Do you have statistics to indicate biking is inherently more dangerous than other activities or are you just repeating a certain assumption you have?
I am guessing the insurance companies are looking far enough into the future where the long term benefits to my health outweigh the short term risks, but they are definitely losing money in the short term.
Wonder what the tradeoff is there for my lifetime medical expenses if I wasn’t running?
Of course it also depends on the physical condition of the person, especially their susceptibility to stress related injuries, and the running surface. Generally speaking running is much higher impact than biking, which is why you so often see runners with a stress injury training on a stationary bike.
Given the same commute you can expect riding a bike to be 23 times more dangerous than driving a car.
Put another way, it looks like people get into car accidents roughly once every 18 years. If instead of driving your car for your commute you rode your bike, you can expect to get into an accident every single year (and then some).
At 15 miles/hour, the means the first 5 miles of biking costs you about 0.25-0.5 micromorts of accident risk and gives you +2 microlifes of fitness.
Riding in a car, on the other hand, incurs accident risk AND has effects on fitness.
But the more interesting article to me was [0] which presents a study that says around 30% of "cycling" deaths are due to natural causes such as heart disease.
[0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/09/01/is-it-jus...
> It also signals that older males need to be mindful that vigorous cycling – as with any form of exercise – can be fatal if the rider has a serious medical condition like heart disease. It’s likely though that the exercise benefit of cycling prevents many more premature deaths from disease that it causes.
It would be interesting to break down the statistics on cycling to seperate those who cycle to commute, and those who cycle for leisure. I’d assume they have vastly different mortality causes.
For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009.
Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.
To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate.
Statiscally, that’s not likely - maybe even not possible. There will be some who are that much safer, but not many - otherwise the average would just be pulled up.
This is a common joke in aviation, but sharing a thermal with multiple gliders whizzing around is a little disconcerting.
That means a 13 year old trundling down a 5 meter wide footpath to the local shops on Sunday morning is up for a $428 fine, roughly 23 hours of adult minimum wage work.
It seems to be seldom enforced, but it is doing a good job at what I think is the main objective - keeping people off bikes and in their car paying road tolls to the government and their private contractor businesses.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-cycli...
Cops never bother to enforce it that I’ve seen tho’