This is a really good point. If we start adding bicycles to the US, more people will die. And we will need to have a greater percent of bicyclists than the Netherlands before the death rate starts to drop off. Having safe bicycle routes is a long way off.

Base rate and attribution fallacies.

When a car kills a cyclist it's not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can't compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.

I agree.

Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph...

Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.

Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don't have the same risks as the entire cycling population.

The bicyclists were quite likely killed by car drivers.

Versus if everyone had cars and perhaps more people would die in total.

And more people die in car accidents each year than in wars. You need to compare against the number of trips made and I suspect they are substantially greater for bicycles.