I have come off my bike a whole lot of times, but they've always either been I've been doing something stupid, or the street design is stupid (there's a spot in

I have come off my bike a whole lot of times, but they've always either been I've been doing something stupid, or the street design is stupid (there's a spot in my city where you can sit and watch cyclist after cyclist eat shit when they hit a particular bunch of tramlines). In general, I think anything can be made safe if you make appropriate design decisions: consider nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, we live in an era where urban planning is generally neglected as a discipline, so states tend to try and push safety onto the street-users, which is often pretty silly: no amount of high-vis gear and protective equipment is going to make sharing a road with 60mph cars safe. You can't stop drivers from driving drunk by just shouting at them: you actually have to plan cities so you can get home from a bar without using your car. You can't stop cyclists from riding on the sidewalks without providing cycle lanes, and so on. The thing that boils my blood a bit is that the car industry has lobbyists, while cyclists do not, so often planning law is massively in the favour of cars. For example, in Germany, you need multiple cyclist fatalities before the city is even allowed to build a bike way[0]. [0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__45.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__45.html --- basically, the city is only allowed to cordon off a bit of the street for 'specific' uses when there's a proven danger. So the road is, in the eyes of the law, 'generally used', even if in practice only cars can actually safely use it, and the city is not even allowed to put in a bike lane unless in the normal course of events you get like a bunch of cyclists being mulched.