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Comment by Swenrekcah | Hacker News Reader

I don’t believe anybody has ever suggested that bikes should cover everything.

People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.

Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.

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> Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.

Even in the Netherlands, bicycles was the most dangerous mode of transportation in 2021, with 207 fatalities. Cars came in second with 175 deaths.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...

The bicyclists were quite likely killed by car drivers.

And more people die in car accidents each year than in wars. You need to compare against the number of trips made and I suspect they are substantially greater for bicycles.

Base rate and attribution fallacies.

When a car kills a cyclist it's not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can't compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.

I agree.

Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph...

Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.

Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don't have the same risks as the entire cycling population.

This is a really good point. If we start adding bicycles to the US, more people will die. And we will need to have a greater percent of bicyclists than the Netherlands before the death rate starts to drop off. Having safe bicycle routes is a long way off.

Versus if everyone had cars and perhaps more people would die in total.

No way “most” people can use bikes for pretty much everything.

I get what you are advocating for. I have had several periods in my life where I used a bike as my primary form of transportation. But it only works well in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.

The point is that within the boundaries of city life, it can absolutely work for most trips, provided the infrastructure is not completely car-centred.

Within the bounds of a childless, healthy, individual, who can work remote, living in a city that is well designed for bikes. Unfortunately this is a nearly negligible percentage of the existing population/infrastructure. There are many many decades of change, including universal rent control, required for the rest of us.

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