[YetAnotherMatt]

For almost everyone 18-40 year old, driving less is one of the healthiest decisions you can make.

A little nitpick: Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all significantly worse than traveling by car.

If this interests you, it's possible to find a lot more interesting research by searching for "microlife" and "micromort".

[watertom]

Motorcycles are 4% less likely to be involved in an accident, however motorcyclists are 27 TIMES more likely to die if they are in an accident.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

[zip1234]

   Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all significantly worse than traveling by car. 

Is this because of the chance of getting hit by a car?

[StavrosK]

That and because they're more dangerous per kilometer. I can go 240km in two hours in a car, but only 16 on foot, and I'm going to be crossing many, many streets in that distance.

[sukilot]

Yes, but morticians don't care whose fault it is.

[catalogia]

    Here lays the body of William Jay,
    Who died maintaining his right of way,
    He was right, so right, as he sped along,
    But he's just as dead as if he were wrong.

Moral of the limerick? Optimize for for your own safety, not mere adherence to the law, because lawsuits cannot bring you back from the dead. The other person being wrong for killing you won't make you any less dead. This is something I try to keep in mind whenever I'm driving, crossing a street, etc. The crosswalk may say I can walk, but for my own sake I better look both ways anyway.

[hangonhn]

Can you explain more about the walking part? Is it because pedestrians get hit by cars a lot? Otherwise it seems walking should be incredibly safe.

[PeterisP]

Transportation safety is generally measured on a distance basis. If you compare one hour of driving vs one hour of walking, then walking is safer, but if you compare the traffic risks of driving a hundred miles and walking a hundred miles, then that's a different story.

[rconti]

This is also kind of silly; the average person doesn't walk 100 miles (say, a week). Extrapolating relative walking safety from 100ft of darting from your office building, across the street, to your lunch spot, out to 100 miles is not actually the same thing as (say) commuting by foot 5 miles each way for 10 days (where the per-step risk profile is probably a lot lower than the numbers we're extrapolating from).

[kelnos]

Yeah, agreed. I think you just need to be making apples-to-apples comparisons based on the type of trip.

If you're talking about trips of no more than a few miles (that don't include hauling too much cargo to carry), you can compare driving with walking. If you're talking about trips of tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have to compare driving with flying or taking a train.

I would be interested to see crash/injury/fatality stats for car trips under certain distance thresholds. I wonder if those are tracked anywhere.

[dionidium]

This is also why the safety of commercial air travel is (sometimes) overstated. Since most crashes happen on takeoff or landing, the risk profile of a 100-mile flight is about the same as for a 1000-mile flight, but on a per-mile basis the latter flight appears safer.

[dmurray]

Is this still true for commercial flights? The most prominent airliner losses from the last 20 years were not close to takeoff nor to (scheduled) landing. I'm thinking of Air France off Brazil, the two Malaysian planes, all four 9/11 attacks, and the Germanwings crash. The exception is the Concorde crash on takeoff which just sneaks into the last 20 years (July 2000).

Of course, part of the reason these crashes were newsworthy is that they were unusual. Are there enough takeoff- and landing- related losses to make these statistically irrelevant?

[dionidium]

My information may very well be out of date! This is one of those lines I've been repeating for 20 years and it might be time to update it.

[dmurray]

Looking at Wikipedia [0], there a a lot of incidents I never heard about and a disproportionate number are "shortly after takeoff".

I didn't count them all, but from eyeballing it a 1000-mile journey is 3x as likely to kill you as a 100-mile one, not 1x or 10x.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

[gsnedders]

On a per journey basis, in Europe/US/Canada, considering _only_ commercial aviation (i.e., excluding general aviation), the fatality/journey rate is comparable to both cars and walking.

[nsgi]

Also because when people are contemplating whether to fly the alternative often isn't using another form of transportation but not travelling at all and using video conferencing, or travelling a shorter distance (e.g. going on holiday more locally)

[YetAnotherMatt]

Like some of the other comments already mentioned, its indeed on a per distance basis. Also traffic accidents are far more deathly if you're walking basically naked from a safety perspective vs protected by a well designed mass of metal.

