As well as writing a blog about cycling, a recent entry in which someone’s been kind enough to post on this thread, I was for many years my newspaper’s transport correspondent. My father also worked in subways all his life. It’s pretty hard to imagine that there could be an incident on the metro much worse than the Fort Totten crash of 2009. That killed eight passengers. The reason for metro’s unreliability is precisely that when the safety equipment isn’t working it automatically switches to danger. The actual danger of dying on the metro is tiny – and certainly far smaller than cycling or going in a motor vehicle for the same trip.
There are big advantages for cycling over metro, though. One, as others have mentioned, is that it’s far more reliable than metro has become. The other is that the big health risks facing most Americans aren’t from crashes but the heart disease, cancer and diabetes that can come with inactivity. All the figures I’ve seen suggest cycling’s benefits in reducing those risks far outweigh the risks from crashes. It’s consequently rational to cycle.
