this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Data is Beautiful
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Because people don't take an airplane when traveling 3 miles. It's really not fair to compare a device designed to haul hundreds of people thousands of miles across oceans with something designed to carry a single person a few blocks. Airplanes and bikes aren't substitutes for each other.
It's like comparing my garden trowel with a commercial excavator. Yeah, thr excavator moves more dirt more quickly, but you don't use one to weed a garden or use a trowel to grade a building site.
They literally are substitutes. If planes didn't exist then more people would ride motorcycles for very long distances. They may even take their motorcycles on ferries to make their trips possible if they have to.
You gonna bike across an ocean? You gonna take an airplane to the grocery store?
None of the other listed modes of transportation would be used to cross the ocean (depending on how generous you want to be with "ferry").
But for domestic travel, no planes would mean more trips by automobile. And inevitably, some of this would translate to more motorcycles.
Pick your destination, now ignore all forms of transport that are obviously unsuitable. Now off you go.
Should include walking/cycling but health benefits are harder to factor in as I am pretty sure the risk of death is lower than the health benefits.
No, clearly not. But I've already explained how they are substitutes and you just ignored my point.
Not that they need to be substitutes in the first place. Any mode of transportation is going to be more or less dangerous than any other mode of transportation, and that alone is enough to compare them. You don't need to be able to literally substitute a plane for a motorcycle in every situation to analyze the differences in the danger between them.
I'd still measure both by ability to move dirt if my objective is to move dirt. This chart compares modes of transport; if your purpose for riding a bicycle is pleasure or cost or whatever then you can make your own personal adjustments, but if you want to decide what's the safest way to do a daily 10 mile commute then this chart will give you that.
You gonna do a 10-mile commute on an airplane?
You use the lines of the chart that are relevant to the kind of journey you want to make. This should not need explaining.
You're just being argumentative for its own sake.
plenty of people use planes to travel to nearby destinations that just don't have road or waterway access