This paper calculates that there is a net increase in life expectancy biking, even given the national accident stats:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/18/114410/016

FWIW, the stat given is that the U.S. suffers 72 fatalities per billion kilometers while biking, versus 6 fatalities per billion kilometers in cars.

Given the generally shorter mileage covered each year on a bike, that seems like good odds ... even car vs. bike.

(as always your neighborhood matters more than the national stats.)

i rode bicycles to school and college and my work from ages seven to sixty-one, when I retired. Now I ride more than ever and have accumulated more than 100,000 miles of accident-free bike riding. To tell the whole truth, I have never even had a close call.

My insight and tactics:

1. be paranoid.
   
2. Be much more totally paranoic, because they are out to get you.
   
3. Realize that half of the drivers are impaired by drugs, alcohol, cell phones or are undergoing car-jacking, and a few are having fatal heart attacks as they realize they just killed that little kid who ran out in the road and is looking at her body and not your bike.
   
4. Study bicycle riding from expert survivors.
   
5. Ride motorcycles and experience even more malice and evil and danger from cars.

For some reason, big trucks are often kind to bicyclists.
Some school-bus drivers are very bad, but most are good.

6. Keep your eyes moving: They can come at you from any direction.

7. Increase paranoia to just barely below the point that the men with white coats takes you away to the rubber room.

8. Practice panic stops.

9. Always be mentally prepared to dump your bike in a ditch and take a broken bone rather than instant death.

10. Do not bike unfamiliar routes except under ideal conditions. Familiarity with route is a HUGE safety factor.

11. Helmets are good. I have been known to wear motorcycle body armor while on a pedal bike under circumstances where I thought ultra caution was called for.

12. Stay on the trail. Ride on grass or sidewalks if that is safer in a particular situation. (I always have fat tires.)

13. Ride an extra couple of miles if the longer route is safer.

14. Don't ride too fast. Don't ride when very tired or emotionally upset. Do not carry your cell phone with you, or if you MUST, then turn it off until your bike is locked up and put away.

15. If you can remember license numbers, report dangerous drivers; I've done this several times and have always gotten good feedback from the police. In one case my complaint triggered a huge drug bust.

I've thought of the political correctness of requiring certain groups of people such as young males or the old to be subjected to extra testing.  Why not have a graduated scoring scheme on the driving test?  Score 100% and you return in 5 years to do it again.  Score 75% and you're back in 1 year.  Fail and you are required to get retraining on your own time and expense.  Get a ticket for a traffic violation and you go for a test and/or training in addition to the fine.  This gives the elderly some time to come to terms with their deteriorating abilities without having to go cold turkey.  

It relieves the kids of their responsibility (liability, some day) for thier elderly parents' driving.  (And the parents for their kids).

We can only try. I guess the biggest objection would be that it would cost money, but of course so do traffic injuries and deaths. Even if this only took a few percent off the road, it might safe billions collectively in auto-insurance premiums.

What are the transportation alternatives for those who live in rural America? At the momoent zero. I'm currently planning to move to a county with a population of less than 15,000. There are probably more people living on one block in New York. What works in Manhattan won't work in Podunk.

Every day doctors talk with family members and tell them it's time to take the keys away from grandpa or grandma because he's not safe behind a wheel. I'm not so sure that expending the effort to get the state to do it is worthwhile. Educating families and voluntary incentives might be more effective.

