Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation | Hacker News Reader

Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation

mrmoneymustache.com

66 pointsTheLarch69 comments

I'm pro-biking, but if you live in areas that aren't friendly to bikers, I don't think these comparisons are as apt.

For example, there's a coffee shop I like that's nine miles away. (The closest coffee shop is a little over two miles away, but I really like this place). In order to get there, the best way is to take a four-lane split highway with a speed limit of 55 MPH (~89 km/h). There are signs that say to 'share the road', but let's be honest: I'm safer in the car than on the bike for that route. I've biked that way twice and probably won't do it again without taking a longer, alternate route. A dedicated bike lane or trail would change the impression here dramatically.

Time matters too. A half-hour round-trip becomes almost two hours. If we trust his conclusion, I lose around 5 minutes of life driving while gaining 234 minutes of life - roughly a 4 hour swing. But 1.5 of those 4 hours are already given back to the ride, and I have to trust that I'll be able to cash out the other 2.5 hours in the future, versus 90 minutes that I can have today with a reasonable amount of confidence.

Plus, what is safe? I've been in two car accidents and I can recall three good bike spills. I was unhurt in both car wrecks and I have scars from all three bike crashes.

The cost comparisons aren't useful for people who live in an area that requires car ownership. If you have to own a car, a lot of those per-mile costs are fixed.

Biking certainly can be safer. In a dedicated bike path it's a lot harder to die due to a collision. But I think this article doesn't accept the reality for a lot of areas.

I think bundled up in his assumptions are things like "if needed, change where you live to enable this lifestyle".

If you've not read mmm before, he's a pretty radical life hacker type. Lots of insight into the assumptions we all make about how we should live, but he also does things many people just don't want to do.

Maybe you'd be happier if you moved just a few blocks away from a good coffee shop, and could bike there and maybe get rid of your car entirely. Maybe you'd be far less happy. It's worth asking yourself those types of questions, though, right?

Absolutely worth asking those kinds of questions!

But such an outlook would require a softer headline. "How bicycling can be the safest form of transportation" would do a lot better.

I used to read a lot of these articles, but the assumptions were just too silly for me.

there is no assumption about amount of extra time it takes to ride the bike. Somehow riding a bike gains you money, when in fact its the cost of driving the car that should increase instead, and the riding of the bike should be some trivial number per mile (cost of bike maintenance). etc...

The argument might be valid but its presentation is just silly.

Agreed, this author plays fast and loose with the stats. I absolutely think almost everyone should be biking, and that it is far safer than people think it is, but this article would not convince me of that. :-)

I'm all for biking, but please inform my clients (and potential clients) that I will be arriving at their offices covered in sweat, my suit horribly wrinkled, and after two hours during which I was unable to hold a conversation over the phone. If they are ok with that, then I'll use a bike.

For below:

It was 27* last week. I had to travel 10km (as the crow flies) to a potential client's location for a private meeting with their CEO. And we have hills. The concept of me and my suit getting there by bike in acceptable shape is laughable. It might be acceptable for a coder or social media expert to arrive dishevelled, but people expect more from lawyers. I wouldn't win clients.

If you are serious you can avoid all of these issues. Just ride a little bit slower. Biking can be less strenuous than walking if you pace yourself. The wind noise drops considerably, you won't sweat at all and you can hold a conversation.

Not with hills as he said, he would have to walk, and with that would take way too much time. Maybe on the days he did not have client meetings.

Posted by someone who commutes to work on a road bike 20 miles per day round trip M-F.

Riding a bike in dense urban areas is not much (or at all) slower if you are reasonably fit. Traffic lights will take away a lot of the advantage that cars have.

Traffic lights stop bicycles too. And pedestrians.

Yes, but it's often the case that a cyclist will catch back up to a car that hits a red light.

Most cyclists in my area (a significant portion of the transient population is college students) tend to forget that bikes must also follow the rules of the road. My small city is seeing a huge increase in bike paths between the downtown parks, the universities, and other cultural landmarks, closeby.

