Thing is, if you wan to beef up the number of casual cyclists, you need to give them a bike network. I used to be opposed to bike lanes (and I ride daily in mi

Thing is, if you wan to beef up the number of casual cyclists, you need to give them a bike network. I used to be opposed to bike lanes (and I ride daily in mixed traffic) for the reasons you cite; but bike lanes are net far safer because the main effect of dramatically increasing the number of cyclists is that you dramatically decrease the number (not just the rate but the actual count) of casualties. Just having more cyclists on the road makes it much safer. This seems to scale - Copenhagen is up to 50% trips by bike and their casualty rate is still falling.