I've had probably a dozen serious mountain bike crashes, and not one of them needed more than an emergency room visit. Road bike crashes are way more damaging. With that said, none of my bike crashes, including several overnight stays in the hospital, has come close to how badly I've been injured in a car crash. Getting in a car is, by a significant amount, the most dangerous thing most people choose to do.
This isn't available everywhere but if you get a chance to play bike polo or the like, it's an enormous help to bike handling skills, since you're colliding with people and doing extremely tight turns the whole time, at very low speed. When friends get clipless pedals for the first time, I try to get them to go out on a lawn somewhere with a friend and play bump-em-off where you try to shoulder your friends off their bikes and they do the same back, so you have a big chunk of practice at low-speed handling and rapidly getting off the bike. A bit more aggro are foot-down competitions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-rEVDRVvec&list=PL762E9987568B956C&index=1 but again they do teach you a lot about handling.
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With that said, none of my bike crashes, including several overnight stays in the hospital, has come close to how badly I've been injured in a car crash. Getting in a car is, by a significant amount, the most dangerous thing most people choose to do.
This isn't available everywhere but if you get a chance to play bike polo or the like, it's an enormous help to bike handling skills, since you're colliding with people and doing extremely tight turns the whole time, at very low speed. When friends get clipless pedals for the first time, I try to get them to go out on a lawn somewhere with a friend and play bump-em-off where you try to shoulder your friends off their bikes and they do the same back, so you have a big chunk of practice at low-speed handling and rapidly getting off the bike. A bit more aggro are foot-down competitions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-rEVDRVvec&list=PL762E9987568B956C&index=1 but again they do teach you a lot about handling.