The cycle rickshaw, which is a variant of a cargo bike is quite common in Asia. The price for a new one ranges from $100-500. Meanwhile, a bike with elongated rear rack, e.g., a longtail cargo bike (barely counts as cargo bike) can cost $1,000 in the West, and that is the entry level “cargo bike.” A front load cargo bike costs $2500 and upwards. An Urban Arrow ™ cargo bike can cost a whopping $6-7k.
I completely agree that being a motorcycle driver is way, waaay more dangerous than being a car driver… as you say, because road infrastructure sucks, and most american car drivers seem to just have a selective blindness that makes them not see motorcycles… and you don’t have a car protecting you from a collision or random debris.
But… I tried wording of my original post this way…
Basically, bicycle infrastructure fucking also sucks.
Very few places have actually protected bike lines, and a bicyclist making a blind left in the middle of a city, even from bike lane to bike lane, is still just as potentially fucked as a motorcyclist, perhaps moreso accounting for their generally lower level of personal outfit protection (bike helmet vs motorcycle helmet, etc).
Your graphic there doesn’t include bicycles.
It would be interesting to see what that metric would be for regular bicyclist commuters, who aren’t using like… park/trail bike paths, but are having to deal with either mostly shit tier bike lanes or sidewalks to get to and from work.
I know some cities have actually useful bike only paths, or truly protected bike lanes that can help you get to work… but most don’t, in the US, or at least they are sparse and not present for all or even most of an average commute.
… As far as I can see, nobody actually tallies up US bicycle miles traveled, so you can’t do the same comparison of fatalities per mile traveled.
I am seeing that in 2023 there were 1377 fatalities, and 937 of those were a collision with a motor vehicle.
I am also seeing that historically, the absolute number of motorbike deaths vs bicycle deaths per year is … well, the proportion is roughly steady at about 6 motorbike deaths per bicycle death.
It could be that basically there are about 6x as many motorcyclists as bicyclists… or maybe 3x, and motorcycling is twice as dangerous as bicycling…
You’d have to actually have apples to apples data to do a reasonable comparison, and as far as i can tell… that data doesn’t exist.
Like yes, motorcycles go much faster than bicycles, which is more dangerous… but you have to actually get a specific motorcycle liscense to drive a motor bike… you don’t need any for a bicycle.
And every cyclist is basically equally fucked from being wiped out at an intersection or in a busy urban street where a car driver just doesn’t see you or pretends you aren’t there even though you are very easily visible and in their field view.
???