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Over 30,000 people lose their lives every year in cars. To reach that number would take half a fucking century for cyclists.

That's only because there are so few of you, and you get so little done.

...cyclists are either 3.4x or 11.5x as likely to die as motorists, per passenger mile. Neither conclusion is very happy.

If you managed to put in as many miles on your bikes as people manage to put in on their cars, you (as a group) would die three times as much from it as you do now, because you already die vastly more per mile traveled than do motorists.

The notion that you are somehow safer without a crash cell is hilarious, but wrong.

"Deaths per mile" doesn't change relative to number of miles traveled for the same reason "50 miles per hour" doesn't change based on number of hours gone by.

From a pro-cycling site:

784 cyclists died in 2005. That would make the death rate 0.37 to 1.26 deaths per 10 million miles.
33,041 motorists/passengers died from 3 trillion miles traveled, making their death rate 0.11 per 10 million miles traveled.

Cycling is 3 to 11 times more likely to kill you than driving.

I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet.

Well, you just met him. Or rather, somebody who just doesn't wear a helmet. I exercise aggressively, every other day or so, and cycling is my most common form in summer months.

So we'll just let people get hit by cars until the cars stop being dumb?

Sure. Or maybe progress shouldn't have a price, either? And, of course, the point: Helmets cause increases in head injuries and here's what increased ridership looks like.

There's scant good evidence that bike helmets do any good at all.

On the larger scale -- "$COUNTRY implements a mandatory helmet law, do head injuries among cyclists go up or down?" -- bicycle helmets either have no measurable effect or do more harm than good.

I've heard this one once or twice, but I haven't yet seen a citation. Do you have one?

See:

• A list of published evidence skeptical of helmets
• A list of published evidence supportive of helmets
• A country-by-country (or province-by-province, where appropriate) analysis of helmet laws and their effects
• A New York Times article (quoted in full -- didn't feel like registering to find the original link) describing a 51% increase in the rate of head injuries among American cyclists since helmet use started to become pervasive in 1991 (and a drop in number of cyclists in that same period)

I found a research paper on the issue:

It says that in the short term you gets $0.11 of traffic reduction for every $1 spent on new roads.

I also found a summary page, that notes some interesting research results:

[F]or every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased 9 percent within four years' time.

and

The phenomenon of induced traffic works in reverse as well. When New York's West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, an NYDOT study showed that 93 percent of the car trips lost did not reappear elsewhere; people simply stopped driving. A similar result accompanied the destruction of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway in the 1989 earthquake. Citizens voted to remove the freeway entirely despite the apocalyptic warnings of traffic engineers. Surprisingly, a recent British study found that downtown road removals tend to boost local economies, while new roads lead to higher urban unemployment. So much for road-building as a way to spur the economy.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising at all, it's simple economics. While there is likely to be some upper threshold to how many car trips the citizens of an area will reasonably make, however, I suspect it's high enough that it would be impractical to build and maintain enough road infrastructure to reach that plateau.

Suppose the White House consumes around 200kW. If one million Slashdotters spend 5 minutes reading about this story on systems consuming 50W each, they will expend about as much energy as the White House does in a month.

That's not counting energy for Slashdot servers and other internet infrastructure (ha ha). And not counting the energy the administration consumed in coming to this decision and putting together their press release. And energy spent by news writers, bloggers, TV news, print newspapers, ...

All this thinking is making me hungry. Hang on while I go eat a hamburger.

"This message will cost the net hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to post to all machines. Are you sure you want to do this?"

I'd like to see the citations for your numbers.

I live in an area where gun collecting, clay shooting, sport course shooting, still target shooting, hunting, and just putting ammo into cans are common hobbies. I remember far more deadly beating around here than accidental gun deaths.

Accidental deaths tend to be in the form of cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats, and farm machinery. Accidental gun deaths are caused when people with no respect for the power and utility of firearms pick them up at the corner shop without sufficient training.

About 30% of Americans polled by Gallup own firearms personally and 40% say they have a gun in their home. 47% of men in some demographic groups personally own at least one firearm.

In 2001, 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental in the US. About 11,000 were homicides, and the biggest number -- about 58% of all gun-related deaths in 2001 -- were suicides. Other sources have higher numbers, but I didn't find anything higher than 1,500 annually in a quip that sounds extremely anti-firearm in a top-ten list of accidental deaths.

Now, since there are around 300 million people in the US and around 300 million firearms, I'd say less than 1000 accidental deaths is much better than the situation for accidental death for motorists and passengers in cars (33,040 of whom died in 2005) or bicyclists (of whom 784 died in 2005, but at 3 to 11 times as many deaths per mile as those in cars).

About 5,000 people die from food poisoning each year in the US, with about 1,800 of those dying from known pathogens. Seventy-five percent of those known pathogens are strains of just three pathogens: Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma.

Remember that top ten list I mentioned? Firearms accidents were listed at #7, although if using other sources for the number they would have fallen possibly at #8 or #9.

