Most sources put it around 2.5x more dangerous than driving, and I'd wager most of those deaths come from inexperienced riders who don't know the traffic laws as applied to bicyclists.
Fatalities Per Mile
Motor Vehicle Travel.................... Bicycle Travel
42,000 killed........................... 813 killed
2.56 trillion miles..................... 21 billion miles
0.016 fatalities per million miles...... 0.039 fatalities per million miles
Data from Traffic Safety Facts 1997 and The Environmental Benefits of Cycling and Walking
Pulled from http://www.bellboycott.com/cached/www.kenkifer.com/bikepages...
Unsure about deaths, but it turns out that more experienced cyclists are actually more likely to be injured, even taking into account that experienced cyclists generally ride more.
I can't find the paper now, but [1] shows a similar finding:
accidents were associated with.... cycling experience (curvilinear association)
According to the research, overtaking vehicles drive closer to better equipped cyclists (wearing a helmet, reflective vest...) than a woman with long hair and no helmet.
Also, the bicyclist with protective gear might be more prone to engage in risky behaviour. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-h...
"The implication," Walker says, "is that any protection helmets give is canceled out by other mechanisms, such as riders possibly taking more risks and/or changes in how other road users behave towards cyclists."
Similar things can be said for driving, in that motor vehicle accidents are concentrated in certain segments of the population, (and people having unlucky interactions with those segments.)
Though this niggle of the statistics is more of an issue with bicycling statistics because the bicyclists who know more or less what they are doing get lumped in with the accident rates of people like the "DUI bicyclist" riding home after dark with no lights into oncoming traffic, or terrible tragedies of people driving carelessly through neighborhoods and running over little kids on their bikes.
Then consider, even if we had statistics showing moderately higher injury/death rates for comparable travel styles with a bike opposed to a car, the overall mortality rates in the bike vs car cohorts would no doubt be reversed because of the physical activity vs sitting factor, and likely lower stress levels of the cyclists. Physical activity tends to reduce stress.
Where are you getting that from? Car specific taxes generally don't even come close to paying for roads, especially the roads bicycles are likely to be using. In the US its actually far more likely that you're subsidizing them than the other way around.
[1] Santa Clara country, paid to extend HWY85 out of their own pocket and as a result, trucks are banned. Last time I drove it, it was still seemed in good shape after mumble twenty years. Compare with HWY880 though Oakland CA. Always being worked on, always broken up.
Why would you think that? The usual estimation for road wear is a fourth power law: scaling of road damage is axle load raised to the fourth power.
You on your bike may be 100kg on 2 axles, or an axle load of 0.05T. A model S has an axle load of 1T (2T over 2 axles), which means a Model S generates 160000 times the road wear a bike does. Incidentally, a loaded 18-wheeler (36T, 5 axles) generates ~1 billion times the road wear a bike does (and ~6700 time the tesla's)
The total cost of ownership is way below a car, due to the low cost of Uber, other people with cars, insurance and gas. In high traffic and hard parking cities like LA and Boston, I get to my destination faster. And though a bicycle is almost 7x as dangerous per mile ridden, I travel much less—maybe 1,000 miles a year instead of the 15,000 I did by car. While the weather is a problem in Boston sometimes, some gloves and a warm coat tide it over well. Besides, who wants to drive in a snowstorm? Overall, the experience holds up to close scrutiny.
Conversely, I am pretty much subsidized by other people's vehicles. And in LA, I nonetheless still owned a $1,000 Toyota with a $50/mo insurance and low hundreds in parking tickets to keep it outside. While that ownership was only a small part of time, it was necessary.
eBikes I think can really effectively complement ride sharing and car sharing. It will save everyone money. And as more people adopt them, the danger of biking will decline through changes in infrastructure like bike lanes and lower speed limits.
Ironically, probably the least persuasive thing is pointing out how the Chinese adopt eBikes. Americans don't want to emulate Chinese anything. It needs to seem cool, organic, high class. Besides, a $3,500 eBike won't break when you come to a fast stop the way a $500 eBike conversion will. Better to keep it safe and expensive than mass manufactured and dangerous.