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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

Did they also ban driving? It's a lot more dangerous than riding a bike.

That's not true: driving results in between 3 and 12 times fewer deaths per passenger-mile than cycling, depending on your methodology. [0]. Even if you take it to be only 3x and compare per passenger-hour rather than per passenger-mile, which nobody ever does, you would find they are roughly equally dangerous.

[0] https://bicycleuniverse.com/bicycle-safety-almanac/

If you subtract all the cyclists who are hit by cars from those statistics, then cycling is orders of magnitude safer. It's only dangerous when there are cars on the road.

If you're the only car on the road, it's substantially safer too. The roads won't be completely empty of cars during the lockdown.

They've been pretty empty so far. It's probably the safest time to use the roads in the area right now.

Like I wrote in the other comment, you can ride your bike to work/the grocery store in Italy, just not go for training rides.

If you want to really start factoring stuff in to how healthy or not it is, you should factor in the sedentary lifestyle that too much driving leads to, as well.

> Even if you take it to be only 3x and compare per passenger-hour rather than per passenger-mile, which nobody ever does

But driver-hours (definitely not passenger-hours) are the correct metric if you're considering biking as a substitute for driving. People take longer trips in cars than they do on bikes because they can. If the mode of transportation shifts, trips to the store won't get longer to adjust -- the stores will become more dense to accommodate the reality that people need closer stores.

That makes sense if we're talking about long-term changes and not temporary public health measures during a pandemic.

For commuting, passenger-mile is important. And that's a vital part of why cities want to increase the share of cycling, to solve traffic during rush hour.

> For commuting, passenger-mile is important.

No, it's not, that's what I'm saying here. The length of a commute is determined by the cost it imposes on the commuter. That cost is measured in time and money, but not in distance. Nobody cares about distance. Commutes are the length they are because that's what people can tolerate. If you slowed everybody down, they wouldn't spend more time commuting; they'd commute for the same time over less distance.

They're talking about bike riding for fun/training, not as transportation.

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