[TheLarch]

"Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not. ... The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation."

I am not sure that I disagree with you overall, but I believe you are too dismissive here. Obviously, implicit in the piece is the notion that you must arrange your life to a degree to make bicycling possible, as the car is vastly more flexible. I think the better question is, having done so, how to compare the risk? It's not an easy question. MMM's answer is admittedly somewhat glib, but you're not allowing room for a fair comparison either.

[Bartweiss]

I'm not sure I am. Cycling safety is a legitimate question if you arrange your life to accommodate it, but what upset me is that this isn't implicit in MMM's piece, as I read it. The piece insists that biking is safer per-mile, and that readers would benefit from a simple, minimal-accommodation switch to bicycling.

There is a real question to be answered here, and I didn't attempt to address it. But what offended me is the use of "per mile" and "best case" values that pretended there wasn't a harder question to address.

[crispyambulance]

Motorists must also "arrange" their lives to support their transportation mode as much as cyclists do. Admittedly these arrangements have been made by others in most cases, but they're still present.

Simply being able to park a car at origin and destination, for example, costs money, and a lot of it, in terms of infrastructure and urban planning (even if there's no meter or explicit parking fee).