Bicycle Commuting 12x Deadlier Than Driving

Heeding the Goracle can be a deadly gambit.

Bicycle commuting is on the rise, as evidenced by the following articles in Treehugger.com, the Boston Herald, and  USA Today. But if the idea of hitting the road on two wheels — with little to protect you from cars and trucks but good manners — strikes you as pretty risky, you aren’t so far from the mark.

Per kilometer, cyclists are 12 times more likely than car drivers to suffer a fatal accident, according to Rutgers University urban planner John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra of the European Commission (the same study found traveling by foot to be 23 times more dangerous than driving, per kilometer).

The unicycling stats are too morbid even to repeat.

On the other hand, if you're among the few to survive a cycling journey, you're more likely to outlive your doughy, sedentary colleagues.

[A] Danish study found that people who do not bike to work suffer a 39 percent higher mortality rate than those who do.

Increased longevity is nice and all (for people obsessed with their own subsistence, anyway), but even for those who escape the perils of walking and biking, do the health benefits they reap really justify the extra carbon they're spewing into the environment by relying on Earth-rapingly inefficient human power?

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.
...
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better."