I think most people equate "bicycles are dangerous" with "cycling is dangerous", which seems perfectly reasonable to me. What matters is whether you'll get hurt using a bicycle, not the pedantry of whether the bicycle itself is the problem.
It's not pedantry when it's the root of the problem.
Cycling isn't dangerous, being on the street with cars is dangerous. Being on the street on a bike is dangerous, walking down a street is dangerous. Heck being in a compact car on today's streets with oversized/overweight vehicles is dangerous.
It's important to be precise about the source of the danger because it correctly identifies the problem.
There's a big push right now to ban people from buying and registering Kei cars with the argument being that they're too dangerous on american roads. If that argument holds, firstly, then it flows logically that they can nanny state people off of their bikes and motorcycles as well using the same argument. Secondly, Kei cars are not dangerous, getting hit in a kei car by an oversized SUV or "light" truck is.
Because whether it's people pulling the trigger or the gun itself, both are the direct source of harm. Bicycles are not the source of harm, cars are.
The analogous argument one way would be quibbling over whether it's the driver or the car. The analogous argument the other would be saying it's the shooting victims fault for being in a place where they are likely to get shot (bad neighborhood, in a position to surprise or threaten an armed individual, or maybe just in America)
Of the 1,360 bicyclist deaths in 2022, 928 died in motor-vehicle crashes and 432 in other incidents, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. Males accounted for 87% of all bicycle deaths
Because it's true in both cases. The root of the problem is something else and the thing being blamed flippantly can be much less of a worry if the root problem is addressed. People dismiss the guns don't kill people argument because it fits a simplistic ideological talking point, but it's just a basic fact that whether guns are accessible or not, the people accessing them will be the cause of fatalities if there's something wrong with their conduct and context.
With bikes, in a different context, something similar applies: What causes fatalities isn't bikes themselves but how the roads, rules, other people/vehicles and social conduct around bike use use and sharing of roads are.
the other one is that flying is safer than driving, and I can bloody well promise you that there is nothing safe about flying at
all. Massive amounts of attention to the job, by very tallented people who are highly trained and supported, manages to do better.....statisticaly for flying, than the abomanable record of highway saftey.
And bicycles are equivilant to ulralight aircraft.Been hit twice while biking, doored a guy in my van, watched a guy on a bike get dead under a city bus late one night, front wheel and then the back ones
I mean, that statement is also true. And a huge number of gun deaths involve the shooter and victim being the same person.
One would argue it's a similar situation even further in that the SUV/Truck also isn't the problem, it's the inattentive driver that runs a person over. If you have a vehicle with the worst safety ratings on the market driven through a crowded city by someone who is adept at driving, there will likely not be an issue, just like if you have a responsible gun owner going to the range every week to fire off a few rounds, you likely won't have an issue.
People are always the problem. The regulations at play are generally built around the idea that if you don't give fallible people access to things that are either dangerous when handled by those unprepared, like an oversized truck, or things that are just designed to kill when someone doesn't really need one, that you minimize the chances of something going wrong.
> How is this any different than "guns don't kill people, people kill people?"
In terms of guns, the reality is that people with guns kill people. An intent to kill plus an instrument designed to do so easily is often a lethal combination. People don't just kill each other more often when they have access to a firearms, they are also far more likely to kill themselves. [1]
The risk to cyclists and other road users also comes about by way of a combination of factors: poorly designed roads, lack of protected cycling lanes, lack of adequate pedestrian infrastructure, oversized vehicles, distracted drivers and so on. I suspect there are also a fair number of cases where cyclists/pedestrians make mistakes or engage in risky behaviour.
As a society, I don't think there is too much we can do in terms of altering people's behaviour. We can, however, do a great deal to alter the built environment to slow cars down and make things safer for other road users. Plenty of cities have made huge progress with this. There remain plenty that are terrible, and in my experience, many of the worst ones are in America. I think the last American city I was in was Vegas and my gosh, I would never want to cycle there. By contrast, I recently visited Montreal and was stunned by how good the cycling infrastructure was.
Cycling is not dangerous because of nature, it's dangerous because of cars. It's not the same as "skydiving is dangerous" where the nature itself goes against you.
What matters is what we want to do as a society: leave the cars where they are as some kind of unmovable force of destiny, or actually manage them to not make them dangerous.