From what I've seen (which is, of course, anecdotal) it's done pretty much nothing. Cyclists still ride on the road next to the bike lanes and still ignore most traffic signals. I'm all for less pollution and staying in shape, but I can't really get behind building infrastructure for a community who are making the road significantly more dangerous. Not to mention the... interesting(?) conversations you'll have if you ever try to argue against specific[+] dedicated bike lanes or mention that cyclists compulsively break the law under the guise of "safety."

[+] as in, "Since Smith is 2 lanes each direction with a dedicated turn lane and is parallel to and has the same speed limit as Mimosa, while Mimosa cuts through several residential neighborhoods, has the same speed limit but is one lane each way with no dedicated turn lane: Why not Smith St. instead of Mimosa Ln.?" perhaps they have a problem with my runons, not my ideas :P

I often see complaints along these lines - and of course, there are scofflaw cyclists, undeniably. But how many motorists do you see in a day do something illegal? 1? 10? 50? I suspect the percentages of cyclists doing illegal things are similar to those of motorists, but there are (depending on your location) 10X to 100X as many motorists. And physics is on their side - motorists are far more dangerous to themselves, and everyone else, than cyclists are.

It may be the area I'm in, but the proportion of cyclists I see: - run a red light, riding past stopped traffic (often, cutting into the crosswalk as if that makes it any safer or more defensible...) - not stop at stop signs - ignore emergency vehicles - commit road rage is closer to 2 in 3 or 3 in 4. So much so that in my experience, I see far more cyclist "crimes" in a week than I do motorist ones. I've also, in my few years living in this city, seen far more accidents involving bikes than cars. (Now that I think about it, I haven't seen either in a few month. So, maybe the bike lanes are helping and I'm just not seeing how...)

You are completely right about physics being on their side though. I'm not afraid a cyclist is going to kill me by T-Boning me running a stop sign, but I am afraid my SO will get PTSD if they T-Bone a cyclist running a stop sign. (I am also worried about a phantom collision [Florida's term for an accident caused by a vehicle that was not damaged] being caused by my reaction(s) to a criminal biker. I do concede that I could do my part trying to find some course that teaches me defensive driving against cyclists.)

From what I can tell cyclists tend to ignore the rules more often in an attempt to conserve that all-important momentum. Particularly in downtown areas where traffic lights are very close together.

>Since Smith is 2 lanes each direction with a dedicated turn lane and is parallel to and has the same speed limit as Mimosa, while Mimosa cuts through several residential neighborhoods, has the same speed limit but is one lane each way with no dedicated turn lane: Why not Smith St. instead of Mimosa Ln.?

I'm not sure which side you were arguing for in this case, but Mimosa seems like a good candidate for a bike lane. Look at Berkeley's bicycle boulevards if you want to see an example of how driving-unfriendly roads are a great place to put bicycles.

I'm against making already cramped roads smaller, especially when the cyclists are going to ride in the middle of the road, regardless. I will definitely look into it though, any good write ups or should I just check the city's webpage?

Here is the city's info: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/bicycleboulevards/

The boulevards do not actually block out a section of the road for bicyclists. They are entire roads that optimize for low-speed neighborhood traffic where cars don't need to blast past cyclists.

Based on your description of your situation, short-distance traffic (people entering and leaving their homes) would use Mimosa along with cyclists. Long-distance car traffic would be free to use the full two lanes of Smith at high speed without dodging cyclists.

Yes, some cyclists don't follow the rules, just like car drivers. But no one generalizes the rule breaking of drivers to all drivers as they do to cyclists.

I think driver's ed classes should cover cycling, both to give drivers empathy for cyclists, and so they know the rules apply to cycling.

Also, cyclists are not obligated to use the bike lane. It is often filled with debris, or located right next to parked cars which would be dangerous to ride next to.

