- The per-hour evaluation is obviously bad. Per-mile numbers are present and more sane, but a vague handwave at 'unnecessary driving' is used to justify focusing on the prettier, less sensible number.
- Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not.
- The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation. Americans get killed in cars because of drunk/distracted/sleepy drivers, and because highway speeds are life-threatening. At city-commuter speeds, a driver can likely survive a head-on with a bus.
- The bicycling numbers are similarly absurd. The audience for this piece, and the group most likely to cycle for their commute, is an audience living in dense cities. Boston and San Francisco are far, far more dangerous cycling locations than residential, sidewalk biking included in these values.
- The cherrypicking here is fundamentally dishonest. This is a 2013 piece that uses 2010 bicycling risk numbers. Why? Because 2010 was the safest year for bicyclists in two decades.
I could go on, but suffice to say that "that’s the worst case" is simply a lie. It is far better than the best case, because these are complete incomparables.
The article seems focused on the commuter experience.
Most people consider their commute by time not distance. "It takes me 35min to get to work" not "I am 5 miles from the office".
To me that backs up the idea that the per-mile numbers are nonsense. If I am comitted to cycling to work, and don't want to commute for more than an hour, I'm going to live within ~12 miles of my workplace. If I'm driving to work, I might be as far as 70 miles (depending on traffic).
A comparison per-mile doesn't match up with reality. I'm riding 24 miles per day on my bike or I'm driving 140 miles.
For non-commute journeys, this makes less sense as I can't choose to live closer to everywhere. I can choose to live closer to work though.
The standard measure of transportation safety is accidents|deaths|injuries / (passenger * distance). There are very good reasons for this that don't change just because a transport modality is slower.
Really, the worst thing people can do about their safety is just putting their fingers on their ears and yelling while refusing to listen to reality. Let's have a honest assessment of cycling, because if it isn't as safe as we want, there are plenty of ways to improve it. But nobody will go fixing things if everybody denies that a problem exist.
I am not sure that I disagree with you overall, but I believe you are too dismissive here. Obviously, implicit in the piece is the notion that you must arrange your life to a degree to make bicycling possible, as the car is vastly more flexible. I think the better question is, having done so, how to compare the risk? It's not an easy question. MMM's answer is admittedly somewhat glib, but you're not allowing room for a fair comparison either.
There is a real question to be answered here, and I didn't attempt to address it. But what offended me is the use of "per mile" and "best case" values that pretended there wasn't a harder question to address.
Simply being able to park a car at origin and destination, for example, costs money, and a lot of it, in terms of infrastructure and urban planning (even if there's no meter or explicit parking fee).
Now, if you happen to be traveling on a route that 400,000 other people travel every day, trains might win. Tokyo to Kyoto is a 2h 19m train ride, while the drive is 6 hours.
Europe does a little better than the US, but not as well as Japan. Paris-Frankfurt is 4h by train, 6 hours driving.
(Everything is always 6 hours apparently!)
I bet there's also some complexity here around incidents vs. injuries vs. deaths.
there is no assumption about amount of extra time it takes to ride the bike. Somehow riding a bike gains you money, when in fact its the cost of driving the car that should increase instead, and the riding of the bike should be some trivial number per mile (cost of bike maintenance). etc...
The argument might be valid but its presentation is just silly.
Most people who insist on riding bicycles for commutes organize their lives around that: living in a place close to work, for example. The author is a person who took up cycling and never stopped; in that case, bike commutability is something he probably planned for when choosing a home, work, and career. People who have organized their lives around driving everywhere have different considerations.
What his argument boils down to is that bicycles have similar or lower accident risk, much lower operating costs, and traveling by bicycle improves your health—and health is extremely valuable.
It really made my day, but seriously it added non-negligible time to my commute. Showering @ home is easier, showers at work can be occupied, and the 2nd shower after coming back was an extra 15m too.
For below:
It was 27* last week. I had to travel 10km (as the crow flies) to a potential client's location for a private meeting with their CEO. And we have hills. The concept of me and my suit getting there by bike in acceptable shape is laughable. It might be acceptable for a coder or social media expert to arrive dishevelled, but people expect more from lawyers. I wouldn't win clients.
People get skewed impressions about how safe/unsafe cycling is because they imagine worst case scenarios for cyclists. To be clear the worst-case outcomes for cycling accidents are truly awful and very fatal... getting right-hooked and run over by a garbage truck, getting hit from behind or T-boned by a car travelling at highway speed.
But fatal bike accidents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of typical bad bike accident outcomes however are little more than road-rash, a broken collarbone or a concussion and frequently these are the fault of the cyclist. A "totaled" bike amounts to something less than the deductible cost of auto-insurance in most cases.
Fatal car accidents are ALSO rare but fender benders (IMHO) have been getting MORE common as a result of mobile phones. Sadly a "fender-bender" can do massive financial damage--- $500 for each popped airbag + $1000++ whatever auto-body damage was incurred. Of course "fender benders" easily extend into "totaled car" when enough damage is done, even if everyone is unscathed.
Taking a hit from a motorist often results in more traumatic injuries.
For example, there's a coffee shop I like that's nine miles away. (The closest coffee shop is a little over two miles away, but I really like this place). In order to get there, the best way is to take a four-lane split highway with a speed limit of 55 MPH (~89 km/h). There are signs that say to 'share the road', but let's be honest: I'm safer in the car than on the bike for that route. I've biked that way twice and probably won't do it again without taking a longer, alternate route. A dedicated bike lane or trail would change the impression here dramatically.
Time matters too. A half-hour round-trip becomes almost two hours. If we trust his conclusion, I lose around 5 minutes of life driving while gaining 234 minutes of life - roughly a 4 hour swing. But 1.5 of those 4 hours are already given back to the ride, and I have to trust that I'll be able to cash out the other 2.5 hours in the future, versus 90 minutes that I can have today with a reasonable amount of confidence.
Plus, what is safe? I've been in two car accidents and I can recall three good bike spills. I was unhurt in both car wrecks and I have scars from all three bike crashes.
The cost comparisons aren't useful for people who live in an area that requires car ownership. If you have to own a car, a lot of those per-mile costs are fixed.
Biking certainly can be safer. In a dedicated bike path it's a lot harder to die due to a collision. But I think this article doesn't accept the reality for a lot of areas.
If you've not read mmm before, he's a pretty radical life hacker type. Lots of insight into the assumptions we all make about how we should live, but he also does things many people just don't want to do.
Maybe you'd be happier if you moved just a few blocks away from a good coffee shop, and could bike there and maybe get rid of your car entirely. Maybe you'd be far less happy. It's worth asking yourself those types of questions, though, right?
But such an outlook would require a softer headline. "How bicycling can be the safest form of transportation" would do a lot better.
I know this is personal experience, and not representative of everyone, but one accident on a bike costs a tun.
I had a friend who was a bike messenger in new york while he was going to school for paramedics and during 9-11 he got downtown before the second building fell
In my experience bicycling did the opposite of that for me. I love biking (way more than I like lifting heavy things, incidentally), but it does nothing to teach you how to lift properly, nor does it really even build the right muscles. Learn the hip hinge if you want to lift heavy things without fear of injury.
The trouble with that idea is that if you really want to minimize risk, you should drive for your transportation, and get your exercise from something safer than cycling.
Not that I see the risk of cycling as unacceptable. But if someone is going to argue that cycling is a net gain, the argument had better work!
His argument that the risks of cycling are exaggerated does hold some water. People are pretty bad at assessing risk.