Death by gases (poisoning and asphyxiation) are in the same neighborhood as accidental gun deaths. Suffocation (choking blocking the respiratory tract or asphyxiation just due to lack of oxygen and not some other gas getting in its way) is double or more, as are fire-related deaths and drownings.

Roughly double the items in the previous paragraph to find 8,600 people per year lethally poisoned by solids or liquids including truly poisonous foods but not foods contaminated by infectious food-borne pathogens like salmonella.

Almost double that again to find that nearly 15,000 people plunge to untimely deaths each year.

Motor vehicle crashes (accounting for over 43,000 fatalities per year according to their unnamed sources) lead by a huge margin. That's more than suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by gun put together.

I guess it's time to tell people about the dangers of letting their loved ones around ladders, stairs, food, and especially cars.

I think this is the source I was thinking of.

They require more time

Maybe. Over long distances of open highway during non-rush-hour, absolutely. Around town, false. In city, at distances under 5 miles or so, I'm usually faster than a car. Some of that is that a car might not be able to park very close to the destination...

require your wmployer have a place to change

Does your employer not provide a restroom?

require you don't need to carry much

Of course--but you should define "much". Panniers carry what I need most of the time, and some people use trailers for the really big stuff.

are more dangerous*

Completely, absolutely wrong. Or check the numbers yourself, but making claims that go against the evidence just makes you look like an idiot.

can't pick up very many people

Have you ever counted how many trips see no more than one person in the car? So use a car for the 10% of trips in which you need to pick up someone who doesn't have his own transportation. Would you like to drive and park on roads with 10% of the traffic that you see now?

can't get groceries

Bullshit. Where do you get these half-baked ideas? 95% of my grocery runs are by bike, to a store about 5 miles away. The only reason I tend to take longer than I do when driving is that I take a scenic route because biking is fun.

impracticable in an emergency

Can you be any more specific? Also, please take into account the fact that the more people bike instead of driving, the fewer emergencies there are.

require good health.

They also create it, in a bunch of ways, while cars destroy it both passively (no exercise) and actively (pollution, stress, accidents). How is this a problem? Also, as I noted, the Bay Area is largely flat, and therefore biking does not require especially good health after all.

Just how fat are you, anyway??

From a quick search, unverified stats show that bikes make up 2% (just like milk) of vehicle fatalities:

From:
http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html

How many cyclists die

Deaths per year. 725, 629, 665, 732, and 693 cyclists died per year in 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000 respectively, and were about 89% male. (National Highway Traffic Saftey Administration, and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

An average of 16.5 cyclists per million die every year in the U.S. (For motorists, it's 19.9 motorists per million.) (National Safety Council 1988)

Cyclists are 2% of road deaths & injuries. The 761 cyclists killed in 1996 accounted for 2% of traffic fatalities, and the 59,000 cyclists injured made up 2% of all traffic injuries. (5)

They also state later:
Health benefits of cycling outweigh the risks. "The gain of 'life years' through improved fitness among regular cyclists, and thus their increased longevity exceeds the loss of 'life years' in cycle fatalities (British Medical Association, 1992). An analysis based on the life expectancy of each cyclist killed in road accidents using actuarial data, and the increased longevity of those engaging in exercise regimes several times a week compared with those leading relatively sedentary lives, has shown that, even in the current cycle hostile environment, the benefits in terms of life years gained, outweigh life years lost in cycling fatalities by a factor of around 20 to 1." -- Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus, Policy Studies Institute, and British Medical Association researcher (7, 8)

Hopefully you'll hit a garbage truck instead of a cyclist, then.

http://bicycleuniverse.info/cars/cellphones.html
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6090342-7.html

the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project was funded by the Bush administration at levels far below those requested by the Army Corp of Engineers.

Specifically the Lake Ponchatrain Levee was finished some time ago, and 2005 funding was irrelevent.

I said the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project, which was "designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain", i.e. exactly this occurance. It wasn't done:

Work in the Chalmette area includes an additional levee lift and miscellaneous floodwall cappings. Work in Orleans Parish is about 90% complete, with the major remaining construction being the parallel protection along London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals. That work is scheduled to be completed by 2009. The remaining work in Jefferson Parish consists of at least two more lakefront levee enlargements and construction of a floodproofed bridge at Hammond Highway over the 17th Street Canal. That work is scheduled to be completed by 2010. The work in St. Charles Parish is only about 60% complete, and there is not yet a closed system. A closed system could be achieved by 2005 if Federal and non-Federal funding levels can support that effort. Overall project completion is scheduled for 2015.

Our desire for freedom created a car culture. The ability to travel where you like is a significant element of freedom.

It's amazing the irrational response you get from many Americans where you mention that a car culture may have some negative effects. Bam - suddenly I'm a freedom hater.

Our car culture was created by a huge federal road-building plan, which directly reduced freedom for many people via eminent domain, as well as indirectly for all of us via increased taxation. It's supported by brutal and stupid foreign policy which works in favor of cheap oil over freedom.

Building more roads always reduces traffic congestion.

No, it doesn't. Build more roads to the exurbs and people move out there, lengthening their daily commute and filling them up.