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A comment on Seth Vidal, creator of yum, killed in hit and run accident. Parent comment

Re:Seth Vidal, creator of yum, killed in hit and run accident by vanderZwan on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @06:35PM (#6016151)
Ok, since I can't edit the comment any more: my whole point was that the threats are not equivalent, and describing the situation as "car vs bike" as if they are on equal terms is wrong.

Instead people are getting all anal about the use of "never" and "always", and use far-fetched examples where a car can be threatened by a bike when atttempting to avoid running over it and crashing into something else.

Way to direct the discussion away from the point I'm trying to make. Look at this Dutch national report on bike safety:

http://www.swov.nl/rapport/Ss_RA/RA47.pdf

The Netherlands has one of the highest percentage of people riding bikes with an estimated 14 million bicycles for 16.5 million inhabitants. It has one of the most developed infrastructures in favour of bike safety, about the safest traffic in Europe in general, and as a culture it is about as bike-oriented as it gets. Despite all of this, travelling with your bike is still 4.7 times more dangerous than travelling with a car.

I am in no way trying to absolve cyclists or pedestrians of their responsibility in traffic safety, but denying that they aren't inherently more vulnerable and that infrastructure design should emphasize their safety is absurd.

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Re:Seth Vidal, creator of yum, killed in hit and run accident by malandrew on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @07:48PM (#6016478)
That 4.7x can probably be completely attributed to all the safety equipment that protects the person in a car. A more valid metric would be accidents (not injuries) per vehicle mile traveled.
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Re:Seth Vidal, creator of yum, killed in hit and run accident by vanderZwan on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @05:28AM (#6018335)
No, it wouldn't, because that's not what we're discussing. The discussion was danger one vehicle poses to the other, and the only significant cause for bike fatalities is car accidents - there are no chasms to fall in in the flattest country in the world, and the speed at which one travels on a bike is much slower so much less likely to be fatal in case of a crash with a stationary object. So this is a very real metric of how dangerous bikes are to cars and vice versa.

EDIT: And even then it's skewed in favour of the car, because for cars the fatality rate is more likely due to crashes with other cars.

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