[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?