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It's a lot worse than no car at all - which people understandably don't feel comfortable doing when they're surrounded by vehicles with bumpers as high as their chest.

I get hit by a sedan, I break my legs, it sucks. I get hit by a crossover, I'm thrown forward from my center of mass and likely under the vehicle. I get hit by an F-150, the hood is at head height and I die.



If you run the numbers, getting hit by any car while riding a bike carries with it a fair probability of death or lifelong injury. The forces involved do not lie, and your feelings of getting hit by a compact car and surviving are foolish at best.

Bikes simply are not safe when occupying the same space as a vehicle. The solution is not 'make vehicles that can't kill cyclists', the solution is to prevent these two modes of transportation from operating in the same space. Banning bikes from roadways for the safety of cyclists is entirely logical. Building cycle paths separate from roadways is entirely logical. Anything outside of that is an experiment we already have data for, and it means more dead cyclists regardless of how you go about it which to any reasonable person is not an acceptable outcome.


There's a separate problem here, which is that large heavy cars are not required to be designed in a way that takes the injury to people outside the car (pedestrians, cyclists, or in other cars) into account. This results in people buying heavy cars in order to be "safe" from other people buying heavy cars.

And while we can't build thousands of miles of new bike lanes overnight, we can definitely start the process of making new vehicles more safe to other road users today. Both are necessary, IMO.

re: injury, sure getting hit is not great, but the SUV is substantially more likely to injure or kill the pedestrian in the same collision. There's lots of data to show this.


How likely do you find to be an acceptable level of likelihood?

For me it's zero, or at least very, very close to it. We're never going to get to zero by complaining that cars are too heavy. It's an ideological dead end. I mean, hell, a tesla, not commonly seen as a large car, weighs over 2 tons. Chassis alone is close to 2 tons by itself. How are you going to make that not kill someone on a bike? Or take, say, the world's lightest production car, the absolutely tiny Caterham Seven 170, which weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000lbs. You and an absurdly heavy bike, a real value brand steel frame special, is like a quarter of that, and, it's not really feasible to say that everyone should drive a small, two seat open cockpit, open wheel roadster.

F=MA is unavoidable, you should stop pretending it is, you'll live longer. Then write your local government, or better, show up to the public forums they hold, and lobby for bike paths. Partner with bike shops, get in with the mom groups, have them make donations to pro-bike path politicians. That's how the world works now.




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