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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, he did carry a satellite phone. But I do agree - this felt like a wildly optimistic decision to make :P

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He also had experience backpacking, so he had experience managing water and preparing for weather, so I would say it was optimistic, but not dangerous (except for the danger of getting killed by a driver.)

IME drivers are by far the biggest danger on the road.

The author engaged in a cross country road trip, not a daily bicycle commute in NYC. While I would be very surprised if your assertion wasn't statistically true it likely unwise to take what is typical and blindly apply it into a situation that is a massive outlier without specific reason to do so.

It's true everywhere. If you're a cyclist you would have to engage in creatively suicidal behavior to elevate any of the other risks of cycling to the same magnitude as getting randomly taken out by a driver.

I have done a 3000 mile tour (Great Divide). The scariest parts were a highway section in southern colorado, and after I finished and was just biking around in El Paso, both because of cars.

It wasn't the bears or lightning or anything else, honest to god I experienced all that stuff and the scariest stuff was still people in cars.

I was wondering how it went for the author. Didn't see any mention of traffic in the article. Probably a lot of open roads, but at least in the populated areas traffic must have been a factor?

It seems he was following a pre-set route that's been used for ... decades, now? I'm guessing it's optimized to keep cyclists out of high-traffic areas.

And I consider that people have been crossing the US by bike since at least as far back as the 1970's. In over half the time since then — no satellite phone.

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