I doubt it is safer per mile travelled than walking. Recent data (2011) shows that 677 bikers were killed and 4,432 pedestrians were killed in vehicle accidents for the year. But nobody really knows how many miles people are riding or walking per year. But one thing that is certain, EVERYONE is a pedestrian for some amount of time every time they leave their home. Walk in from the car to the store, you’re a pedestrian. Walk out to your mailbox, you’re a pedestrian. All 310,000,000 of us are in the pedestrian risk pool every time we walk outside. Bikers are only in the biker risk pool when biking. For it to be safer to bike than to walk, the portion of the population that bikes has to travel for 25% as much time as all of us walk when outside. No chance. Note: it isn’t the miles travelled that matter, it’s the TIME spent traveling. For instance, no matter your mode of transportation (walk, bike, car), you’re still at risk sitting still. When driving, walking, or bike riding for one hour on/along the public roads, you’re at risk of being involved in a crash for one hour. A walker will maybe cover 4 miles, biker maybe 20, and a car easily 60 miles or more. But all are still in the risk pool for one hour each.
According to this: http://peoplepoweredmovement.org/site/images/uploads/2010%20Benchmarking%2011.20.10%20Web.pdf only 0.5% of people ride bikes to work. Even if 2 times that much ride a bike every day (even though it isn’t commuting to work), that’s 1% of the population. If this guess is accurate (and nobody knows, even the above report admits that), that means that 1% of the population would have to be at risk of vehicle impacts for 2500% of the TIME that ALL of us spend walking outside for the risk of fatality to be equal. There’s just no way. A recent survey showed that about 25% had ridden a bike at least once during the summer of 2010. Even if we use this value, the bikers have to spend as much time biking as all of us do walking.
Here’s the math I used (we’re trying to solve for bicycle risk time, assuming equal risk, which will give us a lower value than the situation that the OP states – biking is safer than walking):
Pedestrian fatalities/bike fatalities = (about 4).
So if the risk pool is the same number of people, and the same amount of time, bikers risk is 25% of that of walkers. But the risk pool for bikers is nowhere near the size of pedestrians. The assumption that only 1% of the population rides daily (2 times the amount that commute) means that the people in the bike risk pool are 1/100th of the number of walkers (bikers also walk). To account for the ratio of deaths, assuming equal risk time, 1/100th of the number of people have to generate 1/4th the number of deaths. That means that per unit of time, the biker’s risk would be actually 25 times the walkers. So for the risk over time to be equal to walkers, the bikers have to spend 25 times the time biking than the average person spends walking. That’s 125 minutes per day assuming everyone in the country only spends 5 minutes as a pedestrian each day. If the average daily pedestrian time is only 15 minutes for everyone, that jacks up the required time for bikers to 375 minutes, or over six hours. Sound reasonable? Then add in winter, where in large parts of the country it isn’t practical to ride a bike (try riding a bike on an unplowed road with just 4 inches of snow on it; it’s very hard, and gets harder with each extra inch), and you add even more time needed in the summer to make up for it. The claim just doesn’t pass the reasonable test.
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