Literally just being drunk enough can end up in you being dead or maimed.
From a harm reduction perspective, Drunk Driving -> Drunk Bicycling feels like it reduces the capacity for damage roughly proportionally to Drunk Bicycling -> Drunk Walking. At a critical level, the speeds you can comfortably achieve are reduced at each step, thereby increasing the amount of reaction time available to avoid an incident, reducing the ramifications of an error, and reducing the amount of damage your body has the capacity to do (by nature of the amount of kinetic energy you are attempting to control).
Not sure if this is an example of anti-fragility, but it made me think of that. there's def something diff about bikes for this. Get too drunk as a cyclist and you remove yourself from the situation in relatively safe way, just by not being able to stay in control :)
That's true, but most fatal car crashes happen for people who are very drunk https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... reports that in the US, of the 2019 crashes of drivers who had a BAC above .01, 68% had BACs of .15 or higher (and about half were .20 or higher). That's a group that would have a pretty hard time riding a bike at high enough speed to do much damage. None of this is to say that biking while drunk is a good idea. It probably at least triples your likelyhood of being hit and killed by a car. Defensive riding is one of the things I would expect to be significantly impaired by relatively little alcohol, and it's probably dark out which makes everything riskier.
From a harm reduction perspective, Drunk Driving -> Drunk Bicycling feels like it reduces the capacity for damage roughly proportionally to Drunk Bicycling -> Drunk Walking. At a critical level, the speeds you can comfortably achieve are reduced at each step, thereby increasing the amount of reaction time available to avoid an incident, reducing the ramifications of an error, and reducing the amount of damage your body has the capacity to do (by nature of the amount of kinetic energy you are attempting to control).