It shows correlation not causation and not "research". There's no such proof.

The key sentence in the article is: " Financial struggle for popular bike sharing systems"...

That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.

Good eye. I bet you're right about the PR origins of this specific article, and I can see why that would make you skeptical.

For me, however, this idea is old news. People have been investigating this issue for years and the results seem to be generally consistent. I have been reading reports about the link between helmet laws, reduced cycling rates, and reduced overall safety for at least five years now.

I live in Seattle, where the surrounding county passed a mandatory helmet law back in 1993. After decades of experience, this law was seen to do more harm than good, and the Board of Health decided earlier this year to repeal it.

> That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.

I think it's entirely plausible that the article was written by a PR company, and that is one possible reason (though not the only) they were paid to do it.

I'll quibble with you on a few points though:

Much research only find correlation. Just because it's not conclusive about causation doesn't mean it's not research.

As much "those terrible motorized bikes and scooters" might have lead to people dying (I've heard the anecdotal horror stories, I've just not looked at the data, so I'm ignorant to the overall effect), there have been plenty of attempts (some successful) at non-motorized bike sharing systems. One could reasonably imagine that when those systems are successful, it is likely there's a net increase in cycling within the community, thereby increasing overall safety of cycling via the "safety In Numbers" effect cited in the article, not to mention a possible reduction in the amount of driving. It therefore follows that one could make an argument that improving the success rate of such systems helps improve bike riding safety (though I'd like to see THAT data). It might even be true (and again, I have not seen any data on this) that for all the terrible deaths from motorized bikes & scooters, that adoption of them still increases the safety for cyclists, because if the alternative is the same person being in a car/truck/SUV, then a cyclist being hit by a motorized bike or scooter, even if they get hit more often, might be far less dangerous.

I think we shouldn't presume any particular PR motive for the article necessarily means it is not in line with the interests of cyclists. Ad hominems aren't don't really undermine the arguments presented in the article.