The reason some pedestrians feel cyclists pose a bigger threat than drivers, is mostly due to car centric infrastructure. Cars get all the room, and cyclists&pedestrians get clumped together. Of course you see little conflicts with cars when you're physically separated from them.

Additionally it's a form of servility and motonormativity. Most people accept that they themselves have to obey cars, so no jaywalking or other behavior, most people go out of their way to avoid conflicts with cars (due to the risk), which again makes the drivers seem less of a threat. But only because you yourself have removed yourself from the situation.

In total, the numbers don't support the impression. Literally no one dies from being hit by cyclists. Vs thousands upon thousands die from being hit by vehicles each year.

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tim333 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure that's true. I'm in London and I'd say it's because bikes don't have number plates or licenses and are thus immune from the overwhelmingly camera based rule enforcement. Some riders are still ok but some take advantage.

Also an issue here is we have hundreds of Lime bikes and a lot of new riders are a bit incompetent.

Looking at UK stats pedestrians killed by bikes are not zero but about 1/200 those killed by motor vehicles. But I'd guess for minor injuries it's closer.

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neilv a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> The reason some pedestrians feel cyclists pose a bigger threat than drivers, is mostly due to car centric infrastructure.

I'm sympathetic to criticisms of car-centric infrastructure and regulations, but the human/motor-powered bikes and scooters in just 2 years have lost any political high ground, by en masse behaving like the historically worst car drivers.

And you can no longer separate bicyclists from the motorized regulation-circumventing bikes and scooters, when (in my thousands of hours of anecdotal observations) human-powered bikes are mimicking the behaviors of the motorized.

Regarding injuries, I don't think we will have good stats yet, but random data point I happened to bookmark, from this company's town:

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2025/08/07/e-bike-rider-inflict...

A couple other relevant non-HN links:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/menace-on-the-streets/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1v0mboz/er_do...

	▲	matsemann 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> And you can no longer separate bicyclists from the motorized regulation-circumventing bikes and scooters Why not? Why should how someone else acts impact what you think of me? I see this all the time in these discussions. Cyclists are responsible for what any cyclist ever has done. When drivers break the law (which statistics say they do to a greater degree), it's however those individuals that are to blame.
	▲	sagarm 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Similarly, I oppose spending any money on or allocating any space to car infrastructure until every driver obeys speed limits exactly. Pedestrianise it all :)
	▲	foco_tubi a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There are a lot of conclusions which do not follow the evidence here. You’re using similarity of bad behavior to imply similarity of harm, while simultaneously admitting you don’t have the statistics showing similarity of harm.