But the peak oil angle is indeed the big whammy. If the economy jumps up after this recession/depression the price of gas will skyrocket with it.

Kevin’s comment:
It is rather easy for me to imagine this. All I do is look out the window. Cycling and walking has a 34% commuter mode share here in the Riding of Toronto Centre.

Peak oil is in the near-term future, but if there is a revolution in Saudi Arabia, car culture in the USA ends overnight. This is one of the few issues on which I find myself in agreement with one of the world’s most famous Saudi Arabians, Osama bin Laden.

Of course, rather than waiting for a crisis, there could be reform in a non-crisis planned way. John Pucher describes some ways in which the USA can become more like Canada in his article, “Cycling in Canada and the United States: Why Canadians are so far ahead,” Plan Canada, March 2007, pp. 13-17 (with Ralph Buehler).

Source for commuter mode share (and a truly fascinating map):

http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=080830_commuters_walkandbike.xml

I wish to piggy back on Rantwick’s comment. We all often hear from “bicycle advocates” that lack of facilities is often cited as why folks won’t take up cycling. Well I call horse-feathers!

Surveys may record people saying that, but I think it is just one more excuse from someone who will never ride a bike under any condition, because modern Americans avoid exercise! I doubt there are very many proto-cyclists waiting at the curb for conditions to change so they can go bicycle riding.

It is hard for me to imagine more cyclists beyond double our present numbers- less than 5% of our population surely.

There is a long list of myths that are closely held as a sheild against putting forth effort, and these are but two: “It is too dangerous”, “there are no safe places to ride without bike lanes”.

I want to do ChipSeal’s idea (from the comments of another post):

Let’s pick a road, like University, and do 3 perspective videos—one dash-cam from a car in traffic, one watching traffic zoom past from the sidewalk and then one from the cyclist’s perspective. We could even use clips from Brian’s & my videos of University (I wore a forward-facing camera on that trek).

While nothing substitutes for actually experiencing it, comparing the dramatic shift in perspective might encourage someone to try.

So true — assumed risk is inflated when there is no analysis of the events or the numbers …

Our media does a horrible job of conveying risk or doing any risk analysis when reporting on traffic “accidents” (better to use the word “crashes”). Tom Vanderbilt wrote an excellent article on Traffic crash reporting, where analysis was done on the media reporting of car crashes. Out of 473 nationally reviewed reports:

Only 1.3% of the reports included information about the weather at the time of the crash

Only 1.3% of the time was the speed limit mentioned

Only 17% of the time was the estimated speed of the vehicles involved reported

Only 22% of the time was seatbelt usage mentioned

Almost half the time, the time of the day was not mentioned

Given that all of these are significant factors to help analyze (safe) driving circumstances, how could we ever get a good handle on risk if it goes unreported most of the time?

Mighk, thanks for applying some analysis to the numbers. I think it becomes clear that the public has been mislead about the risks of street cycling ……

Tom’s article: http://www.howwedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/vanderbilt.pdf