What you don't see are articles about all the non-elderly dangerous drivers. Politically, this is only OK if it takes somebody else off the road, as the remarks right here about "taking the oldies off the road" amply demonstrate.

oilmanbob,
As a physician, I see your predicament regularly.  It is very difficult to get elderly patients to give up driving.  It's no so much that 80 year old necessarily share the so-called american love affair with the automobile, it's that they realize their independence will suffer greatly.  this of course is a function of our worthless public transportation systems.  I've often said that an otherwise perfectly normal adult who could run a marathon but cannot drive due to epilepsy is in a sense more handicapped in our society than someone with paraplegia who can drive with hand controls.  The problem for the elderly is made even worse bc/ we tend to build nursing home and retirement communities out in the middle of nowhere.  There's often a little man made lake and a small garden for walking.  Half-baked "activities" occur in the small amount of space the home devotes to "recreation". I've always thought retirement and nursing homes should be in town where elderly people can walk (or go by scooter/ wheelchair) to parks, restaurants, shops, etc. and still be a part of regular society.  I suspect it is in large part our fear of aging and death that drives us to warehouse the elderly out of sight.  This is a tragedy.
Our hospital has an impaired drivers program run by occupational therapists. If anyone has a brain injury, stroke or even if its just mild cognitive impairment and poor eyesight, they can be referred to this service.  They spend hours on a computer simulator before going out on the road with the therapist.  Usually even the most stubborn person will realize they cannot drive after the 7th or 8th time they digitally kill themselves on the simulator.
I'm sure you feel a certain sense of guilt by removing the car from your father, but you shouldn't, you absolutely did the right thing.  You've made things safer for your father and the rest of us.  Many of my patients just have the keys stolen from them by family members.  No one yet has tried to hot wire their vehicle.

How about limiting them to Neighborhood Electric Vehicles?  Slower speed, better visibility, ...

I know I'd rather have one of them coming at me than a full size van (a poor dear didn't see me and made a left in my direction about a month ago.  my brakes worked.)

"Most elderly people who feel they should no longer drive would love to have a way of getting around to shop that did not involve the automobile, but if one is too infirm to drive one certainly has no business on a bicycle!"

This statement misses some important points.  First, an incompetent cyclist is pretty much a danger to only themself.  Vanishingly few people are killed each year by being struck by a bicyclist.  Next, many elderly people operate bicycles or tricycles just fine by traveling at a slower speed.  A motorist who slows down in the US is likely to get a ticket for impeding traffic, so they keep up with the other motorists even if it's unsafe for them to go that fast.  Finally, there are many other alternatives to bicycles that don't involve the danger to others that motor vehicles do.  

The only legitimate argument here is that the US has designed most communities to require automobile use.  Higher oil prices are going to require that all but the wealthy get over that, and start building and living in pedestrian/bicycle/transit oriented communities again, just like most of the rest of the world does.

My great-aunty Kirsteen pedalled around on her tricycle until she was 93.

I could have walked faster than her, but it was her freedom.

Here in NZ, most of the elderly have got electric 4-wheel 'mobility scooters'.  But there have been some high-profile incidences of people being injured by mobility scooters. One recent one resulted in the driver being charged.

I think the biggest problem is that we have lost our connection to our elderly.  In the past, the elderly were taken care of by their families and didn't need to be as indepedent as they are now. My mother cared for my grandpa almost until he died by cooking his lunch every day. She still, at the age of 67, does shopping for several elderly neighbours, as well as being on the committee at the local elderly care centre. How many people these days can be bothered with that level of responsibility? If we weren't so self-centred and "me, me, me" these days, then the elderly would not need to be so self-reliant.

Again, every time we start an engine that burns fossil fuels we cause three kinds of "crashes" whether we hit anyone with the car or not.  There is the geopolitical crash which demands blood for oil.  There is the ecological crash which presents itself more fully as time goes by.  There is the economic crash that will manifest itself more fully as the costs of the first two kinds of crashes really manifest themselves.

Car driving is never safe.

Full disclosure: I pedal mostly, but my family does own a Honda Civic hybrid -- not my choice that we do -- but I ride in it and sometimes drive it.

We are all soaking in this toxic soup we call "car culture" and so our efforts must involve a variety of strategies to create a less damaging paradigm for human settlement.

I'm all for frequent testing of drivers for licensure!

