Gear-up survey results

[Krabill]

I thought you might get a kick out of this, Tigger. Especially the part about the inadequacies of denim

http://www.gearupproject.org/survey/results.html

Here's what someone connected with the survey stated on another forum:

Again . . . take note of the part about wearing jeans . . .

First off, I want to thank so many of you for taking the time to fill out the survey.

You can see the results here http://www.GearUpProject.org/survey/results.html and, because the survey is ongoing, we will be continuing to update them as new submissions come in.

You'll notice a lot of people chose "Other" for the reason they don't always wear a particular piece of gear. In general the reasons they noted were: heat (we moved these to comfort and made notes for manufacturers), that they wore jeans, and that they didn't wear them for short trips, plus a lot of complaints about nowhere to put things when they get to work.

Fortunately, the first two are easy to address. There's plenty of good gear out there that will keep you just as cool as wearing nothing, we just have to educate people on what to look for. There's, obviously, a very common misconception that jeans will protect you in any way (they won't), which is, again simple education. The last is typically surmountable by pointing out that if you have somewhere to hang a coat you have somewhere to hang pants.

The short trips one is going to be a little trickier though. And we'd really appreciate your feedback on how to address it. The problem, if you're not already aware, is that the vast majority of accidents occur very close to home. These short runs to the store, gas station, or work are precisely when you are most likely to get into an accident. Unfortunately statistics aren't enough to convince people, and we need to overcome the perceived hassle of getting into gear only to get out of it five minutes later.

Part of this may be up to the manufacturers to find ways of constructing garments that are easier, and faster, to get in and out of. But, even if they come up with some trivially easy to wear and comfortable design people will still grumble about having to put it on. We've got some ideas on how to address this, but as I said, we would really appreciate hearing your suggestions too.