Danger! HGVs

Just quoting the numbers doesn't really put things into perspective, Ed. You need to compare the risks of cycling to other forms of travel. Compared with all other major forms of transport except motorcycling, cycling has more fatalities per hour and per journey.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm

I've seen different figures in other places, so just quoting those ones isn't definitive: the ones I remember showed the per-hour risk of walking and cycling to be comparable.

There's a collation of (carefully chosen) stats at http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1026.html, among which are some US figures which put the risk of death in a car at 0.47 deaths per million hours, while for cycling it's 0.26 per million hours (that is, almost twice as safe).

Broadly, cycling (and in fact, all road use) in the UK is safe, but we still kill about 7 people on the roads every day: is that a price worth paying for personal mobility, free movement of goods and the like? That's 2600(ish) tragedies every year ...