I'm all for many other efforts to make positive changes as well!  Relocalisation, roads to rails, walking and biking, organic farming, continuously productive urban landscapes -- all are needed.

People can do this right now. Take the 55 Alive course (you have to be over 50) and you get 10% off your insurance on each car you own. I have insurance on 5 vehicles and it saves me a lot of cash each year. And I always learn something new when I take the refresher courses every couple of years to keep the discount with the insurance company. 1 day for course, 1/2 day for refresher course.

http://www.aarp.org/families/driver_safety/driver_program/a2004-06-21-whatisds.html

...but if we all spit on the fire at once...I fully admit that this is a bit tongue in cheek...

The real benefit from a PO perspective is to challenge the auto-centric view of residential development/zoning. Because not all people are well suited to drive an automobile physicially, mentally or emotionally, we cannot and should not assume that automobiles should be the ONLY means of transportation for the vast majority of our landscape.

Another spit on the fire is my Modest Proposal on Drinking and Driving

With enough new bureaucratic red tape, people will perhaps be so busy complying with the rules and paying fines that they won't notice the transition to a post-peak  1984/Soylent Green type environment.
And if they do complain, we can use the new rules and infringements to quieten them more easily.

The most obvious way to reduce driving, by the way, would be to ration gasoline...

Interesting list. I guess these are the real canaries in the coal mine.

Bikes in Minnesota (Twin cities metro area) seem quite practical, as least with a little creativity, maybe helped by mild winters lately, and a little harsh on the dating life (Hope hint - exchange paying gas for your girlfriend's vehicle is a viable compromise!)

Most seriously, I shared a car with my sister for 8 years quite well, with my bike as a primary transportation, and although I expect downgrading to no car is a tough choice for most, I believe more households can and will downgrade to less cars than adults as fuel prices go up.

I do admit I don't "get around" as much without my own car, but even when I had exclusive access to a car, I prided myself on not being daily dependent upon it (i.e. Games like "How many weeks or months can I go without filling the tank?" type games!)

P.S. Internet radar is a GREAT asset to weather-dependent bikers!

Sina,

Thank you for the common sense.  

The weather along with the rapidly aging population and the crime rate assures that bicycles, while an enjoyable toy, and a beautiful device, or EXTREMELY LIMITED as  actual working transportation.  Do not think that in many cities and neigborhoods you cannot be hit with a brick, closelined with a stick, mugged and horribly attacked on bicycles.  Out here in the supposed peaceful South and Midwest, I know of several college girls who were grabbed off bicycles, and their bodies found later,  and the founder of Papa John's Pizza and a friend of his, avid bicyclists, were nearly killed when a textbook was thrown and struck them on a country road in Kentucky.  It happens more often than you may think.

Try carrying your sick child home from school early on a bicycle, and in a raging thunderstorm to boot. :-(
We had this discussion the other day and someone said take the bus or the local train or tram.  What if none is available when you need to go and opps, as we said, the child is still sick!

There are two distinct issues at discussion here:

1.  Peak Oil, and the issue of consuming more fuel than can be sustainably produced.  That is the heart of the peak oil issue.

2.  Rabid and raw hatred of the automobile per se, regardless of what it may be powered, whether or not can be massively improved, or if advanced design can make it a marginal factor in the "peak oil "problem"

The idea of a personal module of mechanized transportation is so abhorrent to many who have grafted themselves onto the peak oil movement, that it is rapidly becoming a fixation, in fact, even a mania, and completely distroying the credibility of the issue in the view of the average person who does not hate the automobile with every fiber of their being, and actually may need one.  For them, salvaging the automobile may be (a) do-able, (b) desirable and (c) non-threatening to the nation, if it can be managed correctly.

What they sometimes fail to understand is that there are those who hate the idea of personal powered transportation  on an aesthetic and  moral basis, and even if every desirable condition could be met, do not accept the idal of personal mechanical transportation of any kind more than a human powered type.

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout