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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Bicycling, even with a helmet, strikes me as an irresponsibly risky activity.

Even minor concussions can cause significant neurological dysfunction, and most bike helmets do nothing to protect against the sub-lethal variety.

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People always focus on small, dramatic causes of death (bike wrecks) and ignore the infinitely more common causes (heart disease). Biking frequently has tremendous benefits on heart disease in exchange for a modest increase in the risk of death (still low) from a bike accident.

You are on the correct track and another problem is substitutions.

If bicycling is made illegal for safety reasons, at least some percentage of current bikers will simply take up running, and running is very hard on the knees. So the total aggregate of knee pain will increase by X vs the decline in bike injury related pain Y. The relationship between X and Y is unclear and probably unknowable, but also probably "about the same magnitude". So all the social engineering and gnashing of teeth would not improve the overall human condition.

Studies have repeatedly shown that running is NOT hard on the knees. Instead, the risk of osteoarthritis (knee problelms) is more associated with aging.

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/8478853/reload=0;jsessioni... http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=403118 http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/18/4/379.short

And a less scientific article on the topic: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/why-runners-dont-ge...

Plus, I don't think that's a particularly cogent argument to make. You can say that about anything, pretty much. If you increase gas prices, then a percentage of those drivers will start biking/walking/running. Better not increase gas prices... Or you can replace "gas prices" with anything that affects mode of travel: taxes, congestion, surplus of bike frames, health fads, etc.

Really? Driving is an irresponsibly risky activity, likewise everything else.

Live a little.

I moved away from a place where everyone drives all of the time for this and other reasons. I avoid traveling by car when possible. Driving or riding in an automobile is quite possibly the most risky thing that most people I know do day to day.

You're right, I live my life barricaded in my house, and the threat of falling planes is a constant worry, as is choking to death on lettuce.

Just by being alive you're subjecting yourself to the possibility of any number of medical conditions, some of which might be caused by issues in your very own DNA! If you're truly interested in minimizing your risk, it'd probably be best for you to invent a time machine and convince your mother to abort you before you were born.

Except... Grandfather effect comes into play.

Just 2x more dangerous than walking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Additional

By the premisses of that article, I suggest bicycling should be taxed about $5/mile [0], to properly internalize the risk of death. Not just to counter ignorance/apathy, but because of the external costs of death to family, other people, and the broader economy. And maybe a separate surcharge to account for social health costs treating preventable injury.

[0] using the article's valuation of $50/micromort; 10 miles/micromort => $5/mile

Let's attack the problem of external costs of death at the source. We should tax people heavily for making friends or having families. After all, everybody is going to die someday, and a person who dies with nobody to mourn him costs the least.

By the same calculation you should tax $50 per 230 miles driven in a car. According to the US DOT the average vehicle travels 12,334 miles per year, so you have an average tax of $2681.

Also a tax of $75 should be attached to each bottle of wine and a 16 ounce jar of peanut butter should have a $40 tax.

A couple datapoints, my home town charges $10/yr for a bike license sticker which is legally required to ride a bike in town (although rarely enforced against white people and/or kids)

Also the DNR maintains a network of state wide bike trails and charges something near $30/yr for an annual trail pass.

Also you'd have to discount the $5/mile by the effect of exercise. Perhaps its net effect is only 50 cents per mile for adults. In that case we may already be taxing bikes nearly that much, at least on average.

People laugh at me when I say bicycles are probably going to be outlawed for children soon. I'm cool with that; they laughed when I said smoking would be outlawed too. It is probably safer to buy a kid a lawn dart set or some packs of matches than a bicycle, and I'm just being honest about a minor hobby of mine. You can stack their little bodies like cordwood every year across the country, seems like a lot of death for fundamentally not accomplishing too much.

That's not what an externality is. The article suggests that people already have an internalised value of around $5/mile.

Since cyclists rarely kill others, an externality tax based on micromorts would hardly hit them at all. Compare that to motor travel, though…

It's not about the risk of death, it's about the risk of neurological damage.

Death is not suffering. Being made stupid would be.

A quick search turned up a paper on Netherlands (population 16.77 mil):

  ... 9,200 sustain serious injury in a bicycle
  crash. A third of these seriously injured bicycle
  casualties are diagnosed with head or brain
  injuries (32%)

http://www.swov.nl/rapport/Factsheets/UK/FS_Bicycle_helmets....

Showing 211 cyclists have a serious head injury per billion km cycled...

Discussion: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/08/brain-injuries-...

Edit: accounting

Let's not even get started on climbing ladders.

I don't do that, either.

> Bicycling, even with a helmet, strikes me as an irresponsibly risky activity.

The evidence does not support your intuition. Even after controlling for the risk of injury in a crash, cycling is associated with several additional life-years of health.

More healthy than the typical American lifestyle, certainly, but how does it compare against other lifestyles with similar levels of physical activity? For instance, running, walking, or swimming?

Kind of a silly point. First, can you swim to work? But, really, you are suggesting that everything always be reduced to whatever is "the best".

Silly?

I had a hard time tracking down good, comparable numbers, but here are some numbers I biasedly picked to support my question:

  * Cycling: 14 months (http://www.bikeradar.com/us/news/article/regular-cyclists-could-live-14-months-longer-than-car-drivers-28162/)
  * Jogging: 6.2 years (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/jogging-life-expectancy-_n_1472318.html)
  * Swimming: "longer than runners" (http://www.chatelaine.com/health/swimmers-live-longer-than-runners/)

These numbers (which could be wrong, I didn't dig too far) say you have more to gain going from cycling to running than you do from driving to cycling. So why focus on getting people cycling instead of getting people jogging?

Because you can use cycling as transportation better than you can jogging. That makes it easier to incorporate into a lifestyle, as opposed to an extra thing you add into your day.

Driving, even with a seatbelt, strikes me as an irresponsibly risky activity.

Even a minor collision can cause significant neurological dysfunction, and most seat belts do nothing to protect against the sub-lethal variety.

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