that's a lot of energy consumption.

For a more ecologically conscious alternative, I recommend carrying a handful of sparkplugs.

If you ride conservatively (use lights at night, use good judgement at intersections) and stay away from buses and trucks, the exercise vastly outweighs any risk.

Personally I avoid riding at night entirely, and use at least a tail light during the day.

This is very dependent on the environment. I would not be so confident saying this about the USA in particular.

If you can stick to at least half-decent dedicated cycling infrastructure separated from cars, sure. If riding alongside traffic, I wouldn't be surprised that, depending on the exact route, the gains wouldn't outweigh the risks.

Generally speaking, operating a bike safely is considerably more difficult than a car and the margins of error are tiny.

I get your idea, but it does rather sound like asking a 4,000lb death robot to follow you around closely and hope that it doesn’t screw up …

To turn the colourful phrasing against you, I too would like a death robot to protect me from all the murder monkeys having a death race around me if I was out biking on the road/death race track.

Wouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races?

Crazy thought, I know.

The grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and so I guess they're fair game like the rest of us

Seperate is not equal. Grade separated bike routes are often not the best routes.

We don't even fully grade separate rail based murder machines from tire based murder machines.

Sorry, yes, I didn't necessarily mean full grade separation, I was mostly thinking about just separated bike lanes in general. Having some kind of real buffer between the cyclists and the murder monkeys.

https://www.txdot.gov/manuals/des/rdw/chapter-18-bicycle-fac...

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

As an outsider and on a more serious note, there's just too much money in cars and car-centric infrastructure. The whole country would need to be rebuilt.

It can be done, they've rebuilt the country a few times, but again, as a outsider, it feels like hope has been dying out in the US. They're giving up because they've given up.

Autonomous cars will solve the problem much faster than redesigning roads or changing driving habits will.