Only the first estimate given there is reasonably sourced. And it's almost 40 years old. Bike safety has improved dramatically since then, so I doubt it's as ba

Only the first estimate given there is reasonably sourced. And it's almost 40 years old. Bike safety has improved dramatically since then, so I doubt it's as bad as you suggest. [1] suggests that the number of trips made by bike increased from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009, but [2] suggests that the number of cyclist deaths was roughly constant over that range. So per-capita, cycling safety has likely improved dramatically. I couldn't find any data on the number of cyclists or number of trips by bike going back to 1979 in the 5 minutes I spent on it, but I suspect the trend is similar going back that far. For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009. Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist. To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate. [1] http://bikeleague.org/commutingdata http://bikeleague.org/commutingdata [2] http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1258.html http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1258.html