Human Car, nevertheless, has a point. Longer exposure also means that you're getting experience, so the longer you ride, the lower your personal chances of dying per hour.

Consider, for instance, the following statistic (numbers are obviously unreasonable, but they illustrate the point). Let's say you have two groups of people: call them Novices and Pros. Here are some made up stats:

# of Novices: 50
# of Pros: 50

# of hours each Pro rode last year: 498
# of hours each Novice rode last year: 2

# of Pros who died riding a bike last year: 1
# of Novices who died riding a bike last year: 9

From the above data we conclude the following:

fatalities per hour = (1+9)/(50*498+50*2) = 0.0004

Now if we just take that stat and apply it to both Pros and Novices, we'll find that we were "supposed" to have about 9.96 fatalities among the pros and 0.04 fatalities among the Novices (in other words, all ten dead cyclists should have been the Pros, since they got way more exposure). The truth, however, is that the rate of fatalities per hour for pros is only 1/(50*498) or approximately 0.00004, while for novices that figure is 9/(50*2) = 0.09.

Of course, they had to survive the Novice stage to get here and, unlike other Novices who survived the Novice stage and then stopped riding, the Pros are continuing to subject themselves to risk. However, the point is that the more exposure you have, the less dangerous, in general, the exposure becomes. It's not like a coin, in which is throw is independent of each other and the odds of tails is 50% every time. It's like a coin in which the odds of getting tails gets smaller with each subsequent throw.