It's interesting how we play games with statistics and add in all sort of non-relevant conditionals to make the statistics seem better for bicycling. But the bottom line is if you need to transport yourself from point A to point B and have two choices, a car or a bike, the car is clearly safer. Whether 6.9X safer, or 69 times safer we can debate. But in the car, you're wrapped by metal. On the bike, your flesh is around the metal. You are clearly more vulnerable, and while fatalities are low for both, I recall very clearly that bicycles have much more failure modes for injuries and I have many scars that show it's not as safe as a car. I have yet to have a scar from a moving car. Let alone skin grafts on my elbows from sliding out on my bike, or whole shins shaved of skin on one side or the other or both. I've got patches on my neck, skull, dents on my ribs, and more from cycling.

So if the goal is to convince the masses that bicycling is good, well, it's not because it's safe. It clearly isn't especially if you got some punk kid in an SUV with loud music texting and punching the accelerator around a corner and then running up onto the sidewalk. Well, a guy did that last year in Pleasant Hill, CA and killed a Dad and daughter, and the other daughter was injured. All three were cycling... on the sidewalk. I'd place bets if they were inside another modern car with safety cage unit body and air bags, they'd still be alive and not minced meat.

But we bike for other reasons than safety. We accept the risks and try our best probably to minimize the risk. Below some threshold, like less than 1 in 10,000 probability on that event, we'll get hurt, we probably don't really care anymore. It's not high enough probability to really be at the forefront of our thoughts. Instead, we consider other things. I consider convenience and parking and total door-to-door time. In my car, it can take 30 minutes door to door if I factor in the search for parking and the final decision to park far away and walk in to the office. My door to door time with less than half red lights on my commute is only 25 minutes. I get 5 extra minutes at the watering hole. Not to mention, all the folks in the hallway get to see that I was the Politically Correct guy on the bike who rode in, not to mention all the cute, super-fit females on my hallway, and not so fit, but still cute females all like to stop by and talk about "getting fit." It's welcome attention for us guys who'd otherwise be geeks in front of some computer console slinging weird code to do weird things like process stupid voice wave forms for some national security agency without knowing it was going to do that.

Some of us will ride because at $4/gallon for gas and maintenance costs on the car, which has 300+ horsepower opposed 6 cylinder with really crappy gas mileage and some euro-japanese pedigree is euphemistically "expensive." Bikes are cheap locomotion and give far more independence than waiting for mass transit in the big city, where gangs of teens regularly like to assault riders and steal their phones. Given such choices, bicycles force those bullies to actually chase you, which they won't because it's easier when they've got you cornered in the back of the bus or the front for that matter.

But to address the masses who don't bike, you need to get at the core reason why people don't bike and instead insist on driving the car. And that's because people are lazy. It's far easier to hop in the car, turn on the A/C and step on the accelerator than to turn the cranks. We're the weird folks who enjoy this sort of thing with the wind through our helmets, quads burning, lungs processing double the oxygen, and having to deal with motorists, occasional weather anomalies, bugs in the mouth/eyes/nostrils, and flats on the road.

No, biking was never safer than driving, and it's never as easy physically as driving. But it doesn't have to be equally safe, just acceptably safe, and it doesn't have to be equally easy. As driving gets less convenient, and more expensive, there will be more of us commuting on bikes. You can count on that.