Tag: risk

Short answer: As with all modes of transportation, it entails some danger.

Longer answer: yes, similar to the risk of motoring — perhaps twice as risky. but how to measure? (per mile, per trip?). Bike-MV collisions are currently running 2% of all in AZ. Bicycling represents perhaps 1%, i.e. twice the risk.

For the moment, this is going to be a catch-all for links and related info on the topic. Links:

• crash-injury-rates-by-mode-of-travel and crash-injury-rates-by-mode-of-travel-2/ these contain stats on per-trip, and per-mile fatality risk by mode; bike/ped/passenger car/motorcycle
• 2019 The Risk of Dying Doing What We Love published a neat chart that compares a broad range of activities; it uses commercial airline travel as the benchmark and attempts to list an exposure (by time) adjusted risk value; i.e. driving is 4X as dangerous, bicycling is 8X as dangerous (i.e. cycling is twice as dangerous as driving in a car). Motorcycling comes out as 100X, i.e. 25 times worse than driving. (also noted in my article here)
• collection from Ohio Bicycle Federation: “Cycling is Safe” subhead.
• www.bicyclinginfo.org/facts/crash-facts.cfm
• kenkifer.com/bikepages/health/risks.htm now via archive.org
• http://www.bicyclinglife.com/EffectiveAdvocacy/BicycleMyths.htm
• Mighk Wilson’s essays freedom from fear, and I am not a Bicyclist.
• Another essay in the same vein by a UK sociologist Dave Horton: Fear of Cycling.
• My posts about the books How Risky is it Really? and Free Range Kids.
• Alan Solot: Tucson bike vs. car crashes aren’t increasing March 2016 op-ed style piece breaking down some Tucson-specific figures
• UK gov’t study showing how the usual measures of cycling safety tend to overstate the danger… “This research dispels the idea that risk for UK cyclists is substantially higher than for drivers or pedestrians” “we found that for young male cyclists between 17 and 20 years of age, cycling was markedly safer than travelling by car”  “Surveys from many countries show that time spent travelling has remained fairly constant over time at about one hour per day, despite large changes in modal split . This supports the use of risk based on time as being most appropriate for comparing modes with different average speeds”. It covers risk expose measures that tend to favor driving, like comparing per mile, rather than, say, per trip. I think this is all obvious stuff but it’s good to have it quantified, if only for the UK; the same mechanisms seem to be applicable to US. full text: Exposure-Based, ‘Like-for-Like’ Assessment of Road Safety by Travel Mode Using Routine Health Data Jennifer S. Mindell, Deborah Leslie, Malcolm Wardlaw. Here’s a road.cc story about it.
• Rick Vosper has an excellent 3 part series in BRAIN, part one  Haunted by the Ghosts of Dead Cyclists addresses the media bias, and danger exaggeration “There is nothing the media likes better than a dead cyclist. Unless it’s a dead cyclist who was not wearing a helmet. That salacious and often completely irrelevant bit is invariably tossed in…”
• Pedestrian danger/risk: “Of the 711 pedestrians who have died in traffic collisions since 2014, only four have been killed by bicycles” — We’ve Blamed Traffic Deaths on Bicyclists Since 1880. What About Drivers?

Continue reading “Is Bicycling Safe? Is Bicycling Dangerous?”