The weather is improving and the allure of the road is calling to cyclists on Vashon.

The wind in your hair, the smell of fresh mowed grass or hay — what’s not to love? Well, if that wind in your hair isn’t passing through a helmet and you are not braking hard on Vashon’s notorious downhills, there may be a lot not to love.

As reported in The Beachcomber, we recently lost a cyclist to a deer-bike collision. John Kaiser was super experienced and was riding on a stretch of road he had traversed many times, and he had a helmet.

Two other experienced riders failed to brake on a couple of Maury Island’s worst downhill turns in last year’s Passport2Pain (P2P) ride and ended up in the emergency room.

Before the P2P ride, we implore riders to keep their speed down, but that wonderful feeling of freedom sometimes overpowers judgment. This year we are going to have more flaggers on the course in a renewed effort to reduce speed and its possible consequence. Besides a surprise deer encounter, there can be many causes of bike crashes: equipment failures, motor vehicle interactions, alcohol, potholes, and domestic animal encounters. In every single case the energy that gets dissipated in a crash increases as the square of the rider’s speed. It’s simple physics.

Terminal velocity is reached where the downward force of gravity is balanced by the wind resistance; wind resistance goes up as the third power of bike speed, which means that doubling your speed yields an eight times increase in resistance. The relationship of terminal velocity to the hill gradient is well known. At a 10% gradient, the terminal velocity is well over 40 miles per hour, and we have plenty of hills on Vashon with gradients higher than 10%.

Although there are not good statistics relating bicycle speed with severity of injury, there are two other related situations where there are good numbers. People fall all the time down ladders, roofs, balconies, trees and stairs. Falling thirty-six feet takes a second and a half, at which point the faller is going fifty miles per hour. Such falls are fatal in more than a third of cases. There is also extensive data on vehicle-bicycle collisions. Collisions where the car was going more than forty miles per hour resulted in bicycle fatalities over 60% of the time.

Neither of these cases is directly analogous to a single bicycle crash at speed, but the data suggests that at the gradient of many of Vashon and Maury’s hills, without braking, cyclists are in the extreme danger zone.

So please: Put on those brakes and reduce your chance of a serious injury or worse.

More than 500,000 bicyclists go the emergency room each year from bike accidents. Overall, the preponderance of serious injuries and death in bike accidents occur in older (50+) males on non-urban roads — that describes a lot of P2P riders.

Please don’t be a statistic. Tighten the straps on those bike helmets and slow down.

Pat Call is an active elder and chair of the 2025 Passport2Pain bike ride.