If traffic lights stopped bicyclists, I wouldn't think they are such a nuisance.

Transportation in Manhattan used to be a solved problem with walking + subways. I applaud someone getting exercise, but I wish that during their recreation they wouldn't plow into pedestrians who actually need to get somewhere.

</rant>

The extra time it takes to ride a bicycle can be minimal. When I drive to work, it takes about 20 minutes; when I cycle it takes about 30. In urban traffic a car tavels only about twice as fast as a bicycle on average, and bicycles are easier to launch and park. I find that trips of 2 miles are less are faster by bicycle, and that's the most common kind of trip.

Most people who insist on riding bicycles for commutes organize their lives around that: living in a place close to work, for example. The author is a person who took up cycling and never stopped; in that case, bike commutability is something he probably planned for when choosing a home, work, and career. People who have organized their lives around driving everywhere have different considerations.

What his argument boils down to is that bicycles have similar or lower accident risk, much lower operating costs, and traveling by bicycle improves your health—and health is extremely valuable.

My problem with bike commuting is sweat. So when I used to commute (7mi), I showered after arriving at work, and after my ride back.

It really made my day, but seriously it added non-negligible time to my commute. Showering @ home is easier, showers at work can be occupied, and the 2nd shower after coming back was an extra 15m too.

I only have the sweat problem in July and August where I live, and it's easily fixed for me by simply wiping off my arms and face with a damp towel when I come in. It's quick and works surprisingly well.

Everyone's situation is different of course. Bicycle commuting is frequently oversold; The sweet spot for cycling is 2 miles or less or 2-5 miles, which accounts for a lot of trips, but lots of people live farther than that from work.

Regardless of all the statistics, math, and you-live-longers in this I have to disagree. Maybe I'm just an incredibly lucky driver (zero collisions) and a disaster-magnet on a bicycle (40 year old woman driving an SUV (SF), 33 year old man driving delivery van (SF), drunk driver (Sunnyvale), 92 year old driving a van (Sunnyvale)), but I know where I feel safe. That said, I still love to ride my bike.

Oh and let's be clear: extending your life and saving you money do not make you safer.

It would be interesting to see these stats for non-fatal accidents. One issue with bicycle safety analysis is that non-fatal crashes tend to be under reported. For example, in Montana a crash is reported to the State only if there is a fatality or the cost in damages exceeds $1,000. I have been hit by a car while on my bike and the damages only came to $700 (I had no physical damage).

You have to separate out what feels safe from what is safe; our intuition isn't always up to the task of sorting that out. (There's the usual example of airplane travel being very safe, but people being scared of it.)

I bet there's also some complexity here around incidents vs. injuries vs. deaths.

Another complexity is that one thing that makes a big difference to cyclist's safety, is the number of people who cycle, so you can have a vicious or virtuous cycle of people taking up cycling and making it safer, or people giving up cycling and making it less safe.

The most common types of car-bike collisions are some sort of scenario where the car fails to yield. If you know that, you can prevent a lot of them. For instance, never assume that a car turning left across your lane will yield.

Very accurate. Pretend that car drivers cannot see you, and act accordingly.

Looking at a single individual is completely uninformative for rare risks like car crashes. The average driver in the US has a very roughly 5% chance of being involved in a car crash each year. If you've been driving for 50 years (just an example, no idea how long you've been on the road!) then you'd expect to have been involved in two or three crashes by that time, but there's also about an 8% chance that you've never been in a crash.

"lift heavy things without fear of injury"

In my experience bicycling did the opposite of that for me. I love biking (way more than I like lifting heavy things, incidentally), but it does nothing to teach you how to lift properly, nor does it really even build the right muscles. Learn the hip hinge if you want to lift heavy things without fear of injury.

Bicycling is a great way to get around and traffic would be better for everyone, even motorists, if more and more people decide to bicycle.

