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For almost everyone 18-40 year old, driving less is one of the healthiest decisions you can make. A little nitpick: Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all

For almost everyone 18-40 year old, driving less is one of the healthiest decisions you can make. A little nitpick: Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all significantly worse than traveling by car. If this interests you, it's possible to find a lot more interesting research by searching for "microlife" and "micromort".

hangonhn 6y ago
Can you explain more about the walking part? Is it because pedestrians get hit by cars a lot? Otherwise it seems walking should be incredibly safe.
- Gunax 6y ago
  My guess is that on a per distance basis, walking is more dangerous because of pedestrian-car collisions (aka getting run over). I think part of the dissonance is that intuitively I tend to compare on a time basis. I guess it depends on whether one is traveling to a destination (constant distance) or traveling for recreation (constant time).
- UnFleshedOne 6y ago
  Might have something to do with the size of your signature (I think that's what they call it in military terms). Consider a spherical traveler following a certain path in a field of randomly moving projectiles. The chances of being hit with one depends on path length, your own size, and how long you stay on the field. Seriousness of the hit depends on your durability and speeds involved. Maybe pedestrians just spend a lot of time exposed (assuming they have to cover similar distance) and bikers are extra fragile.
- YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
  Like some of the other comments already mentioned, its indeed on a per distance basis. Also traffic accidents are far more deathly if you're walking basically naked from a safety perspective vs protected by a well designed mass of metal. When a car and a human collide, it's not the driver that's likely to die. I got my stats from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which shows walking approx 12 times as dangerous per mile. On a time basis walking would be less dangerous than driving I reckon. Walking also has other health benefits. I mentioned it specifically, because walking to the store instead of driving for safety reasons would not be a smart choice. Doing some daily walking in a park likely would be a smart choice though.
  - nelaboras 6y ago
    That depends on many factors. Living in a crowded European city I have plenty of shops in walking distance, protected sidewalks and a traffic nightmare. It would take me longer and I'd be much more likely to get into an accident when driving to any of the shops nearby; walking is easier and safer. If you have a city designed for cars like most US cities seem to be the story is very different. Per se walking is definitely safer, given decent walking conditions. If all you got are sidewalk-less streets and only big shops that are a decent distance away, that's not the fault of walking but of bad city design. similarly in winter, if there's snow and your city clears the street but not the sidewalk then of course the sidewalk is less safe.
  - jmchuster 6y ago
    FYI, here's where they get the 12x more dangerous data from: https://web.archive.org/web/20091122180337/http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/DR2008/DR_08.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20091122180337/http://www.statis...
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Transportation safety is generally measured on a distance basis. If you compare one hour of driving vs one hour of walking, then walking is safer, but if you compare the traffic risks of driving a hundred miles and walking a hundred miles, then that's a different story.
  - rconti 6y ago
    This is also kind of silly; the average person doesn't walk 100 miles (say, a week). Extrapolating relative walking safety from 100ft of darting from your office building, across the street, to your lunch spot, out to 100 miles is not actually the same thing as (say) commuting by foot 5 miles each way for 10 days (where the per-step risk profile is probably a lot lower than the numbers we're extrapolating from).
    - kelnos 6y ago
