• ... and what you should also know is that 'cycling is dangerous'-type articles come along with some regularity. There are the perennial favourites, like 'cycling reduces male fertility' (that one comes up about every three years), but also more novel ones than this one.

    To be honest, I tired of reading them years ago, as they almost invariably understate or ignore the benefit of cycling. All that showing that cycling is 'more dangerous than terrorism' would show is that terrorism isn't actually very dangerous, but of course they are incomparable phenomena, anyway.

    You can try and force just about anything onto a single scale, but if you try to do it with an ordinary everyday activity which is not very risky at all and enjoyed by billions, and an activity carried out by very few people that is rarely manifested (at least over here--it's a different story in countries that are at war, like Afghanistan), although it creates momentary extreme danger when it is, then you're just on a hiding to nothing. It may sound sensationalist but it's really not very important.

    I can understand Bill in not having read the paper, and I probably would have done the same had I got that reply back from the author of the study. Studies like this in my experience are really a case of 'seen one, seen them all'. I might give it a quick look tomorrow to see if his baseline figures really are so off. The 'official' figure is currently 545,000 cycle trips a day across the Inner Cordon counting line. It's probably higher now, but I haven't seen the latest stats yet.

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