There's some data that for middle aged blokes bicycles are safter if you take obesity and heart attacks into the equation.

Perhaps there is less incentive then to drive dangerously.

That hasn't shown up in the fatality statistics for motorcycles. Sometimes more dangerous is just more dangerous.

I’d appreciate it if there was an attempt to actually engage here, this is hardly the gotcha you might think.

Most fatalities of motorcycles are due to collisions with cars, not other bikes nor pedestrians.

Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.

Undoubtedly there are stupid people and people who are more likely to take more risks will be more likely to engage in motorcycle riding; creating an additional selection bias.

But, we’re talking about electric scooters, e-bikes and so on, the core issue remains to be that mixed use-infrastructure will have a loser. Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).

> Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.

That's the point. Diligence won't save you but crumple zones might have.

It's also not obvious that most collisions being with cars isn't just because most other vehicles are cars. If two motorcycles collide with each other at high speed, the damage they do to each other isn't your problem, it's the resulting loss of control and the damage to your body when you impact the pavement.

> Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).

But then you're stuck between three bad options: You have separate roads specifically for e-bikes (implausible), you put high speed e-bikes in pedestrian zones, or you limit the top speed of e-bikes to something safe for pedestrians and then people go back to buying cars because e-bikes are too slow.

My point is cars don’t necessarily deserve the deference society affords them, they’re utility vehicles, needed by fewer people than we think (but still needed). The paths we reserve for car use should be diminished.

If every person was driving an articulated truck then there would be more deaths, caused not just by collisions and poor driving but by emissions too. We’d need bigger roads too- its unnecessary for everyone to do this.

The general problem is that it's not that fewer people need them, it's that most people need them on fewer occasions, but they're not going to buy, register and insure separate vehicles for different uses. So they get one that does everything and use it for everything, and then they're driving an SUV even when they're traveling alone with no cargo.

To get away from this you'd have to completely redesign US cities to have people living in them instead of significant numbers commuting in from the suburbs. To begin with you'd need a massive amount of new higher density housing, the construction of which is currently inhibited by building codes where not outright prohibited by zoning. Trying to solve the rest of it before you do that is going to face massive opposition, because you'll be trying to make it harder to have a car to people who still can't realistically avoid having a car.

I used to be an EMT in the US. I also was an avid motorcycle rider for many, many years. And an avid bicycle rider for even longer.

It is dramatically easier to screw yourself up on bicycles and motorcycles than cars. It’s frankly shocking how stupid someone can be in a modern car and survive.

It doesn’t require another car to kill someone on a motorcycle or bicycle, but the squids tend to filter themselves out pretty quickly. Many of them actively collide with cars due to their own recklessness and/or stupidity, making the statistics somewhat hard to interpret.

Was the 80 year old driving the RV ‘the cause’ of the head on collision, or the 22 year old with the 1.5l super bike illegally passing over a double yellow at 50 over the speed limit around a corner?

I can provide graphic details of who ended up winning in that situation, regardless.

If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.

Because even though cars are also more dangerous to other people, for the most part, those other people are in cars in the US, and the danger still generally cancels out.

Even head on collisions at highway speeds are more survivable than anyone should reasonably be able to expect.

Vehicle vs ped calls are still the worst though.

Protip: don’t get out of your car after an accident on the highway unless you’re really really sure you can see all other traffic. Chances are you can’t, especially at night. Especially when the drunk coming the wrong way on the highway never turned on their headlights. Wait for the firefighters to physically block the road with their rigs first. That was a gnarly call.

my perspective is someone where the city has been largely built for cycling, which leads to less deaths overall.

Population of Malmo is actually higher than Orlando, FL for example.

Yet, for Skåne (the region where Malmo is; pop: 1,421,781), 25 traffic deaths were recorded in the year 2019[0].

173 road deaths were recorded in Orange County (where Orlando is; pop: 1,429,908), during the same period.[1]

That’s a difference of 7x, and Skåne is one of the largest regions in the country, many places are car dependent - yet the major change is that urban areas are sufficiently dense so can be cycled (even during cold climates) and that there’s dedicated infrastructure for doing so, which eases the traffic burden too.

[0]: https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/globalassets/global/press/...

[1]: https://www.flhealthcharts.gov/ChartsReports/rdPage.aspx?rdR...

So if everything is different, everything is different?

Make life require cars: more fatalities.

Seems pretty evident.

Arguably the conditions are better for personal electric vehicles and bicycles in Florida (than the comparatively frigid and rainy conditions of Sweden).

Even the topography is flat[0][1], it's literally the perfect place for cycling, but the US has chosen something else.

So, yes, if things are different they are different: comparable populations, a better climate and an equally flat topography and somehow 7x the amount of deaths; and the only difference is the approach to infrastructure by the county.

[0]: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-c3fdcz/Orange-County/?...

[1]: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-5749m/Malmö/

Florida may not get as cold as Sweden, but it's certainly not hurting for rain.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2024/02/02/discover-the...

It also has the opposite problem in terms of temperature. There are days when the wet bulb temperature in Florida requires humans to be in an air conditioned environment because they would otherwise literally die from the heat.

> If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.

That's rubbish as cyclists/bikers are not the cause of most collisions. Once you remove the majority of car drivers, the number of collisions will plummet along with the severity of those collisions.

(Sedentary disease such as heart disease and type II diabetes will also reduce if more people are using active travel - not so much if they're motorbiking).