      Yeah, agreed. I think you just need to be making apples-to-apples comparisons based on the type of trip. If you're talking about trips of no more than a few miles (that don't include hauling too much cargo to carry), you can compare driving with walking. If you're talking about trips of tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have to compare driving with flying or taking a train. I would be interested to see crash/injury/fatality stats for car trips under certain distance thresholds. I wonder if those are tracked anywhere.
  - dionidium 6y ago
    This is also why the safety of commercial air travel is (sometimes) overstated. Since most crashes happen on takeoff or landing, the risk profile of a 100-mile flight is about the same as for a 1000-mile flight, but on a per-mile basis the latter flight appears safer.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      Is this still true for commercial flights? The most prominent airliner losses from the last 20 years were not close to takeoff nor to (scheduled) landing. I'm thinking of Air France off Brazil, the two Malaysian planes, all four 9/11 attacks, and the Germanwings crash. The exception is the Concorde crash on takeoff which just sneaks into the last 20 years (July 2000). Of course, part of the reason these crashes were newsworthy is that they were unusual. Are there enough takeoff- and landing- related losses to make these statistically irrelevant?
fractionalhare 6y ago
Is that a typo, or do you teally mean cycling and walking are significantly worse than traveling by car? Are both of those activities actually more dangerous? I would have thought cycling and walking - even in urban settings! - are safer activities than driving, statistically.
- Daneel_ 6y ago
  I would imagine that it’s not a typo. In a car you have a big shell around you to protect against the environment. While walking or cycling you’re far more prone to be injured by the world - a branch could fall on you, a car could hit you, another person could hit you, you could trip, slip or lose balance, etc. Being inside a big metal shell that can’t fall over and with active safety measures is a great place to be, risk-wise.
  - nimih 6y ago
    On the other hand, when I'm cycling, I'm typically not moving at >15 mph or so. When I'm walking, reduce that to 3mph. That seems like it would do a lot to counteract the car's crumple zones and airbags in terms of severity of injury. In fact, once you take into account severity, the GP's claim seems extremely suspect: maybe the chance of any injury on a bike or by foot is higher, but I'd be skeptical of claims that the same applies to death, or even chance of serious injury (since that's what I, personally, care about), without serious backing evidence.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      I knew a lot more people that died cycling than I knew people that died in car accidents. And all of the cyclists got hit by vehicles.
      - nimih 6y ago
        I'm in the opposite situation, personally. Irregardless, the point I meant to convey is that I'm able to talk myself into both the original claim and its converse, so it's probably better to actually point to a statistical study than try to provide a causal explanation, no matter how compelling.
watertom 6y ago
Motorcycles are 4% less likely to be involved in an accident, however motorcyclists are 27 TIMES more likely to die if they are in an accident. https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcycle-crashes https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
zip1234 6y ago
Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all significantly worse than traveling by car. Is this because of the chance of getting hit by a car?
- sukilot 6y ago
  Yes, but morticians don't care whose fault it is.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Here lays the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way, He was right, so right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong. Moral of the limerick? Optimize for for your own safety, not mere adherence to the law, because lawsuits cannot bring you back from the dead. The other person being wrong for killing you won't make you any less dead. This is something I try to keep in mind whenever I'm driving, crossing a street, etc. The crosswalk may say I can walk, but for my own sake I better look both ways anyway.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That and because they're more dangerous per kilometer. I can go 240km in two hours in a car, but only 16 on foot, and I'm going to be crossing many, many streets in that distance.

