Of course, there are also places where the risk is higher. SF is just an example used because someone prominent died in SF whilst on a bicycle. The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault. The effect of that would be instantaneous, every bike would have an invisible force field of liability around it. Sure, some might abuse it, but nobody in their right mind is going to play chicken with a car.
> The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault.
That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.
I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.
> Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
Even in countries with the best bike infrastructure they still mix. It's the cyclists that come off second best (to put it mildly) in any confrontation so they need extra protection and a default 'car is in the wrong' rule made a huge difference in those places where it was enacted. To categorically dismiss it without further research is a bit silly assuming you actually want to make progress. The enemy of the good is the perfect and this is no different. Obviously there are problems with such a rule, but that's the wrong way of looking at it. The question should be does it have more advantages than disadvantages and that seems to be solidly proven by now.
People that believe that cyclists would en masse run in front of cars like in Russia either have a very negative idea of society or want to dismiss the idea without further consideration because they in fact do not want things to change at all whilst pretending they are looking for progress.
This is a profoundly bad idea whose negative implications and undesired second order effects would be intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer.
