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I’m pretty skeptical that switching a car commute to a bike commute increases safety. Anecdotally I have seen a lot more bad bike accidents than car accidents,
by pfannkuchen 3y ago
I’m pretty skeptical that switching a car commute to a bike commute increases safety.
Anecdotally I have seen a lot more bad bike accidents than car accidents, despite the number of bikes being much, much lower. This makes sense, since you are much more exposed when on a bicycle and while you are moving slower the cars aren’t.
If the stats do say this (I assume you have indeed read that somewhere), I suspect there is some large selection bias at play. Like, people with a safe bike route available are more likely to bike, which skews the numbers towards safe even though I imagine switching any random car commute to biking on the road would make it more dangerous on average.
Public transit of course makes sense, and I do wish biking in urban areas was safer since I don’t do it now because it’s dangerous and it would be great to be able to do it safely.
- sandspar 3y agoI think the proper way to compare bike and car fatalities is to compare deaths per mile traveled or, as this article does in a charming way, deaths per hour. https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-of-dying-doing-what-we-love/ https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-of-dying-doing-what-we-lo...
- pfannkuchen 3y agoNo definitely not, when we are talking about “Switching your commute from a car to a bike or public transit will extend your lifespan”. If bike vs car choice is confounded by route safety, deaths per distance or time does not tell you anything useful about whether switching will make you safer.
- mcv 3y agoThe issue with that table is that it's comparing apples to oranges. It compares general travel to the most dangerous part of a dangerous activity, like the final push for the summit of mount Everest. It compares activities that take a few minutes and are done for fun to activities that take hours every day and people to do get to work. It's not like I'm going to hang-glide to work.
- Stranger43 3y agoIt's of cause worth noting in comparing cars to bicycles that cars are the number one cause of bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities, so fewer cars will lead to fever cyclist dying. Railways and busses are a lot closer to airplanes in statistics then cars https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... so going car less is probably the single biggest improvement we can make to transportation safety.