There Must Be Some Mistake, Mr. Noyes.
How can this be true, I-Team? It must be impossible. That's the only explanation. Do you really expect us to believe that in the past five years, out of the thousands of bike-car collisions in the Yay Area, sixty percent were caused by the bicyclists? That's preposterous! Everyone knows that bicycles are incapable of driving unsafely. Just like how black people can't be racist.
Dan Noyes, head inspector at the I-Team and blogosphere crush du jour, reports that according to the lying monsters at the CHP, 4,474 accidents were caused by bad car-driving, and 6,988 by bad bike-driving. (That's 11,462 total accidents.) What's worse, bicyclists in accidents were three times more likely to be drunk! In their defense, that's the only state in which bike advocates are funny.
Now, granted, riding your bike while drunk doesn't present the same public hazard as driving a speeding deathmachine. It's a hazard, sure -- we've got the data, and dangerous bike-driving causes accidents and in some cases deaths -- but it's not as hazardous as car-driving, right? One's REALLY dangerous, and the other's only slightly dangerous. It's like dropping a baby out of a first-floor window versus a third-floor window. Or not even! It's like dropping a baby only a couple inches -- not even on its head! You don't mind if we drop your baby a little bit, do you?
After the jump: caveats.
Incidents in which car-drivers were at fault are less-likely to be reported, according to The Bike Coalition (six years ago). So that means that there very well may be tons more accidents in which cars are to blame.
And honestly, we'd like to believe that that's the case, as cars certainly do pack a lot more destructive force. Not just to people, but to the air, and to urban planning as well. In short, we long for anything that makes cars look bad. And we fume -- FUME! -- at the bicyclists who hurt their cause by ranking up such damaging statistics.
(Also, we don't really believe that bike advocates are only funny when drunk. Just funnier.)