cars are more dangerous on average (the concept of average should be banned from any statistical analysis) because they travel many many many more kilometers than the average bike and mostly for very long distances at high speed.
But if you notice, I wrote "than slow 4 wheeled cars".
Ami is much safer than a bike, especially for the occupants.
Example: there are 3.75 million cars in Rome urban area (5 million residents)
There were 121 deaths last year caused by car accidents.
It's 32 per million vehicles.
Bike users deaths caused by street accidents have been 50 in the same year.
Meanwhile the number of people brought to ER for either having an accident with an e-bike or and e-scooter have tripled in the past couple of years. Mostly is people falling on their own and hitting their head. Main two reasons: lost balance on the e-scooter, going too fast with their e-bike.
A bullet has more kinetic energy because it's significantly faster than a bike. But a bike is actually slower than a car, even an Ami so I don't understand what argument you're trying to make here.
Cars kill people every. single. day.
All the traffic rules had to be created just because how dangerous and deadly cars are.
> A bullet has more kinetic energy because it's significantly faster than a bike
that's part of the problem.
The bullet is also shaped to cause damages
If the same 50 grams were a disc of few microns of thickness and a diameter of 50 cm, they would be much less dangerous.
A bike is shaped like a battering ram, an Ami has to pass very rigorous safety tests and is shaped to cause the less damage possible on impact, because it's the law.
So a bike going 20mph is more dangerous than an Ami going 25mph.
Because the Ami has a real braking system and it's possible to maneuver it out of the danger zone at the same time. A bike is much harder to handle in emergency situations, because, you know, the aforementioned gyroscope effect does not work as flawlessly as having 4 stable wheels on the ground.
Good news is that when a biker does some stupid shit, they can blame cars.
Except that when a bike hits a pedestrian it usually causes
grave damages, ask my cousin, who got a broken hip from a bike riding on the pavement.
> All the traffic rules had to be created just because how dangerous and deadly cars are.
That's like saying that rules around train safety were created after trains were invented.
No sh*t Sherlock!
Bike safety rules existed before, because bikes existed already.
> This is absurd. It makes me really doubt if you have any understanding of physics.
You are looking at the problem from the wrong angle.
Weight is not the issue.
How about this: would you prefer to be hit full force in the face with a pillow weighting 1Kg or with a bar of steel weighting the same 1Kg?
Or maybe you would prefer to be hit with a metal ruler weighting less than 100 grams.
Sounds better than 1Kg, doesn't it?
I don't know you, but I would choose the pillow any time.
I might be wrong, but I think that density is discussed in physics too.
The point is not that a bike runs as fast as a bullet, but that a bike is basically a bar of very hard, very dense, very rigid, indeformable stuff (metal and/or composite materials) like a bullet, while a car is made in a way that in case of impact its deformable body absorbs a good chunk of the kinetic energy.
The same way being hit with a piece of metal embedded in a pillow causes less harm than being hit by the naked piece of metal, even though the weight of the pillow + metal bar is higher than the metal bar alone.
TBH a car is a very heavy pillow, running too fast too often, but looking at just 15 years ago cars have gone a very long way towards safety, bikes haven't, they have in fact gained a brand new clean and green engine, becoming much heavier, much faster and much more dangerous.
The bicycle is also more dangerous for the occupant, it's irrelevant what the biker hits, could be a wall, a car, a bus, another person, the person riding the bike will be projected forward at the same speed she was riding, no way to stop it, no safety mechanism.
That's why in the Netherlands are worried about "fewer road fatalities but more serious bike accidents" and are thinking about making it mandatory to wear an helmet when riding a bike.
I'm quite sure the problem is speed.
Specifically they state that
- the number of motorcyclists or moped drivers who died following an accident increased by 24 victims to 101 last year
- While the overall number of road fatalities has reached a seven-year low, number of cyclists seriously injured in accidents continues to rise, data released by Dutch safety organisation SafetyNL reveals that the number of cyclists seriously injured in road accidents has increased by a third over the past 10 years likely as a result of the rise in popularity of the e-bike. (too fast, maybe?)
When we talk about safety, rising numbers are always a net negative, no matter the reason why. Cars are getting safer, bikes are getting less safe over time.
Bikes are not for everybody, I think not everyone should drive a car, but slower, lighter, smaller, mostly made of derformable plastic city cars will have a major impact on urban transportation, while bikes will not.
Let's talk about it in 5 years, I bet I won't be proved wrong.
maybe a video made by someone "addicted to cycling and coffee", living in a very bike friendly Country, will give you some more perspective.
It's no surprise that the most common vehicle is involved in most of the fatal accidents.
Absolute numbers are not very interesting in this context, the difference in number of vehicles is at least an order of magnitude, it's obvious that cars are top of the list, like adults cause most of the homicides and you won't find many toddlers there.
As a data point, when Rome was in lockdown and cars were banned from the streets, accidents involving bikes and other means of transport like e-scooters, went up 5x and hospitalizations to HR went up 3x for the same kinds of accidents, compared to when cars were allowed to drive around.
Cars are WAY more dangerous than bicycles.