People get skewed impressions about how safe/unsafe cycling is because they imagine worst case scenarios for cyclists. To be clear the worst-case outcomes for cycling accidents are truly awful and very fatal... getting right-hooked and run over by a garbage truck, getting hit from behind or T-boned by a car travelling at highway speed.

But fatal bike accidents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of typical bad bike accident outcomes however are little more than road-rash, a broken collarbone or a concussion and frequently these are the fault of the cyclist. A "totaled" bike amounts to something less than the deductible cost of auto-insurance in most cases.

Fatal car accidents are ALSO rare but fender benders (IMHO) have been getting MORE common as a result of mobile phones. Sadly a "fender-bender" can do massive financial damage--- $500 for each popped airbag + $1000++ whatever auto-body damage was incurred. Of course "fender benders" easily extend into "totaled car" when enough damage is done, even if everyone is unscathed.

" frequently these are the fault of the cyclist " - citation needed.

I'm assuming grandparent is assuming injuries incurred due to bike mishandling. It's fairly common amongst the training crowd to take spills resulting in road rash or a broken collar bone due to poor roads or just mishandling.

Taking a hit from a motorist often results in more traumatic injuries.

Most bike accidents are just ordinary mishandling of the bike resulting in a fall. Of course these things ARE NOT tabulated anywhere, there's no way to give a citation for this but those of us who ride a lot know it is reality. Who is going to file a police report because they fell while getting out of clips or because they hit a road defect the wrong way?

But from the stats in London those are 90% of the fatal accidents undertaking HGV's is suicidal - don't let your self get pushed into the gutter (or cycle lanes)

Living in San Jose and seeing many, many people ride in bike lanes in the wrong direction, I wonder how safe it is. It terrifies me every time I see it. I want to honk and wave and tell them but I'm afraid it'll only cause an accident.

This lack of understanding happens all over the US. I don't see how it happens. Many of the people doing it clearly think that a bicycle is contraflow like a pedestrian.

In Manhattan, it's mostly bike couriers who go the wrong way. When I cut across one short block the wrong way because it's convenient, there have been a few pedestrians who've called me out on it. So someone who's on a bike all day should know the "right" way by now. There are also frequently bikers on some busy avenues when there's a bike lane a block over, which is also just laziness or failure to plan ahead.

Sure, I'm an occasional rule breaker and I know the traffic rules well enough.

I'm talking about people like the person I saw slowly riding a 3 wheel cargo bike up the wrong side of one of the busier streets in this small town.

There's a lot of silliness in here, as other comments point out already. There is one good argument in here, that cycling gives you a net increase in lifespan because of the exercise. Once you count that, I'm pretty sure the risk when cycling becomes negative.

The trouble with that idea is that if you really want to minimize risk, you should drive for your transportation, and get your exercise from something safer than cycling.

Not that I see the risk of cycling as unacceptable. But if someone is going to argue that cycling is a net gain, the argument had better work!

Using national odds and figures to make personal decisions is a deadly trap. If your area/commute isn't average then this statement has to be re-evaluated dramatically. Saying "Bicycling is that safest form of transportation" using this data is true only in a special situation.

His argument that the risks of cycling are exaggerated does hold some water. People are pretty bad at assessing risk.

I loved riding my bike, did around 1200km a year. Last summer I slipped in the rain, demolished my ankle, was non-weight barring for 12 weeks... That costs a lot of money.

I know this is personal experience, and not representative of everyone, but one accident on a bike costs a tun.

Accidents in cars can be equally catastrophic.

This is disgustingly sloppy. I'm not opposed to rough approximation, but every number present here has crippling, unaddressed confounders.

- The per-hour evaluation is obviously bad. Per-mile numbers are present and more sane, but a vague handwave at 'unnecessary driving' is used to justify focusing on the prettier, less sensible number.

- Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not.

- The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation. Americans get killed in cars because of drunk/distracted/sleepy drivers, and because highway speeds are life-threatening. At city-commuter speeds, a driver can likely survive a head-on with a bus.