When a car and a human collide, it's not the driver that's likely to die.

I got my stats from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which shows walking approx 12 times as dangerous per mile.

On a time basis walking would be less dangerous than driving I reckon. Walking also has other health benefits.

I mentioned it specifically, because walking to the store instead of driving for safety reasons would not be a smart choice. Doing some daily walking in a park likely would be a smart choice though.

[nelaboras]

That depends on many factors. Living in a crowded European city I have plenty of shops in walking distance, protected sidewalks and a traffic nightmare. It would take me longer and I'd be much more likely to get into an accident when driving to any of the shops nearby; walking is easier and safer. If you have a city designed for cars like most US cities seem to be the story is very different.

Per se walking is definitely safer, given decent walking conditions. If all you got are sidewalk-less streets and only big shops that are a decent distance away, that's not the fault of walking but of bad city design. similarly in winter, if there's snow and your city clears the street but not the sidewalk then of course the sidewalk is less safe.

[jmchuster]

FYI, here's where they get the 12x more dangerous data from:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091122180337/http://www.statis...

[UnFleshedOne]

Might have something to do with the size of your signature (I think that's what they call it in military terms).

Consider a spherical traveler following a certain path in a field of randomly moving projectiles. The chances of being hit with one depends on path length, your own size, and how long you stay on the field.

Seriousness of the hit depends on your durability and speeds involved.

Maybe pedestrians just spend a lot of time exposed (assuming they have to cover similar distance) and bikers are extra fragile.

[Gunax]

My guess is that on a per distance basis, walking is more dangerous because of pedestrian-car collisions (aka getting run over).

I think part of the dissonance is that intuitively I tend to compare on a time basis. I guess it depends on whether one is traveling to a destination (constant distance) or traveling for recreation (constant time).

[fractionalhare]

Is that a typo, or do you teally mean cycling and walking are significantly worse than traveling by car? Are both of those activities actually more dangerous? I would have thought cycling and walking - even in urban settings! - are safer activities than driving, statistically.

[hansvm]

I doubt it was a typo. As a ballpark, cycling has 10x the deaths per mile as driving.

Here in the Bay nobody stops at stop signs (3-10mph is typical), and they don't even really slow down to look both ways till after the white line and after the sign -- plowing straight into sidsewalks and bike lanes. I'm honestly shocked it doesn't cause more deaths.

Cyclists themselves usually aren't much better -- not even bothering to slow down for a 4-way stop, failing to signal before turning, etc....

As a personal anecdote, I was biking home down a pretty steep hill (I had lights, a helmet, etc) last fall on a road without any shoulder or bike lanes whatsoever. It was a short stretch, there were plenty of signs warning cars of cyclists, and I thought it would be fine, but shortly after I started the descent I had an SUV tailgate me the entire way down the mountain (again, nowhere for me to pull over, no way to get out of the way). If I'd hit a rock or anything and lost control I would've been toast.

When I checked my GPS after the fact I had been going a minimum of 10 over the limit, but that wasn't enough for somebody in a hurry and apparently not aware they were risking my life.

[VRay]

Anything involving cars is probably the biggest ongoing nightmare in our society. People have no appreciation for the danger they're constantly putting themselves and everyone around them in, just to save a few minutes a month in commute time.

The news, social media, etc should be plastered with the 100+ people who needlessly die every day in car accidents. ALERT: 10 YEAR OLD CHILD SLAIN SO DRIVER COULD GET TO WORK 30 SECONDS EARLIER

(Side note: This is why I'm going long on the stock market again.. it looks like the public and the media have gotten over being scared of the virus. Even if we have another 100-200k deaths in the USA this year, my guess is it'll get swept under the rug just like 50k car deaths, regular flu deaths, heart attacks, etc)

[adwww]

There was a study on UK cycle commute accidents recently.

Commuters over several years who cycled, were 44% more likely to be hospitalised than other commuters.

However...! This cycling was associated with some quite dramatic health benefits. If 1000 people switched to cycling... The benefit would be 15 fewer cancers, four fewer heart attacks or stroke and three fewer deaths.

