Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's character whose strategy for bike safety at night was to assume he was wearing reflective clothing and that everybody in a car would be paid a million dollars to kill him.

Another strategy is to actually wear OSHA-certified hyper-reflective clothing, such that the anyone would assume that a driver who hit him must have been paid a million dollars to do it.

A friend of mine does this, he has a whole closet full of orange and silver sweatshirts that he wears every day. Last time he got hit by a car was years ago, but when the cops showed up they took one look at him and arrested the driver before he'd uttered a word.

Would only work in the US.

Here in England, everybody wears that terrible neon reflective stuff every time they leave the house. Bicycle optional in many cases. They have no shame here.

The downside is that it makes me comparatively less easy to spot.

Another strategy is to assume the drivers are wearing hyper-reflective clothing and that you've been paid a million dollars to hit them. Someone try that out and report back.

What Neal Stephenson book was that? Zodiac?

Yep, it's a description of Sangamon's method for dealing with the nightmare of Boston traffic.

I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the book or the character - I do remember perfectly the gas-masked fish on the cover of the mass-market paperback, though.

His book is a mixed bag. His thoughts about how to ride are good, but his conclusion in favor of wide curbside lanes and against bike lanes did lots of damage, as many locales/planners used his book as justification for not putting in bike lanes. This thinking was difficult to unwind. Of course bike lane use shouldn't be mandatory, as they aren't in California at least. I don't know any cyclists here who aren't grateful for the great bike lanes we have, thanks mainly to good codified, standards for their implementation. [I think I read his book 20 years ago :-)]

The closest I've ever been to being killed on a bicycle was in a traffic configuration where the presence of a bike lane completely upset the rules of the road. It was in Gainesville, Florida which has bike lanes everywhere and where drivers are familiar with people using them.

While I appreciate that some people favor bike lanes, in my experience riding in the traffic lane as a vehicle is safer than accepting secondary status in a separate lane. And the technique is not dependent on infrastructure...and saying, "But California does it," won't help the cause in most places. [I bought the book about 20 years ago, recently returned to it now that I'm teaching my son to ride]