Originally Posted by JohnJ80

FAIL.

I read those studies before you even posted them and noted that the make no comparisons to riding bikes on the road or sidewalk. Unless I'm mistaken, isn't that what we are talking about here?

None of these statistics compare the relative safety of riding your bike on the sidewalk vs riding it on the street. The links I posted do just that and show it to be many times more dangerous riding on the sidewalk to riding on the street. The argument that this makes is the whether to ride a bike or drive a car. If you want to make that argument, then you ought to be doing that in a car drivers forum not in a cyclists forum. I had presumed we were talking about where to ride a bicycle most safely not whether to ride a bike or drive a car.

Your note indicating that there are more accidents in the last studied year are not corrected for the hugely increased number of cyclists. You need to be normalizing this to accidents per mile ridden to get an actual measure of the danger. That is not done. If so, I'd bet you that, if anything, cycling has become safer per mile ridden (but that is another topic for another time) due to drivers becoming more aware of cyclists. Anecdotally, that is very much happening around here.

Also, do you want me to go out and post individual examples of cars hitting other cars and people getting killed to prove... what? that people in cars hit people in cars? Or that there are examples of people in cars hitting people on bicycles? So what - anecdotal evidence.

Please read the links I provided. Apparently you have failed to do that.

J.