hangonhn 6y ago

Can you explain more about the walking part? Is it because pedestrians get hit by cars a lot? Otherwise it seems walking should be incredibly safe.

Gunax 6y ago
My guess is that on a per distance basis, walking is more dangerous because of pedestrian-car collisions (aka getting run over). I think part of the dissonance is that intuitively I tend to compare on a time basis. I guess it depends on whether one is traveling to a destination (constant distance) or traveling for recreation (constant time).
UnFleshedOne 6y ago
Might have something to do with the size of your signature (I think that's what they call it in military terms). Consider a spherical traveler following a certain path in a field of randomly moving projectiles. The chances of being hit with one depends on path length, your own size, and how long you stay on the field. Seriousness of the hit depends on your durability and speeds involved. Maybe pedestrians just spend a lot of time exposed (assuming they have to cover similar distance) and bikers are extra fragile.
YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
Like some of the other comments already mentioned, its indeed on a per distance basis. Also traffic accidents are far more deathly if you're walking basically naked from a safety perspective vs protected by a well designed mass of metal. When a car and a human collide, it's not the driver that's likely to die. I got my stats from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which shows walking approx 12 times as dangerous per mile. On a time basis walking would be less dangerous than driving I reckon. Walking also has other health benefits. I mentioned it specifically, because walking to the store instead of driving for safety reasons would not be a smart choice. Doing some daily walking in a park likely would be a smart choice though.
- nelaboras 6y ago
  That depends on many factors. Living in a crowded European city I have plenty of shops in walking distance, protected sidewalks and a traffic nightmare. It would take me longer and I'd be much more likely to get into an accident when driving to any of the shops nearby; walking is easier and safer. If you have a city designed for cars like most US cities seem to be the story is very different. Per se walking is definitely safer, given decent walking conditions. If all you got are sidewalk-less streets and only big shops that are a decent distance away, that's not the fault of walking but of bad city design. similarly in winter, if there's snow and your city clears the street but not the sidewalk then of course the sidewalk is less safe.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  FYI, here's where they get the 12x more dangerous data from: https://web.archive.org/web/20091122180337/http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/DR2008/DR_08.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20091122180337/http://www.statis...
PeterisP 6y ago
Transportation safety is generally measured on a distance basis. If you compare one hour of driving vs one hour of walking, then walking is safer, but if you compare the traffic risks of driving a hundred miles and walking a hundred miles, then that's a different story.
- rconti 6y ago
  This is also kind of silly; the average person doesn't walk 100 miles (say, a week). Extrapolating relative walking safety from 100ft of darting from your office building, across the street, to your lunch spot, out to 100 miles is not actually the same thing as (say) commuting by foot 5 miles each way for 10 days (where the per-step risk profile is probably a lot lower than the numbers we're extrapolating from).
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Yeah, agreed. I think you just need to be making apples-to-apples comparisons based on the type of trip. If you're talking about trips of no more than a few miles (that don't include hauling too much cargo to carry), you can compare driving with walking. If you're talking about trips of tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have to compare driving with flying or taking a train. I would be interested to see crash/injury/fatality stats for car trips under certain distance thresholds. I wonder if those are tracked anywhere.
- dionidium 6y ago
  This is also why the safety of commercial air travel is (sometimes) overstated. Since most crashes happen on takeoff or landing, the risk profile of a 100-mile flight is about the same as for a 1000-mile flight, but on a per-mile basis the latter flight appears safer.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Is this still true for commercial flights? The most prominent airliner losses from the last 20 years were not close to takeoff nor to (scheduled) landing. I'm thinking of Air France off Brazil, the two Malaysian planes, all four 9/11 attacks, and the Germanwings crash. The exception is the Concorde crash on takeoff which just sneaks into the last 20 years (July 2000). Of course, part of the reason these crashes were newsworthy is that they were unusual. Are there enough takeoff- and landing- related losses to make these statistically irrelevant?

fractionalhare 6y ago

Is that a typo, or do you teally mean cycling and walking are significantly worse than traveling by car? Are both of those activities actually more dangerous? I would have thought cycling and walking - even in urban settings! - are safer activities than driving, statistically.

Daneel_ 6y ago
I would imagine that it’s not a typo. In a car you have a big shell around you to protect against the environment. While walking or cycling you’re far more prone to be injured by the world - a branch could fall on you, a car could hit you, another person could hit you, you could trip, slip or lose balance, etc. Being inside a big metal shell that can’t fall over and with active safety measures is a great place to be, risk-wise.
- nimih 6y ago
  On the other hand, when I'm cycling, I'm typically not moving at >15 mph or so. When I'm walking, reduce that to 3mph. That seems like it would do a lot to counteract the car's crumple zones and airbags in terms of severity of injury. In fact, once you take into account severity, the GP's claim seems extremely suspect: maybe the chance of any injury on a bike or by foot is higher, but I'd be skeptical of claims that the same applies to death, or even chance of serious injury (since that's what I, personally, care about), without serious backing evidence.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    I knew a lot more people that died cycling than I knew people that died in car accidents. And all of the cyclists got hit by vehicles.
    - nimih 6y ago
      I'm in the opposite situation, personally. Irregardless, the point I meant to convey is that I'm able to talk myself into both the original claim and its converse, so it's probably better to actually point to a statistical study than try to provide a causal explanation, no matter how compelling.

watertom 6y ago

Motorcycles are 4% less likely to be involved in an accident, however motorcyclists are 27 TIMES more likely to die if they are in an accident. https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcycle-crashes https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

zip1234 6y ago

Motorcycling, cycling, and walking are all significantly worse than traveling by car. Is this because of the chance of getting hit by a car?

sukilot 6y ago
Yes, but morticians don't care whose fault it is.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Here lays the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way, He was right, so right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong. Moral of the limerick? Optimize for for your own safety, not mere adherence to the law, because lawsuits cannot bring you back from the dead. The other person being wrong for killing you won't make you any less dead. This is something I try to keep in mind whenever I'm driving, crossing a street, etc. The crosswalk may say I can walk, but for my own sake I better look both ways anyway.
StavrosK 6y ago
That and because they're more dangerous per kilometer. I can go 240km in two hours in a car, but only 16 on foot, and I'm going to be crossing many, many streets in that distance.