Originally Posted by
Cosmoline
I calculated the ft. lbs. of energy I generate on my bike when coming down a hill. It was equivalent to a .50 Browning Machine Gun bullet. Don't drink and pedal, boyos. Not only will you screw your chances of recovery if some idiot injures you, you can most certainly kill a person with your bike. Not to mention the fact that you can kill yourself or break your neck because your reflexes are impaired.
Now all you need to do is to turn the cyclist into a bullet so your analogy would make sense. Just because you're getting hit by two objects with the same energy doesn't mean they are of similar lethality. There are many many ways the energy of a speeding cyclist could be converted upon a cyclist/person collision, not so much with a bullet/person collision. Its the difference between getting hit by a well packed iceball and a fluffy snowball that'll shatter on impact.
While it's true that there is a small chance that a cyclist could kill someone in a collision, it's also true that the cyclist might get struck by a falling jetliner right before impact, so LOGICALLY those improbably events will cancel each other out and its impossible for a cyclist to kill someone in a collision (because it would be the jetliners fault!).
