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TheOtherDave comments on How to avoid dying in a car crash - Less Wrong
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...but might contribute sufficiently to your reduced risk of dying of coronary heart disease at 45 to offset that?
Cycling does not uniquely reduce risk of coronary heart disease. Even if cycling beats driving because of reduced risk of heart disease, driving + non-dangerous exercise would still beat cycling.
At roughly double the time investment. I prefer to commute by bicycle whenever possible (I live in a city where about 20% of people bike to work during summer and about 5% during the winter, so I suspect risk is lowered by bikes being more common on the road). The commute by bike takes about 80 minutes (including return), sitting in rush-hour traffic takes about the same, as would "non-dangerous" exercise. Discounting the negative effects of commuting by car, I would still be losing about 400 hours per year by "exercising safely".
So in order to make up for the lost time, the increased risk of commuting by bicycle should reduce my life expectancy by roughly 0.4%. It doesn't.
Also, statistics and my personal experience indicates that the most effective way of avoiding traffic accidents is to live in a western country other than the United States
That doesn't correct for urbanization, which could affect the statistics in any number of ways (both positive and negative), so is worthless.
Canada is less urbanized, Western Europe is more urbanized. All have lower deaths than the USA.
Also, why should that correction be necessary? If urbanization leads to lower car deaths, that's a good reason to move to a more urbanized place. I can't find any significant number of news stories about subway deaths, and bus travel would count as cars, so there isn't slack being picked up by other methods of transport.
No, it's not, because you're ignoring other causes of death and we already know that everything else is not equal.
I didn't mean to imply that it's a reason which should override other ones. What I did mean was that
is true even if urbanization is a confounding factor.
Is not.
Emphasis mine: "...the most effective way of avoiding traffic accidents" is to change countries. Oh, really?
By the way, the US is a diverse country. Traffic fatalities per 100,000 population: Italy 6.2, Belgium 7.2, Massachusetts 5.3. So, is the most effective way of avoiding traffic accidents is to move to Boston? DC is even better -- 2.4 fatalities per 100,000 population...
That's true.
Technically true, but the difference is small: about two percent less of the population living in urban areas, which is the usual measure of urbanization. Canada has a smaller population and a larger land area, but most of its land is very sparsely populated. (Several European countries, incidentally, are less urbanized than the US by this measure, including Germany and the UK.)
It does seem to have fewer road fatalities by most reasonable measures, though. It's closest if the denominator is in distance driven, and even there the US is about 15% higher.