Originally Posted by
Hippiebrian
I don't buy that biking is more dangerous
That wasn't my argument, though perhaps my wording was a bit odd. (The post I was commenting on said that biking was
less dangerous, that drivers are "taking a much higher risk" than he is, and I don't think the statistics really support that.)
If you look at the 700 vs. 40,000 numbers and compare them with the per centage of bike trips vs. car trips in the U.S., they come out almost equal, which would make both equally dangerous.
Actually, I covered that.
40,000, 700 ... these figures are well known and likely quite accurate. When somebody dies, it's counted.
Number of bicycle miles/hours/trips and car miles/hours/trips figures are much harder to come by. But whatever method you choose to use, be it miles/hours/trips/whatever, if the ratio between doing it via bicycle and doing it via car is over 1.75%, then biking is less dangerous. If it's lower, it's more dangerous. That's what I said in my post.
Of course, this also assumes that "danger" only means killing you. If you include being hurt or maimed, things change, but unfortunately these things aren't tracked nearly as well as deaths.
As for Austin being more dangerous than other places, well, it seems that historically about 2.5% of traffic fatalities here are cyclists. That's higher than the 1.75% figure, but this is also a college town with a lot of cyclists -- we probably have more cycling going on here than average. But still, the miles/hours/trips/whatever figures are hard to accurately come by.