Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

> The number of cyclist deaths per 100 million kilometres cycled is 5.8 in the United States and 3.6 in the UK. In contrast, a cycling-happy country like Germany has a rate of just 1.7 deaths; and in Denmark it's 1.5 – four times safer than in the US and twice as safe as in the UK. And cycling is even safer in the Netherlands, with just 1.1 deaths per 100 million kilometres on the road. It appears that the more cycling is encouraged and taken up, the safer it becomes[2]

This conclusion is specious and these statistics are misleading as they do not account for vehicle exposure. If you travel 1,000 kilometers on a bike and never pass a car, obviously you can't get killed by one. I'm aware of no studies that account for vehicle exposure. Anyone who has been to the countries with low cycle death rates will know that vehicle exposure is far less than is typical in any American city.

EDIT: I don't understand why I'm receiving so many downvotes for this comment... HN has gotten bad lately.

I would expect causation to flow the other way, actually: make cycling safer and more people will be willing to do it.

Also, the implications of GP, if true, seem to be obvious to me: reduce the number of cars on the road to make cycling safer. Seems like a win-win to me.

No downvote from me, but couldn't it be argued that the more cycling is taken up, the likelihood is that fewer people would be driving so there'd naturally be less exposure? So then it would be true that the more cycling is taken up, the safer it becomes -- because there are fewer cars driving about.

As you mentioned, there's less vehicle exposure in countries where there are low cycle death rate -- lower car usage is presumably a big factor here, though well-designed road sharing and separate cycle paths etc. would presumably also help a lot. (Of course, people can be killed cycling in other ways than being hit by a car, but I'm guessing that's a small minority of cases -- would be interesting to see figures though.)

What you say is true, and another factor is that "there's safety in numbers" -- it's more dangerous when cyclists are rare, and drivers aren't expecting them. If there are crowds of cyclists everywhere, drivers will expect them, and are more likely to know how to deal with them and adapt their behavior accordingly...

I think you're reading too much into the statement. "the more cycling is encouraged and taken up, the safer it becomes" doesn't read to me to be excluding infrastructure changes like you describe, and I think the author would agree that it can go the other way also (the safer it is due to infrastructure support, the more popular it becomes).

I will agree that the paragraph is set up strangely. "Fewer people on cycles, however, doesn’t mean fewer accidents" is an odd statement when you are measuring accidents on a per mileage basis.

I agree that what was said didn't really make logical sense. The writer was probably aware of studies where the environment stayed the same but things seemed to get safer with increased cycling. One theory for why that happens is that drivers learn to look harder when there are more bikes around.

It would of been better with a bland statement about "things shown by studies" followed by the statistics.

I think they do. If you have far more protected bike lanes, then you're going to have far fewer cyclist deaths from cars.

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