I rode 3000 miles across the US in summer 2017 and had just one blatant encounter with someone deliberately running me off the road, but heard plenty of stories from others on bikes. It seems like I beat the odds.

Maybe everyone on a bike should wear a huge picture of their face on their back!

I'm having a hard time believing that anyone would connect cyclists to something other than human on the two scales they mentioned.

As to aggression, though, the first time my mother saw my daughter ride her bike about 2 feet into the roadway she tried to talk her into moving onto the berm. I had to inform mom that she was riding there for self-protection, as I had taught her. When (not if) she encounters an aggressive driver, she needs to be able to move to the right to get out of the way. If her only option is to move off the pavement (because she is riding right at the edge of it), she will spin out and literally become roadkill.

That's the reality of sharing the road with cars.

I wonder what ridership numbers are in Australia? I remember a study from several years ago that when cyclists made up as little as 3% of road traffic, the rate of conflicts between motorists and cyclists began dropping. I don't remember if the researchers drew this conclusion, but my experience has been that when motorists are accustomed to seeing cyclists, they're more likely to share the road space.

Tell us more. Has there been a study that determined this, like this Australian study but in reverse? Such a finding in the US would be very odd indeed, since most cyclists in the US are also drivers of cars. I don't know if that's true in Australia, though.