Originally Posted by
dougmc
While I appreciate your attempt at extrapolating the number of injuries from the number of deaths, and admit that it's likely pretty accurate for motorists (though one would need to state how serious an injury must be before it's counted), I question the accuracy of extrapolating (mostly) motorist data into cyclist data.
In a car, you tend to be uninjured in most collisions. On a bike, even minor collisions tend to result in injuries.
Ultimately, based on that, I would expect the injured/killed ratio for cyclists to be higher than for motorists. Of course, to actually quantify this qualitative guess would be difficult -- motorist injuries are better reported than cyclist injuries, for example, and ultimately the only thing that's accurately reported is deaths.
All true. Bicyclists are disproportionately injured compared to car drivers but the death rate seems to be in the same ballpark. Makes perfect sense..
Available numbers go like this: About a half million cyclist ER visits per year in the US, and another half million outpatient visits. Among those are about 30 or 40 thousand hospitalizations, sometimes used as a measure of serious injury.
A lot of the ER visits are for minor injuries; the vast majority of minor injuries don't show up in the ER. The overall injury number is unknowable but probably not worth knowing anyway.