azekeil

Okay, I've been curious about this for a while, because I keep hearing of accidents and fatalities on motorcycles through friends. Here are some very crude numbers for the UK taken from here for 1999.

The cross-modal table lists 123 fatalities per billion km travelled for mopeds + motorcycles, and 2.9 for cars. So, in order to work out my chances of dying over a lifetime of biking or driving:

Assume I travel an average of 20,000km a year
Assume I do this for 40 years
Distance travelled in my lifetime = 800,000km

That means my chances of dying are 123 * 800,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 9.84% if I ride that distance, or 2.9 * 800,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.23% by car.

Feel free to tell me my methods are flawed as I'm not certain myself, but otherwise:

That means my chances of dying if I choose to ride a motorcycle over a car are 42 times greater!

I hope I'm a safer rider than some, but even so. I think I may well be buying and using a car where possible too.

UPDATE: Thanks

wechsler for pointing out an English billion is in fact a million million..

UPDATE2: Thanks

growf and

racinghippo for pointing out that the English billion has been depreciated.

UPDATE3: Thanks all, but I also wanted to know my likelihood of dying as a percentage over my lifetime. The difference was incidental :)

UPDATE4: This is getting ridiculous. Apologies to

wechsler for spelling his name incorrectly!