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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Something else that improves your QALYs: cycling. Of course, it's about exercise more generally, but if you don't have time to exercise only, doing it while commuting is clever!

In most locations in the world -- my null hypothesis includes the US here too -- people who commute by bike (for all its risks) live longer and are sick less than those who do not.

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I probably would have given this a full-throated endorsement just a couple years ago, but after years of improving safety standards that drove down the number of automobile fatalities, we've seen two years of massive increases (7% in 2020 and then 10% last year [0]). And that pairs nicely with my anecdotal experience, which is that people have lost their fucking minds on the roads. (And also, more controversially, coincides (with utter predictability, in my view) with a massive drop in traffic stops by law enforcement.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

10% increase in my city with the numbers it sees could mean just two additional cycling deaths a year. That's the thing with these statistics, the numbers are so small to begin with, that just a few more events are liable to lead to huge percent increases. These few more events could well be within the variance of this measure you observe year over year, and may not be a real trend.

The numbers actually are not small. There were 42,000+ automobile deaths in the U.S. last year. This isn't a phenomenon of small numbers.

And across the entire nation of 400 million people, there were 900 cycling deaths last year. Like I say, in my region, there are usually only a dozen or two.

Sure, people are afraid to bike anywhere, because our roads are so unsafe :)

Your null hypothesis has been born out by study after study.

What is QALY?

Quality-adjusted life years. Sometimes used as the unit in which to measure interventions aimed at improving health.

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