Quick thoughts on the topic:
-As near as I can tell, riding a bicycle is about as dangerous, on an hourly basis, as driving a car. So if you think cycling is too dangerous, then driving is, too.

When someone gets killed driving a car, all their friends drive to the funeral, and the casket is driven in a hearse. It doesn't ever occur to anyone to say "Golly, driving is dangerous, I guess I'd better give it up." But for some reason, that line of reasoning comes up with bicycling.

You hear a lot about cycling deaths, and one reason is that they are uncommon. Here a while back, one of my friends was killed driving a car. That never made the Dallas Morning News= it was too commonplace. But if a bicyclist gets run over, that's much less common and makes the news. That tends to skew people's perception of the safety of bicycling. If every time somebody sat on a sofa and had a heart attack and died, there were big news headlines that said "Man sits on sofa and dies...the 4th this week!", after a while, people would be afraid to sit on their sofas, too.