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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"In absolute terms, more people were killed in a car accident (237) than in a bicycle accident (203) last year, but this is different per kilometre travelled. Traffic mortality per billion vehicle-km was much higher among cyclists than among passenger car occupants (11 versus 1.6 deaths)." (https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/31/decline-in-road-fatali...)

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Is it as much about vehicle-km or per vehicle-km? At the end of the day people generally will avoid super long trips on a bicycle because it’s slow and strenuous.

There are a lot of ways to slice those numbers; I like deaths / km as it describes the risks of traveling from point A to point B by various methods. On the other hand, it's likely skewed somehow by the fact that you rarely have more than one fatal accident per trip.

Another way of looking at it is deaths / trip; a quick search shows 4,800,000,000 bicycle trips in 2019 for a rate of 48 deaths / billion trips and 229 deaths versus 3,600,000,000 car trips and 610 deaths or 169 deaths per billion trips.

The average trip length in the US is apparently something like 10-15m which might make the number of automotive deaths per billion trips something like 130-200. Maybe. (I can't find an actual estimate of the number of trips.)

Another way is deaths per population, see one of my other comments.

Thing is, cyclists don't need to rack up as many kilometers as drivists. If you're riding a bike, you probably live in an urban place and you need only bike short distances.

Well, obviously cyclists are more vulnerable. Considering that the numbers are pretty low IMO. The Netherlands have 16 million people, most of which use bicycles for daily travel. 200 died in a year, especially elderly who are exceptionally vulnerable. It's not something that warrants extreme worry. There's always risk in a life.

Also, it's something that is only a risk to the rider themselves so leaving it to their discretion is warranted IMO.

Dividing fatalities by population might be reasonable to look at acceptable death levels; in NL in 2020, that's 229 / 17,440,000 or 1.3 per 100,000. Automotive numbers would be pretty similar.

(Correction: They would not. There were ~610 auto deaths in NL in 2020. That gives 3.5 per 100,000.)

In the US, 2020 had 11.7 automotive deaths per 100,000 people and 0.38 bicycle deaths per 100,000.

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