I wonder what the right "if everybody drove this.." is? It is probably not a lotus 7 clone. What is the smallest vehicle with superb crash test ratings?
For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.
A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly.
My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.
These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways
If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...
The interstate system and truck delivery seems to be pretty fantastic at servicing the continental US when paired with freight trains, cargo planes, etc. And it is similarly effective for delivery of all other kinds of things including people.
These systems would be good to implement in many cities, but interstate shipping and travel is another thing altogether.
The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car
So to answer your snarky question with snark in kind, mostly from the other 4/5 of emissions.
For my commute to work, its something like my choice of a 35 minute drive (not counting the circling I will have to do finding a parking spot at the other end) or a 45 minute bike ride. I probably save time on the whole even without counting the parking fiasco, considering now I don't need to find time in my schedule to work in my cardio.
If we add congestion into the mix since everyone is bicycling, I imagine a higher number of accidents would occur. Right now an estimated 67 million people in the USA ride a bicycle for an estimated 15 billion hours combined per year. 228 million licensed drivers times 290 average hours on the road equals 66 billion hours per year. Let us assume the bicyclists will have to spend three times more travel time due to lower speed of bicycles. That equals roughly 200 billion hours of bicycling per year. 200 billion hours divided by 15 billion equals 13.3. 900 257 deaths per 15 billion hours equals 3,341 deaths per year. The average number of deaths per year from automobile crashes for the last few years is about 36,000.
Even if this is a conservative estimate. I think it is safe to say you are essentially correct.
Half are elderly.
About a third are on ebikes
87% involve a car.
That's around 0.8 deaths per hundred thousand people worth of bike modeshare not invovling a car. 1/15th of the USA and a quarter of netherlands road deaths.
This is with drunk cycling penalties being almost completely unenforced (although not sure how it compares to US drunk driving prevalence).
Granted cars are used for the longer trips so it's not completely sound, but bikes are used for congested trips. Small vehicle modeshare also shortens all trips.
My guess is the safest vehicle would look like a train followed by lightweight velo no heavier than a dutch bike (and not optimized for aero) or a recumbent trike with a roll cage and a lap belt. Also we can conclude that either current ebikes are too fast and heavy, or they result in people cycling who would be too frail otherwise.
More realistically, it's smaller cars on slower city streets.
Edit: you are right it's about 3% die at 30kpmh, vs ~35% at 50kpmh. My bad. Still lower speeds dramatically improve the safety of cars.
https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2011PedestrianR...
Also, residential roads in the US are usually 40km/h
I personally know someone who was hit at about 10-15hm/h and they were hospitalized and broke their spine.
The distinction is professional drivers and safety standards.
Is that still true after you adjust for the number of buses on the road vs. the number of cars? If not, then this is like saying driving drunk is less dangerous than driving sober since only 30% of car crash fatalities involve drunk drivers.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/19/heres-how-much-safer-...
That data could be representitive of buses being big and heavy or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.
Compare the same dataset for busses on a grade separated RBT with well paid/trained drivers and platform doors and you get a very different story.
But there's nowhere that buses share space with pedestrians and cars don't, so that can't account for why buses are more dangerous than cars.