I'm a bicyclist, same deal, except no license. There are a lot of people out there who believe that riding a bike on public roads is unacceptably risky.

Yeah. I used to ride bikes (bicycles) in some super dense urban areas of US for years. Got hurt more on bicycles than on my motorcycles (my 70+ mph interstate crash on motorcycle not nearly as bad as getting whacked on bicycle by a valet going 10mph in downtown Chicago!)

Bicyclist probably get way more injuries per mile than motorcyclists. It's risky!

Cycling isn't risky, sharing poorly designed roads with cars is risky.

Dedicated, fully separated paths with no conflict points have very low fatality rates. Also, even in risky areas there is a net positive effect on mortality.

Yea I was going to say this. I moved to downtown Manhattan and finally mustered up the courage to start road biking after ten years of avoiding it in SF and.... It's amazing and feels almost 100% safe on the routes I take. The only real risks I've seen come from asshole deliverypeople barreling down the bike path the wrong direction, and even those risks have felt pretty capped. They've never been going fast enough that I would've been anything but banged up a bit.

Indeed, and it's very hard to assess individual safety from broad based statistics. How do cycling injuries per mile translate into my personal risk? I've had one cycling injury in 50 years, when I hit a patch of ice on a bike path and cracked a rib. Ouch.

Cyclists have to figure out safety by guesswork. One thing that's reasonably certain is that cars cause the majority of cycling injuries (not counting mountain biking, which I'm not equipped for). I have a rule of thumb, which is that if a car can crash into another car, or into stationary objects such as buildings, then it can crash into a cyclist. So I look at where car crashes occur: Mostly on higher speed, congested roads, and especially at intersections. My first safety rule is route choice, and I avoid routes with a lot of car traffic. I rarely encounter cars on my commute to work.

What about electric unicycles, which were invented "yesterday" and are legal?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek

The US tends to have a laissez faire approach to product safety. Rare problems are ignored unless they become newsworthy. More frequent problems are addressed through lawsuits. Regulation is applied (either new regulations or enforcement of existing ones) after the fact if problems reach a certain level of visibility or persistence.

From what I can tell, Europe has more regulations and fewer lawsuits.

That’s quite likely, I agree (I am a motorcycle rider too).