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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Biking and drinking (in excess) — probably not the world’s best combo in general, but on the bright side it is just your own life at risk, and there’s a built-in coordination challenge, so I guess it isn’t possible to get going while truly hammered!

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Eh what? You can definitely kill someone with your bike. Also if you kill yourself in traffic you will raise the risk of traffic related deaths for the responders. Many places in the world riding a bike drunk is as illegal as driving a car drunk.

> Many places in the world riding a bike drunk is as illegal as driving a car drunk.

Even if you assume the the risks outlined in your comment as relatively high likelihood (which I don't), it still makes 0 sense to think it's anywhere near as serious as driving drunk.

Riding a bike drunk is asocial and a danger to yourself and others. You might like to think of it as less serious, just like people thought of drunk driving as okay if you were careful. It's a judgment call you make, but it is objectively more dangerous than when you are sober.

All motion is more dangerous while drunk, but how drunk you are matters, how fast you're going matters, and how dense traffic is matters. I'm not convinced of how much more dangerous biking is while mildly drunk than walking, or biking very slowly while very drunk, especially at night when almost no one is walking.

So is walking anywhere

It‘s definitely possible and happens regularly. But statistically speaking, it‘s a freak accident compared to car vs. pedestrian. It‘s orders of magnitude less likely.

That's besides the point. People sometimes die when bikes run into them - simple as.

People sometimes die due to collisions pedestrians.

Should it be illegal for people to walk around drunk as well?

What is your point then, if not “cycling drunk is as likely to kill somebody else as driving drunk?” If it is “it’s technically possible to kill somebody cycling drunk” - then yes, I concede the point. But it’s not a useful point in this discussion.

In the Netherlands driving a bike under influence is technically illegal. But nobody gets caught for it, and it's the much preferred alternative to drinking & driving.

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