- The bicycling numbers are similarly absurd. The audience for this piece, and the group most likely to cycle for their commute, is an audience living in dense cities. Boston and San Francisco are far, far more dangerous cycling locations than residential, sidewalk biking included in these values.

- The cherrypicking here is fundamentally dishonest. This is a 2013 piece that uses 2010 bicycling risk numbers. Why? Because 2010 was the safest year for bicyclists in two decades.

I could go on, but suffice to say that "that’s the worst case" is simply a lie. It is far better than the best case, because these are complete incomparables.

Taking parking into consideration it's often faster to bike < 5 miles in a city than drive that distance. For longer distances Trains and then Aircraft win.

I wish that were true here in the US: the train is a reasonable option only in certain regions, e.g., the northeast corridor.

It's pretty tough to find a trip in the US where trains win over cars. Rush-hour commuting in certain big cities is one case. Some trips in Amtrak's northeast corridor are another. But for the most part, our trains go slower than cars, stop more often, and often take less direct routes. And that's assuming you can get there by train at all. Huge parts of the country simply have no passenger train service.

From the Boston exurbs, driving to New Haven and taking the Metro North into NYC is optimal. Also there's Frank Pepe to stop at on the way home.

The car turns out to be pretty useful for traveling long distanecs. I've both driven from NYC to Montreal and taken the train. The train takes 12 hours. Driving takes 6 hours.

Now, if you happen to be traveling on a route that 400,000 other people travel every day, trains might win. Tokyo to Kyoto is a 2h 19m train ride, while the drive is 6 hours.

Europe does a little better than the US, but not as well as Japan. Paris-Frankfurt is 4h by train, 6 hours driving.

(Everything is always 6 hours apparently!)

Something to consider that 12 hour train ride is ~20x safer than a 6 hour car ride.

  CARS/LIGHT TRUCKS: 7.28 fatalities per billion passenger miles
  COMMUTER/LONG-HAUL TRAINS: 0.43 fatalities per billion  passenger miles
  BUSES: 0.11 deaths per billion passenger miles
  AVIATION: 0.07 deaths per billion passenger miles

Granted, trading an extra ~0.002% chance of death for 6 hours is not something most people think about. But, 0.002% * ~60 * 365 * 24 = ~10 hours of life lost on average.

A few city pairs on the northeast corridor are marginally more time-efficient by train, especially with the (more expensive) Acela. The train is maybe 1-2 hours faster between Boston and NYC or Boston and DC.

(And that corridor is pretty miserable to drive for the most part.)

But that's about it in the US [for non-commuter rail].

According to the internet, NYC-Montreal by car is 595 km Paris-Marseille, in france, by car is 774.92km

Paris-Marseille in train is 3h17. The trains are comfortable, you arrive in the middle of the city and you don't have to park.

Conclusion: get yourself a better train network.

Edit: Just saw you took paris-frankfurt as an example, which seems to be a particularly poorly optimized route. :/

Comparing an American highway map to a train map is telling.

The highways are a neat, practical grid, and we cut the landscape to enable that. The traintracks, coming later, had to circumvent both natural features and the highways occupying the best routes. Plus, without a culture of train travel, express routes are pricy and most trains stop constantly to fill up and scrape together a profit. Worse, even our express trains simply have slow top speeds.

The one thing I'm proud of is our train system for freight, which is actually quite efficient.

The rail system predates the interstate highway system by almost a century. The reality is that the highway system was built by the government, and the rail system was built by private companies. The government had better planning tools than the private companies (eminent domain), and ended up with a better system.

Furthermore, if you look at old maps of many cities, you'll note that many current highways either are adjacent to still-used railroad tracks or use the right of ways of railroad lines that no longer exist.

"Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not."

The article seems focused on the commuter experience.

Most people consider their commute by time not distance. "It takes me 35min to get to work" not "I am 5 miles from the office".

