[phyzome]

You have to separate out what feels safe from what is safe; our intuition isn't always up to the task of sorting that out. (There's the usual example of airplane travel being very safe, but people being scared of it.)

I bet there's also some complexity here around incidents vs. injuries vs. deaths.

[ZeroGravitas]

Another complexity is that one thing that makes a big difference to cyclist's safety, is the number of people who cycle, so you can have a vicious or virtuous cycle of people taking up cycling and making it safer, or people giving up cycling and making it less safe.