HOW LETHAL IS CYCLING, PART 2: Lies, damned lies, and Krygo"Facts"

Frank Krygowski has claimed, inappropriately in a thread about a
cylist killed on the road, that

"...some annual risks for Americans, according to _The Book of Risks_
by Laudan:

You will die of heart disease: 1 in 340
You will die of cancer: 1 in 500
You will die from a stroke: 1 in 1700
You will die on the job if you're a coal miner or farmer: 1 in 2300
[notice that defining and delimiting "if"]
You will die in an accident: 1 in 2900
You will die in an auto accident: 1 in 5000
You will die of breast cancer, if you're female: 1 in 5000 [notice
that defining and delimiting "if"]
You'll be killed in the line of duty, if you're a cop: 1 in 7,700
[notice that defining and delimiting "if"]
You'll be murdered: 1 in 11,000
You'll die in an accident at work: 1 in 26,000
You'll die in a fi 1 in 50,000
You'll drown: 1 in 50,000
You'll be stabbed to death: 1 in 60,000
You'll die from poisoning (excluding suicide): 1 in 86,000
You'll die from riding your bicycle: 1 in 130,000"

First of all, notice the *absence of the defining and delimiting "if"
for the cycling calculation*. This ****** Laudan has just taken the
entire US population of 307m without asking how many ride bicycles,
and based his number on that. Presumably that is why Krygowski, never
a champion of truth or fair reporting, is so keen to quote him. The
Laudan/Krygowski risk factor is thus probably only half of the real
risk factor for a regular cyclist (see below). The stupidity of the
Laudan/Krygowski formulation can be seen when we realize that their
forecast is therefore that 2462 cyclists will die on the roads this
year (307m/130,000), three and a half times as many fatalities as can
actually be expected. Frank Krygowski (and Laudan too, if Frank typed
that out correctly) should leave statistics to people who know what
they're doing.

Here's the correct way to calculate the risk of dying while
cycling.The risk if you don't cycle is zero. You have to cycle to die
while cycling. We know that about 57 million people ride a bike at
least once every year and that about 700 cyclists will be killed on
the roads. (-- Source: -- http://www.bikeleague.org/media/facts/#how_many
--)The chance of even the most casual cyclist being killed is thus 1
in about 81,500, and correspondingly higher risk (lower number) for
regular cyclists, a very, very long way from the Laudan/Krygowski
error of 1 in 130,000.

Why are you lying to us again, Frank Krygowski?

Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Bicycles at

http://www.audio-talk.co.uk/fiultra/...20CYCLING.html