Every (US) cyclist who was killed by a driver in 2020

I used to run my own hand built ebike so it didn't have any governor or limit on it. Was always safest when I could keep pace with cars. Otherwise they just try to pass and that's not great on residential streets.

That a good point, i never thought of this hypocracy

Cars still have to abide by speed limits, which can be enforced because they have licenseplates.

If ebikes had license plates, we could enforce speed limits on them the same way as cars, rather than a hard limit by design.

I think the speed limits are more for the benefit of riders than for things they collide with.

Whilst it's somewhat hypocritical there is some false equivalence there to consider. An ebike can still go beyond the engine cut-off speed and exceed the local speed limit, so would act differently to a speed limiter on a car, which would be more restrictive. So, for ebikes at least, these are different things. Also in some countries larger vehicles already require a speed limiter (although not cars) so the political will is there in some form.

Part of the reasoning for the speed limiter seems to be linked to the absence of mandatory training & licensing for ebikes & scooters. By limiting the speed governments are aiming to limit the risk to both rider and others and that risk has a direct correlation to speed.

A non-limited ebike is similar in many ways to a light petrol powered moped and so in much of Europe you can get non-limited ebikes but you need a light motorcycle license and wear a helmet, as you would riding a moped. So there's some equivalence in law there.

Like for example in the EU where all cars sold after 2022 will be required to have speed limiters?

Speed is also a poor proxy for safety. Lack of attention and aptitude is the real problem.

Some people's problem is that they drive faster than they or their cars can physically handle, but they are relatively rare compared to those who are unsafe even below the speed limit. Things like texting, fixating on the spot directly in front of the car, and simply not caring about putting others in danger. They are also less likely to speed simply because they don't have the confidence for it.

So speeding enforcement is a poor use of resources. What's really needed is some kind of driver screening to see if they have the mental and visual acuity, motor skills and discipline to drive at any speed. Intense scrutiny of new drivers is probably why western and northern Europe are the safest places to be on the road. With VR simulators and eye tracking this can even be done objectively and consistently at no risk to the public. Stare at the spot in front of the car? Miss an erratic cyclist in your field of view? Can't keep in your lane? Better get a bus pass. I expect a lot of politicians would balk at the idea since they know they themselves would fail.

Also, a better alternative to speed limits is tiered licenses, just like they are for motorcycles. I've experimented with seeing how fast I can drive on the derestricted Autobahn, and found it takes a very different skill set and lots of practice to do well. Everything happens in split seconds, before you know it you're task saturated, falling behind the car, have angry Germans in diesel Passats behind you and no planned escape in the middle lane. If you want to drive a particular speed you have to demonstrate in the simulator that you can keep up at that speed, and do so consistently over time. So the people who do on-ramps and merge at 50 km/h should probably be capped at that speed anyway and stay on surface streets. Then you have one that lets you in on the right lane at truck driving speeds, and then another that lets you drive at whatever speed you please.

We recently had an incident where a driver struck a lady's car door while she was loading her child, stops for a brief second and takes off.

That's terrible, we are in real trouble with this generation.

> I guess watching pain and death on TV all day long really makes you numb to the suffering of others.

What does TV have to do with anything?

Additionally, bikes sold out last year, pretty much every bike sold out, people where grabbing old bikes off craigslist for 2x or more their worth. There has to have been a disporportionate amount of bikers and new bikers compared to other years.

Really? You routinely have near misses that would have been fatal?

In the UK, cyclists are responsible for between 2 and 3 pedestrian deaths each year. The total number of people killed on UK roads in the year to June 2020 was 1580 (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...). This suggests that motorists directly kill about as many people in a morning as cyclists do in a year, and that's ignoring deaths caused by pollution.

if the epidemic of cell phone use while (badly) driving where i live is any indication, it’s a very large share.

No idea. I cycle in Germany I would argue that the main issue is extremely aggressive and reckless behavior towards cyclists by car drivers, not that they're inattentive. Although that's a big problem as well, many drivers simply don't "look" for cyclists - you always need to act like you don't have right of way. Of course, many drivers get aggressive against cars as well, e.g. somewhat adhering to traffic laws is a surefire way of inciting road rage.

Yea, I'm also wondering about that. It might sound callous but it doesn't sound like a massive number of deaths when compared to other deaths in the US but I'm not really sure how many people ride bikes and for how long they are on the road.

Dutch person here. I believe the driver is at fault, unless it can be proven that the cyclist had a serious part in the crash.

Having said that, there is significant effort made here to just reduce conflict points between modes of transport. No law can help you if you're dead.

This makes sense, even though I'd be on the receiving end of that, being the guy in the car. I'm assuming the actual text of the law is a little more nuanced, being written more in terms of responsibility to act to avoid the accident.

Despite appearances cars are far more agile than anything else on the road, and even if a biker makes the initial mistake, a driver has the biggest toolbox to mitigate or completely avoid the accident. This is something to be aware of when sharing the road with motorcycles as well.

That seems short-sighted, if the "weaker" party can still cause the incident. If a bike swerves in front of a car, they are to blame regardless of how strong the car is.

Do you know how many people in The Netherlands ride bicycles daily? A lot. I think almost everyone in the Neherlands has ride a bicycle daily some time in their life..

