My literacy of the German language is almost nil, but it seems patently unreasonable for an author or journalist to believe that over half of the incidents involving a fairly common activity would be fatal. Now, I should say that I’m basing this on prior knowledge of the German e-bike/pedelec market, where over half the bikes sold there at electric. What this implies is that of the sizable population of the country, of the subset which are riding bicycles, and further the subset which ride pedelecs, and still yet the subset which get into a collision or other incident, that somehow it’s believable that over half will die?

That cannot possibly be true, does not pass the sniff test, and isn’t even passable as a joke. If it were true, there would be scores of dead riders left and right, in every city in the country, daily. I suspect it would overtake (pun intended) the number of murders in the fairly safe country.

Compare this with parachuting, which would be more sensible for a headline of “most accidents are fatal”, I’m shocked that no one in the publication chain of command noticed such a gross error. While it’s true that some statistics are bona fide shocking – American shooting deaths come to mind – this is a very bizarre instance of confirmation bias, since no one noticed the error.

I was led to believe that cycling in German is “normalized but marginalized”, but this type of error speaks to some journalistic malpractice.