To me that backs up the idea that the per-mile numbers are nonsense. If I am comitted to cycling to work, and don't want to commute for more than an hour, I'm going to live within ~12 miles of my workplace. If I'm driving to work, I might be as far as 70 miles (depending on traffic).

A comparison per-mile doesn't match up with reality. I'm riding 24 miles per day on my bike or I'm driving 140 miles.

For non-commute journeys, this makes less sense as I can't choose to live closer to everywhere. I can choose to live closer to work though.

Do you move every time you change your job? And does rent price not ever get in those calculations? After you rent that home 24 miles away from work, you'll have to decide each day if you want to make that distance by bike or car.

The standard measure of transportation safety is accidents|deaths|injuries / (passenger * distance). There are very good reasons for this that don't change just because a transport modality is slower.

Really, the worst thing people can do about their safety is just putting their fingers on their ears and yelling while refusing to listen to reality. Let's have a honest assessment of cycling, because if it isn't as safe as we want, there are plenty of ways to improve it. But nobody will go fixing things if everybody denies that a problem exist.

You can have a mixed commute. Bike last mile to the train station / bus, then bike/walk the last mile to work or similar. I would think the bus / train is safer than a car or a bike.

I've certainly had a mixed commute, and I appreciated it a lot. Living in a place with harsh winters and bad traffic, it was far safer and more practical than an all-exercise trip to work.

While the standard measure makes sense for a lot of cases, a more wholistic view is required when making life decisions.

Taking my own life as an example: when I owned a car, my travel habits were different. I went farther more often, without good reason to. Not owning a car, I now travel less distance. With the same job and a car, I drove x miles/year. Riding a bike, I ride y miles/year. If x * deaths/mile is greater than y * deaths/mile, the smart choice would be a bicycle. Even if as a mode of transport it technically has a higher rate of deaths/mile.

You're right, you can't really say biking is the safest form of transportation. It's less safe per mile, according to the stats. But it could turn out to be a specific person's safest transportation choice.

While I like reading MMM, I also really dislike the way he uses numbers. What bothers me is that he pretty much always does his computations based on averages. This lets him do math on things that aren't really comparable, like the risks of driving and the benefits of exercise. Riding a bicycle is great, I do it myself because it's frugal and pleasant to do. But I don't think these benefits are as quantifiable as MMM implies.

I am not sure that I disagree with you overall, but I believe you are too dismissive here. Obviously, implicit in the piece is the notion that you must arrange your life to a degree to make bicycling possible, as the car is vastly more flexible. I think the better question is, having done so, how to compare the risk? It's not an easy question. MMM's answer is admittedly somewhat glib, but you're not allowing room for a fair comparison either.

Motorists must also "arrange" their lives to support their transportation mode as much as cyclists do. Admittedly these arrangements have been made by others in most cases, but they're still present.

Simply being able to park a car at origin and destination, for example, costs money, and a lot of it, in terms of infrastructure and urban planning (even if there's no meter or explicit parking fee).

I'm not sure I am. Cycling safety is a legitimate question if you arrange your life to accommodate it, but what upset me is that this isn't implicit in MMM's piece, as I read it. The piece insists that biking is safer per-mile, and that readers would benefit from a simple, minimal-accommodation switch to bicycling.

There is a real question to be answered here, and I didn't attempt to address it. But what offended me is the use of "per mile" and "best case" values that pretended there wasn't a harder question to address.

I love cycling, and I wish I lived in a place where it was more practical and safer. As great as it is for the environment, traffic, and health (mental and physical!), if you know a decent number of people that cycle a lot, you will see a continuous stream of injuries among your friends.

Though very amusing and quite charming, I would hate to be driven to the hospital on a gurney bed attached to a bicycle or have the fire department arrive on tandem bikes with fire ladders.

what about first-responders on bicycles, especially in a disaster zone where roads may compromised?

I had a friend who was a bike messenger in new york while he was going to school for paramedics and during 9-11 he got downtown before the second building fell

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