Share: Essential Evidence
Top line: Using a hands-free mobile phone is no safer than using a hand-held mobile phone. Both increase crash risk fourfold, but under-reporting at crash scenes of mobile phone use hampers analysis and future prevention efforts.
Top line: Inactive people are contributing to a premature death burden as large as tobacco smoking. This fact is largely not known beyond health scientists.
Top line: Excessive speed is a cause of deaths and injuries across all motorised societies. Through a Safe Systems approach to road safety, with lower speed limits, the evidence is that deaths & serious life-changing injuries can be reduced, while improving quality of life.
Top line: While aging is a fact of life, the pace of the aging process appears to be compounded by modern sedentary lifestyles. By contrast, high levels of cycling, which often include bouts of vigorous activity, results in little age-related muscle decline. Moreover, immune system decline with age is lessened by this type of physical activity.
Top line: Political pressures may encourage a selective use of evidence as a rhetorical device to support pre-determined policy choices or ideological positions. Such biases are likely to be amplified when there is a lack of institutional capacity or structures able to provide competent and independent scientific advice. 1
Top line: E-bike use has grown dramatically over the past decade and there is little evidence to suggest this growth will slow in the coming decade, as market penetration is low across much of Europe.