Having said that, in 2000, 1200 people died. So 610 deaths in 2020 doesn't seem that much.

The Netherlands is one of the safest place to ride a bicycle. And continues to improve on it.

The problem with that statistics is that it records the absolute number of people that died cycling, neither controlling for population size nor total distance cycled. That makes all conclusions drawn essentially worthless: an increase in accidents may be caused by an even larger increase in miles cycled, which would actually be a net improvement.

There's the (controversial) concept of "Risk Compensation", which covers some of the same ground; when we feel safer driving (eg, when we start wearing a seatbelt), we unconsciously compensate by driving with slightly less care. There are two problems with this: the risk is often transferred to other people, and the magnitude of the compensation is not guaranteed to be the same.

The Netherlands is a great example of reworking the streets to make them better (see for example: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... and https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...). There was a large and well-organised campaign starting in the 1970s.

I'm curious where you live? Because it seems more and more cities are adding bike lanes and separate bike paths, and cars are already obliged to yield to everything else, at least everywhere I've lived in the USA.

I'd choose the separate infrastructure. We already spend billions on highways every year (often new highways which will end up being liabilities down the road as opposed to maintenance) we can spend a little on better infra. I'd rather not treat the situation as zero sum and basically wish more drivers and car riders die in larger numbers.

Again the situation isn't zero sum, we can save both car rider lives and bike rider and pedestrian lives.

I don’t really follow a lot of your points. Why are making cars visible making other things less visible? If everything is just a bland surface, and the eye can more easily make out a car, that doesn’t mean that pedestrians blend into their backgrounds any more or less noticeable than they were before. How are crush zones related? If it was just the surface of a less-crushable area, isn’t that just the same or worse for people getting hit?

I mean, your overall point is right. Cars are mostly not compatible with pedestrians and small vehicles like bikes and scooters. There does need to be more separation between these modes. One example is flashing yield signs for pedestrian crossings. This separates pedestrians from traffic and makes them more noticeable. Separate-ish bike lanes are getting more common too. I think making certain streets car-free is a good idea in dense areas too.

Another note is that (IIRC), cars are already required to yield to pedestrians and bikes in many areas.

But when it comes to most roads outside of dense areas, cars aren’t going anywhere because cars are the mode of transportation which makes most sense when things are spread out and there aren’t a lot of people.

What if the risk was a manslaughter charge?

Of course not in all cases, but if we had better ways of showing you were on your phone and cruising at 50 in a neighborhood.

Your post is typical example of self-righteous and egotistical attitude of cyclists. Making cars less safe would make other people suffer more, and riding with pedestrians would endanger the pedestrians. How can one even suggest to explicitly increase danger that way for others in order to decrease danger for themselves?. Instead, I'd suggest the cyclists look at themselves. In my experience (Bay Area, mostly PA/MV/Sunnyvale) cyclists are less educated in traffic rules, less respectful of those rules and less polite than any other traffic participants - from riding wrong side of the road and riding on sidewalks to riding while reading smartphone to flying over STOPs to angrily banging on my car for taking over the bike lane before right turn as rules dictate (yep, hard to believe, yet it is true - i'm standing waiting for cross traffic to pass, and that cyclist instead of waiting behind me squeezes between me and the sidewalk while several times angrily banging on my car's roof while making the face - the poor moron had obviously no idea about the traffic rules, and that that specific rule is precisely for his own safety).

I've been in places where bicycles are required to be on the sidewalk (shoulder really doubles as sidewalk) and hate it both as a pedestrian and as a biker.

Also the website mixes relative and absolute stats. Car fatalities at "all time lows", relative to other years where tens of thousands die in cars. While a vastly-smaller biker-death stat is compared to the other years of vastly-smaller stats. Need to compare in terms of deaths per mile traveled or something. We probably don't want to make a change that leads to ten thousand more driving fatalities in hopes it will help a few hundred bikers.

There is a great thread about this on twitter [1]

SUVs/Trucks have longer blind spots. They cause significantly worse accident outcomes due to hitting the upper body and sending the person under the car, instead of over. I might be stereotyping, but I have found big cars to be particularly popular among women and mothers, many of whom have even larger blind spots due to be shorter/ the car seat not going up high enough.

> “We really feel we can see what’s in front of us, and if you tell somebody they can’t see eight feet in front of their vehicle, they think you’re crazy,” said Amber Rollins, who maintains the national injury and fatality database for KidsAndCars. “Unfortunately, not a day goes by that we don’t add a child to our database.”

> That database shows each year at least 3,000 children are injured and an average of nearly 60 kids are killed in frontover accidents in the United States. KidsAndCars tracked 575 frontover deaths over the past 10 years, compared to 304 deaths in the prior decade– an increase of 89 percent.

Small crossovers are particularly egregious because they are often just raised up hatchbacks with similar sized interiors and worse driving, worse visibility, and worse safety for everyone but the car sitting highest. I have similar but less valid complaint about SUVs when wagons have existed for time immemorial, with wagons driving better and having fewer blind spots.

On a similar note, horsepower has constantly gone up with zero improvement (or even decrease) in the quality of drivers or changes to speed limits. Why do cars need 400+ Horsepower when the buyer explicitly claims to be buying these SUVs for comfort over drivability.[2]

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1396939038456750089.html

[2] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-01/trends202...