This leaves a third source of fear and anger, the belief that bicycles are adding confusion to what was a smoothly-running system. Of the three, this is the most grounded in fact: there are more bikes in American cities than in the past, riding on streets that were almost entirely optimized for cars, but have seen recent changes. Many streets in central Chicago, Portland or Washington DC today would look strange to a driver from the 1970s—with all the new striping, bike-specific signals and traffic-calming bumpouts, the urban environment is asking for different behavior from drivers. And some of the people biking on these redesigned streets act like jerks.

The problem with this belief, though, is that the smoothly-running system that bikes are disrupting already kills over 30,000 people per year. On the same day that Suchi Hui was struck by a cyclist in San Francisco, resulting in one of the only bike-on-ped deaths of 2012, around 82 Americans died in car crashes. Going by averages, roughly that many more died in car crashes the day before as well, and the day after, and every other day of the year.