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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

That’s one of those comparisons where the goal is to underestimate the greater Chicago area’s population, but it’s not even an accurate statistic.

From 2005 to 2016 Chicago with a population of 2.7 million had between 3 and 8 cycles deaths per year vs 27 to 65 pedestrian deaths and 282 to 487 motorists. https://activetrans.org/sites/files/crash%20report%202018%20... Edit: The closest to 1/3 days I could find was 13 bicycle deaths and 95 pedestrian fatalities totaling to 108 for the region. Which is 1 cyclist death per 28 days out of ~10 million people.

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Chicago's metropolitan area has around 10 million people in it. Are you saying that a cyclist killed every third day with that kind of population is considered an acceptable loss?

Edit: for context, NYC alone has a comparable population (versus the entire Chicago MSA) and, despite rising cyclist deaths, still has significantly fewer than ~120 a year[1].

Edit: TFA's source for cycling deaths appears to be incorrect; the actual rate is far below ~120/year. The ~120/year number appears to come from a misreading of total pedestrian and cycling deaths in this report[2].

[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/08/07/cyclist-deaths-are-su...

[2]: https://activetrans.org/sites/files/crash%20report%202018%20...

And also: what's the actual number of cyclists and how much do they travel? It's not close to 10 million, so a comparison with just raw population data doesn't really mean much. I guess there aren't many cyclists and they don't bike as much as the Dutch, making this death statistic even more absurd.

I’m saying the statistic is flat out incorrect.

I followed the link and the closest I could find was 13 bicycle deaths and 95 pedestrian fatalities totaling to 108 for the region.

Thanks; that's my read as well. I'm going to edit my comment.

lol look at the active normalization going on even here in this thread!

You may have misunderstood, I’m saying the statistic is wrong. The closest I could find from their link was 13 cyclist deaths and 95 pedestrian deaths totaling 108 for the year for the region.

I’m not saying deaths are ok, just that the number is shocking because it’s wrong.

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