One safety feature that cars could have for bicycles is Wide-angle rear-view mirrors[1] by default. I put one on my car when I lived in Austin to soothe my anxiety that I would kill someone and it did wonders for my situational awareness.

https://www.amazon.com/Fit-System-RM011-Clip-Mirror/dp/B001A...

The point is that one of the main reasons that there aren't more people biking may be that people feel unsafe because of the physics and that one way to see that is to compare the standard of what is safe for people riding in cars to what is safe for people riding on bicycles.

Would you buy a car if it received less than average safety scores? But all of the cars with those below average safety scores have large metal frames, a body, and a huge amount of mass that as I said, due to the basic physics equations means that the occupants of a car will be much, much less likely to be injured or killed if there is a collision. So considering how seriously people take car safety regulations, this is a bit of a crazy double standard.

But cycling isn't unsafe. Cycling is only unsafe in the proximity of two ton vehicles and their incapable operators.

It continues to be unsafe in this manner because we treat cars and trucks different to all other transportation. It's unthinkable we all shrug our shoulders when a pilot crashes a plane because he was checking his Facebook. There is a root cause analysis and there are effective measures taken. But here we are with car casualties many times that of planes or trains and yet no one is doing any cause analysis at all. Car manufacturers continue to produce ridiculously overpowered and oversized vehicles and advertise them speeding through the city at night.

Right but we are required to be in close proximity now. Let's build some smarter, safer cities where we aren't required to be close and maybe have physical barriers. It's just basic physics equations that aren't adding up to any type of real safety for me with current designs.

Cycling can be unsafe, with or without the proximity of heavy vehicles.

Just the other day I came about a cyclist driving on the shoulder, against the flow of 80 km/h traffic, with his hands off the handlebar. Insanely dangerous no matter how capable the drivers of the cars were. (Not to mention it's not a good idea to think you could safely check you Facebook updates as long as you were, say, cycling, or even walking about.)

Safe to say cyclist are one zealous bunch of they hobby, at least on every article related here on HN.

As I understand it, the safety scores for a particular car are relative to that type of car, e.g., compact, mid sized, etc.

So I expect a tiny little subcompact hatchback to be less safe than the average car overall. Yet it's what I drive.

Also, based on what I've read about statistics, I expect driving a car to be less safe than riding a bus, yet I drive a car.

Still, I suspect you're right that a lot of people are afraid to ride a bike. When folks see me pushing my bike out of my workplace, they get a look on their face like I'm about to go skydiving without a parachute, and say: "Pleeeaase be careful out there."