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If you are a city driver, you have undoubtedly been scared half to death by some maniac cutting across traffic like Frogger on a fixie. Such emotionally charged events stand out in our associative memory far more than mundane events, like a cyclist riding peacefully alongside your vehicle. The affect heuristic is compounded by the idea of negativity dominance—bad events stand out more than good ones. This causes you to overestimate both the amount and the severity of upsetting events, like almost getting some dirty hipster’s blood on your windshield.I know deep down that most cyclists are perfectly rational, reasonable people who are willing to share the road, who won't swerve out in front of me, or do something dangerous that will put me in the position of having to cope with the death of a stupid stranger, thus putting me through a lot of guilt and a very tedious legal process. I know they're not like that at all. But then nobody can be quite that rational. To be honest, they scare the living crap out of me. I'm just like everyone else who isn't a cyclist when it comes to cyclists (even though I know plenty). My view is that they're idiots.
And there's a perfectly good reason for this kind of irrationality:
[Ask] yourself, what causes more deaths: strokes or all accidents combined? Tornadoes or asthma? Most people say accidents and tornadoes, and most people are wrong. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman asks the reader these same questions before revealing, "strokes cause almost twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80 percent of respondents judged accidental death to be likely. Tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter caused 20 times more deaths." Kids careening on bikes are our urban tornadoes—somewhat rare, upsetting events that stick in our craw longer than they should, and seem like bigger problems than they really are.Related article here, titled, "How to Not Kill a Cyclist."