
Of course it is, unless you’re assessing what happens when you substitute different modes of transport for a specific route. We’d never do a unicycle race on the scale of the Tour de France, therefore the number of kilometers covered by the Tour de France vs. RTL is not relevant to the comparison.
Let’s say you’re thinking about going into either marathon running or NASCAR racing. You do some research and find that NASCAR racers get injured about once every 10,000 miles, and runners get injured about once every 9,000 miles. Would you conclude that running is more dangerous than NASCAR?
Yes, if you get run over by the NASCAR while running! 
The problem with data is there isn’t any good data (yet), except our own experiences.
Now, I consider the fact I’ve had two ORIFs in unicycling to be significant. A Weber C fracture dislocation, and an open Tib/Fib fracture, a wrist fracture, and AC-joint dislocation and multiple sprained ankles. The first two are pretty nasty as far as orthopaedic injuries go.
On our last Unitour, we had one wrist fracture and rib fracture, and prior to the tour, a hip fracture requiring surgery.
Most of the serious uni riders I’ve known have sprained ankles at some stage. I’ve seen far more unicyclists require surgical intervention for ankle fractures and knee ligament surgery (I won’t name them, but you know at least a couple of these people).
In 8yrs working in ED, I’ve yet to see a bicyclist require ankle or knee surgery. They’re mostly upper limb or abrasion type injuries, and the majority require only a plaster or an MUA.
Or, you don’t see them because they go to the morgue instead of the ED.
A factor I haven’t seen mentioned yet is the ability to guide the bike crash and the inability to guide the uni crash. I don’t think most bike crashes “just” happen. Speed or terrain builds to a point of no return and usually the crash site can be aimed to, picked out…sorta. On a uni the UPD happens now, instantly with no hope of aiming or guiding the crash. Obviously, neither would be crashing if they had control over the situation, but I feel the bike has better odds of a last ditch effort to get to a better crash site. Because of this, I think given the same path and speed, the bike would be safer. Not nearly as rewarding but safer.
Well it was you who introduced the TdF to the discussion. The discussion which started with the suggestion of gearing up a uni to bike speeds in order to be able to do similar things. What’s more plenty of us do use a unicycle for transportation purposes as a direct substitute for a bike.
A quick scan through the other TdF abandons I hadn’t looked at before suggests at least another 6 weren’t crash related - which certainly makes bike racing (in close proximity to 200 other riders at high speed) no more dangerous than unicycle racing on the basis of injuries per hour based on the available statistics (unless you think we need another 0.4 of a unicyclist injury for that to be true!)