Originally Posted by
bkrownd
Oh stop it with this feel-good nonsense. I'll counter that by saying I've fallen many times. Mostly when I was a kid, but a few times more recently. I've been run off the road. I've been hit by a car, which ran over my foot. I've been hit by bikes as a pedestrian. Stuff happens, and the more you ride and the more congested your routes and the wetter your weather the more likely it is to happen. Every rider should be prepared for the inevitable collision or big wreck.
I don't get it. Didn't you just insert your opinion for another person's opinion? You've fallen a lot. Him, not so much. Get over yourself.
The statistics are misused by dint of converting them to apply to an individual.
You may or may not have a 1 in 5000 chance of having an accident. The probability of
you having an accident is completely dependent on your riding habits, skill level, and environment. The 1 in 5000 number means that, out of 5000 randomly chosen people in a given time period, 1 will have had a bike accident. My coworker, who doesn't ride a bike at all, will have precisely a zero percent chance of having an accident while riding a bike.
If you invert this to apply to an individual, you don't get a probability for any certain individual, but rather, you get a probability (1:5000, or 0.02%) for an
average person. You, personally, might fall near the average person, or you might be a standard deviation or two away from the average person. I suspect that most of us cyclists fall a standard deviation or two away from the average person in terms of how much riding we do and in what environments.