Danger! HGVs

Not really. It shows the intrinsic risk of that mode of transport, in the real world - on the road, in the air, whatever. Most governments monitor these statistics so I'm not alone in thinking they have some point.

No it shows the statistical chance of being in a fatal accident. Not the same as intrinsic risk as your risk is influnced by a large number of factors over and above what those numbers take into account.

Also, if your government jumped off a cliff would you follow it? More to the point governments looking at stats (do they just monitor or do they do things about it?) is not the same as individuals making choices, as your next point points out:

The statistics describe how things are, they don't make a recommendation about how things should be. No one in their right mind would think that just using vans and buses was a sensible solution to anything.

No, but they are quoted suggesting that people should make vehicula choices based on them, which is the thin end of the wedge. I just took the arguement to it's illiogical extreme in an attempt to point out the flaw.

Again, I'm not talking about counterfactuals, I'm talking about the real world. It's not interesting to speculate how many fatalities there would be in a world where the roads carried only cyclists and peds.

but it's an important point when trying to convince people to ride, the more people on bikes the safer all cyclists (and peds) are. The less people in motorised transport the safer we all are.

What ever your choice of transport the chance of fatality is miniscule and it shouldn't influence whether you use it or not (hmm 6 in a billion or 4 in a billion... although I like the idea of puting distance and time into a chart and being told the safest form of transport for that journey! anyway I digress). But maybe more people should consider how their vehiclular choices affect those outside.

Why isn't there a statistic showing journeys/km/hours against the thing that did the killing? We have a very unscientific percentage gained from a very small sample of cyclists died in london of which over 60% were killed by HGVs, but I'd like to see a table of all road deaths and what the other object to kill them was? I'm aware of one individual in the last year killed by a cyclist... might be two... and at least 10 killed by HGV... how many by cars, stationary objects, pedestrians... do you think that would be a stupid statistic?