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HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING? DEPENDS ON WHICH NUMBERS YOU EMPHASISE.
Here's my analysis of US national bicycle safety, published in 2010.* Nothing significant has changed since then.
*** HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING? Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and unexceptional general morality. In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were injured. Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough. Compared to a motorist a cyclist is: 11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled 2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in the US: Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is: 3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding 3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding Source: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...Wt7vubH xju7Q It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater per mile/per trip/per hour danger. *** Andre Jute * A complete version is at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!ms...ch/qOFCNhQ1428 . I used the best national figures available then, referring to 2008, but just about nothing has changed since then. |
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