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m336

[Daneel_]

I would imagine that it’s not a typo. In a car you have a big shell around you to protect against the environment. While walking or cycling you’re far more prone to be injured by the world - a branch could fall on you, a car could hit you, another person could hit you, you could trip, slip or lose balance, etc.

Being inside a big metal shell that can’t fall over and with active safety measures is a great place to be, risk-wise.

[MereInterest]

Exactly. Just like air conditioners cool a container while increasing the overall heat of the system, cars make the car occupants safer while increasing the overall danger of the system.

[nimih]

On the other hand, when I'm cycling, I'm typically not moving at >15 mph or so. When I'm walking, reduce that to 3mph. That seems like it would do a lot to counteract the car's crumple zones and airbags in terms of severity of injury.

In fact, once you take into account severity, the GP's claim seems extremely suspect: maybe the chance of any injury on a bike or by foot is higher, but I'd be skeptical of claims that the same applies to death, or even chance of serious injury (since that's what I, personally, care about), without serious backing evidence.

[jacquesm]

I knew a lot more people that died cycling than I knew people that died in car accidents. And all of the cyclists got hit by vehicles.

[nimih]

I'm in the opposite situation, personally. Irregardless, the point I meant to convey is that I'm able to talk myself into both the original claim and its converse, so it's probably better to actually point to a statistical study than try to provide a causal explanation, no matter how compelling.

[jacquesm]

I think it very much depends on where you live. Here cycling is super popular and so you can expect more deaths even if the deaths per distance number is likely quite low even when compared to places where cycling is less popular due to infrastructure differences.

[zodiac]

You can cycle at 15mph and have a car crash into you at a much higher speed

[nimih]

Yes, exactly: there would seem to be factors that both increase and decrease the risk of both activities, so the relative danger of each one is an empirical question, not something which can be deduced from first principles.

[mumblemumble]

I would be curious to know what the numbers look like if you broke the driving up by city/highway or something like that. I'm guessing the deaths per passenger-mile are very different between the two.

They're also somewhat difficult to compare at a nationwide level because driving in the suburbs is not really comparable to biking in the city, in part because the miles per trip in suburban and rural areas are so great that biking and walking aren't really feasible, anyway. This poses a big selection bias problem: What if the real underlying effect is that suburban transportation is generally safer per mile, perhaps even independently (as much as they can be separated) of transportation mode? For that matter, are we even measuring the right thing? What if the metric that really matters is deaths per passenger-hour, or deaths per passenger-thing-you-need-to-get-done?

City driving and city biking or city walking, on the other hand, can be much more comparable. For example, I own a car, but typically use a bike to buy groceries. In part because, where I live, it's the quicker and easier option. Similar story for driving vs. walking to go to my favorite restaurant, or to go to the hardware store.

Finally, I think we'd be remiss not to think about how it's being framed: The original data focus on likelihood of being the victim of an accident. It's maybe more properly called "deaths experienced per passenger mile." The numbers would look entirely different if they were framed as "deaths caused per passenger-mile." That's kind of a big deal, because one framing suggests, on an instinctual level, that cars generally increase public safety, while the other, I'm guessing, would suggest that cars generally reduce public safety. It's the difference between saying that Elaine Herzberg died because she was walking across the street, and saying that she died because an Uber self-driving car hit her.

[clifdweller]

This is probably an area where I wouldn't just trust statistics. During pandemic I've tried out many new running routes and one particular stretch of road i have had 4 incidents of me having to move to not be hit by a car that didn't see me wheras on other routes its happened 5 times in 6 years.( The cause is its people coming out of a neighborhood with lots of stop signs then they get to main road that is busy and are impatient and looking for a hole to slip into). It really makes each persons situation different as traffic patterns also changes throughout the day.

[GloriousKoji]

It's a skew of metrics. Cycling has more fatalities per mile than driving. A higher percentage of cyclists die per year than motorists. In an accident with a car a cyclists has much much higher probability of death than the motorists. But are those really fair comparison?