All of which is irrelevant to this discussion, since you did not give us the distance the girl would have had to travel.
This is a completely irrelevant argument that you make. The distance the girl would have had to travel doesn't change the fact that accidents/mile and injuries/accidents statistics are both worse for bicycles than for cars. If she travels said distance in a car or a bus she is subject to the risks inherent in that travel. If she travels said distance on a bicycle she is subject to the inherent risks of that modal form.
In the end, yes, cars are driven more than bikes are ridden, but the numbers are the numbers. To argue that bicycle riding is more dangerous than riding in a car when far, far, far, far more children are killed in cars than on bikes is nothing short of ridiculous. I cannot get behind your position on this topic.
Driving your child around in a car results in far more fatalities than letting a six year-old play with a loaded handgun. Which activity do you think is
riskier though?
Look, you're forcing me to make an argument that I don't want to make. I'm a huge advocate of cycling, that's why I posted this thread. More than half my trips away from my house are taken on my beloved bicycle. My car is only used for work (and only because my employer requires that I drive my car to work). When I've discussed this issue with my parents who feel that cycling is quite dangerous I've emphatically argued that their perceptions are overstated. I will make that case to anyone, anyday. But you're staunchly contending that bicycling from point A to point B is just as safe as riding in a car from point A to point B and the numbers don't lie. Accidents/mile and severity/accidents both suggest that bicycling is a
somewhat riskier activity. That's a reality that I can't dispute as much as I'd like to.
I have to disagree. The officer is not well-intentioned. The officer is over-reacting and has some random agenda that he gets to enforce because of his position of power and blatantly abusing his authority.
Most people have that agenda. Even a lot of good people who are very sympathetic to cyclists ultimately suffer from an ideological agenda that condemns cycling. Until I got into commuter cycling I suffered from those very sentiments. I didn't understand how hazardous cycling could be, I didn't understand that cyclists have excellent safety reasons to routinely ride out in the traffic lane. I'd always ask why they didn't just ride on the sidewalks and I often joked about lobbing slurpees at them.
I was ignorant, like most people including this officer. That doesn't mean that I wasn't well-intentioned or that I wasn't trying to do the right thing and respect those cyclists. I just didn't understand.
He's not "abusing his authority". He's trying to do the right thing. Public safety personnel tend to suffer from a certain bias that they rarely acknowledge. Cops and firefighters alike heavily weigh immediate consequences of actions and ignore the long-term effects. There's a reason for that: their jobs expose them to the immediate consequences every single day. I've been there when a little kid went under a 4-door sedan. I've seen, felt, and smelt that. It's a horrific thing to see. Cops and firefighters deal with other calls, many more calls, to help out old ladies with chronic health problems. They don't generally make the connection that the chronic health problems are a result of the fact that this older person didn't take small risks and live a healthy life when they were younger. They just don't make that connection. Public safety personnel (cops and firefighters) view the promotion of the public safety as a sacred duty that they must uphold. Sometimes their perceptions are wrong. They're only human.
In this story the police officer, mother, and daughter are all doing what they think is right. They're trying to be good people,
immanentizing the eschaton, so to speak. The folly is that their perceptions are often wrong. Nobody is omniscient and every involved party is wrong in some respect. I'm very, very sympathetic to the mother. I think that the police department is probably wrong to challenge her decision to allow her daughter to ride a bike to school. For reasons we've discussed earlier it's understandable why police officers feel this way, even if their sentiments are ultimately flawed. They're trying to do the right thing.
My OP was an attempt to accept the rational judgment of the officer as well as the sentiments of the mother. What I want to discuss is this:
Why are we building cities where children can't safely ride a bicycle to school like they could when we were children? Our parents built a world that nurtured and fostered us, that gave us opportunity and freedom. I think that we are building a world for our own children that stifles innovation, freedom, and opportunity. Why are we doing that?