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Comment by fruityrudy | Hacker News Reader

As a pedestrian I am routinely almost killed by cyclists.

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.

2-3 seems surprisingly high to me, considering the small mass and low speed of most cyclists. Can you describe the most common classes of such accidents?

I realise how odd it sounds weird to ask about 2-3 when car drivers cause a four-digit number.

Go get hit by a bicycle at 10+ MPH and see how many times you're left disabled.

Well, a bicycle plus rider is about 100kg, which is a tenth of an old-fashioned car or closer to a twentieth of a SUV, so that should correspond roughly to getting hit by a car at about 1MPH.

I'm not awfully worried about cars moving at 1MPH, and correspondingly unworried about bicycles. You may disagree. Do you happen to drive a car? At 1MPH, or faster?

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

There may be a little exaggeration. But there are many occasions where if I do not move out of the way or stop walking when I have right of way, I would be hit at high speed.

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