By Bay City News Service
A pedestrian was briefly knocked unconscious when she was hit by a
bicyclist as she walked across the Golden Gate Bridge this afternoon,
according to the California Highway Patrol.
The accident was reported at 12:34 p.m. on the eastern sidewalk at
mid-span.
A 64-year-old San Francisco man was riding his bike north on the
sidewalk when he struck the pedestrian, a 54-year-old woman from Ireland, CHP
Officer Chris Rardin said.
The woman’s teeth were broken and she briefly lost consciousness,
Rardin said. When she came to, she complained of pain to her wrist.
She was taken to St. Francis Memorial Hospital for treatment.
The bicyclist was uninjured, Rardin said.

So yeah, who knows, maybe “fatalities / time spent per mode” is the most relevant? Yeah, I dunno. I guess it doesn’t really matter. No matter who is right, Rod is still more annoying.

I mean this is a real problem I think. I don’t believe the city should subsidize the burbs by making our streets into alternate highways and I don’t believe we should continue to support wars for oil.

Somewhere on the interwebs I saw 3 design alternates for a single lane Folsom. So these plans tend to get shelved until there is some popular movement, something you might call critical mass, occurs and the voila! The plan is dusted off and built

The rest of us constantly have to swerve, dodge and look behind us (without the benefit of rear-view mirrors!) to avoid being knocked-down by inconsiderate dingbats who don’t care that riding bikes on sidewalks is actually illegal here.

And that says nothing about the issue of bikers who ride at night without a light on the front of their bike. Never try to cross a street and almost get run over by one of these idiots because, gosh, as long as THEY can see well enough to ride, who cares if no one can see THEM blasting down the street in the dark?

“Between 45,000 and 50,000 people die in U.S. roadway
accidents each year, including roughly 7,000 pedestrians and 1,000 bicyclists.
Based on the estimates of U.S. miles walked, bicycled, and driven in this report,
per-mile fatalities as well as injuries appear to be considerably higher for walking
and bicycling.”

which isn’t really relevant, maybe you can enlighten me, you seem to be much more sure about these stats than I am.

http://atfiles.org/files/pdf/BikePedBen.pdf (page 42)
(or do the math yourself from FARS)

But, really zyzzyva’s statistic of miles-traveled is really the key. If injury levels of walking and biking were equal…. and if a walker travels, say, 1 mile for every 4 miles traveled by bike; and there are 3 times as many people walking, that would make each mile biked 12 times safer than walking.

Now, the fact that walking has more injuries and fatalties per capita, that only amplifies this example, further– it’s much more dangerous to walk than ride.

The point is, *everyone* in San Francisco is a pedestrian at some point, even if only between front door and car. A far smaller number bike on a regular basis (somewhere around 5%), which means there’s roughly 20 peds for every cyclist. But in terms of person-miles, that number is far closer.