Cycling accidents definitely happen, and they’ve become a lucrative industry. Just look up "bicycle injury attorney" and you will see tons of ads claiming that they "have recovered over 50 million for bicycle injury clients". The market here speaks for itself. Of course, a reasonable person doesn’t set out expecting to mow down a cyclist, but accidents happen despite the traffic laws designed to ensure everyone’s safety, and, to follow your example, a 3 y/o toddler doesn’t need a license to ride her trike down the street, but there’s nothing in the law, aside from common sense, stopping the child from continuing down the street and joining a major highway. At least "a multi-ton piece of steel" is visible and moves at the speed of traffic.

What I don't understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should "watch out for cyclists", yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law. The easiest solution, imho, is to make the requirements equal for all - if someone wants to use a public road, they should be licensed and insured.

Because that's what happens a lot. Cars are deadly.

The anger against cyclists is so weird to me. Like I can relate to seeing a cyclist taking up a whole lane on highway 1 somewhere they shouldn’t be riding and me thinking, this is ridiculous, they shouldn’t be risking their own life and slowing everyone down like this (and feeling some anger). But I have only encountered this a few times and even then, it’s just a minor inconvenience… Most cyclists ride relatively responsibly through city areas and are a net positive on the community, environment, parking, traffic, city budget, etc. Look at some data instead of coming up with some narrative in your head based upon some immediate emotion.

This negative sentiment towards cyclists is real, I see it on Facebook all the time and at first I thought it was a joke. Maybe they should add a few questions to the drivers test

But please continue theorizing that this zero effort google search you went in to knowing nothing about is instead evidence for a world in which there is a large market for attorneys forcing payment by cyclists causing significant damages.

Next, have your last word because this conversation appears completely disingenuous and I will not be continuing it.

There are several reasons:

First, your assertion is simply not true. There are campaigns to educate cyclists, and markings for them to yield. I’ve seen them first-hand in multiple US cities.

Second, there are far far fewer cyclists than cars, therefore you need to expect there to be proportional spending. More education for drivers mirrors the (many) more drivers.

Third, cars are heavier and faster by a huge factor. Cars cause far more deaths in practice than bikes. There is a much much bigger problem with cars than there is with bikes. Over 40000 people die in the US in car crashes. As far as I can tell, fewer than 10 pedestrians die from being hit by a cyclist. The number of minor injuries of pedestrians caused by cyclists is dwarfed by the number of cyclists or pedestrians kills by cars.

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-myth-of-th...

Cars require way more education because they’re way more dangerous. As a cyclist, if I hit a car, I die. If a car hits me, I die. It seems really weird that your arguments are ignoring basic facts of physics and ignoring the realities and statistics of accidents and fatality rates.

The vast majority of serious bike accidents would cause damage only to the rider, I would guess. It's just not worth regulating or mandating anything.

At a minimum any vehicle going 15+ MPH should be making enough noise to get people’s attention.

Personally I’d like to see insurance and licensing requirements on any e-bike with more than 50w of assistance. Because constantly going moderately faster means dramatically more danger as KE = V^2. So going a little bit faster and slightly less in control can be a lot more dangerous to others.

Cars are so much more likely to kill people that I think you'd increase road casualties by making the alternatives harder to use. Yes, an ebike is faster, heavier and less safe than a conventional bike. No, an ebike is nowhere near as dangerous as a car, and in general I don't think they should be regulated. The current thresholds most places are setting (250W/25kph or thereabouts) are plenty conservative anyway.

Tangentially, this is why it's also good to give bikes their own space. They are not pedestrians, and they shouldn't be mixing with pedestrian traffic. That's why they're on the road. They act more like a car than a pedestrian.

In a 2D layout there’s going to be an intersection between pedestrians, bikes, and buses etc.

> anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle

While your gut feeling is that discouraging use is harmful the statistics are more questionable.

In the US, statistically E-bikes are roughly as dangerous as cars on a per mile basis. It’s got almost nothing to do with the bikes themselves and is almost totally related to the infrastructure and how people use them. The rates people on bikes ignore basic traffic safety and do things like speeding between stopped cars and then going through a red light is insane. Further, they are directly used around pedestrians with little concern for people’s safety.

PS: There’s lots of ways to slice these numbers, but we don’t actually know the exact numbers for miles biked per year.

If we're going to talk anecdotally, I think we need to read between the lines. Many locations in the US don't have good support for bike riders beyond telling them to ride on the road. This is going to encourage/force many to ride (unsafely) on the footpath because they don't want to share space with cars, and thus into conflict with pedestrians.

I'd like to see a breakdown of ebike accidents between them and pedestrians vs them and cars. I would bet that the vast majority of accidents are into (or from) cars. Almost all of the fatal accidents are almost certainly from accidents with cars as well.

You could try regulating them, but that's not going to fix the core issue that in many places they are expected to share space with cars, and cars are just plain more dangerous than everything else.

Also, I will point out that even if bike riders are supposedly less law-abiding (maybe, I don't know), the consequences are almost entirely isolated to themselves for doing so. They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else. The same is not true for heavy motor vehicles.

It seems counterintuitive that despite being human car interactions being vastly more common in urban areas you see so many rural fatalities but accidents occur in unusual situations.

> They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else.

There’s nuance here. They are more likely to injure a pedestrians in a bike pedestrian crash. However cyclists will be more likely to die because they end up in traffic after an accident.

Old people just don’t handle falls well.

I don't quite follow the second point - my presumption is that the chance of a bike hurting a pedestrian is lower than a car doing the same, and the chance of causing a fatality is, in general, reasonably low compared to getting hit by a car.

Stats would probably be hard to gather - there's probably quite a few bikes hitting pedestrians, but in all likelyhood many incidents go unreported if no one is injured.

IE the number of serious accidents depends on the number of accidents times the risk of each individual accident and bikes are far less segregated from pedestrians than cars.