Bloomberg: People need a reality check. Despite common assumptions, traveling by bus, subway or train is actually safer than driving.
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Same as people think cycling is dangerous. In reality, cycling makes, on average, your life longer, while driving a car makes it shorter. And this is because lack of excercise is killer number 1, and cars are like a comfortable but very unhealthy drug.
It's worse than that. In the US cars are the #1 non-medical way people die. They're fucking killing people and we've grown so accustomed to just shrugging our shoulders when yet another person is killed by a car that it's weird just how little we notice what's causing our suffering.
I'm up to two dead family members from different car accidents. Another few have been in major accidents and others hit by cars. Once you start looking at just how many people are harmed, both directly and indirectly (family, friends) its scary that these predators are allowed to just roam our cities on the scale they do.
So much loss. I wish I could soothe your pain.
40,000 car related deaths annually in the US. That's basically a 9/11 every month.
One was used to justify 20 years of warfare. The other is completely ignored.
should be pretty obvious to everyone now life is one of many things not sacred in this country
Cycling is dangerous. It's inherently a lot safer, but when you get bumped by a car in the morning because some wage slave didn't have time for their morning coffee that day, it's a lot safer to be in a car. Couple this with unreliable and expensive public transport and you have the recipe that made me give up on cycling to school/work after over 25 years and get a driving licence. The tipping point for me was being hit by a car going at least ten miles over the limit on a straight, totally empty road in broad daylight while wearing a hi-vis jacket and barely walking away from it. A few inches the other way and I would certainly have been killed. Nope. Nope nope nope. I've put on a lot of weight since then and I am not enjoying car ownership much, financially. But sadly I have had a traumatic experience and I just feel nervous about cycling now, even after all those years.
Cycling is dangerous.
Sure, there are accidents with bikes. I do not want to discount your trauma (I had a traumatic car accident waliking when I was a pupil), and I had on the bike a collision with car whose driver took a left turn without looking.
I also have seen two probably fatal bike accidents in my life, where cars turning rolled over bikes and a lot of blood was left on the street.
The numerous terrible accidents with cars, when we pass wrecks on the highway, we somehow don't register that much.
But the whole point is, you will objectively and statistically live longer when you use a bike. Our views and risk perception are a bit distorted. And this is because cars are also dangerous to our health.