Does riding a bike in the rain increase your risks of being struck by lightning, over simply walking?
If you are talking about walking down a particular sidewalk or path vs. riding a bicycle down the exact same sidewalk or path, I can’t see any reason why one would be more of a risk than the other.
People tend to walk on sidewalks and ride bikes on roads, and the roads are a bit more out in the open. On the other hand, sidewalks often have trees that are a bit closer nearby and trees are basically death magnets during a thunderstorm. You never want to be near a tree when lightning is around.
Well, you’re closer to a significant mass of metal. Other than that, I’m not sure what the difference would be. Your head would at about the same height.
Assuming you have a fixed starting point and destination, you’re going to be outside for a shorter amount of time on the bicycle, which is to your benefit.
On a bike, assuming the tires are rubber and are not wet, you’re not earthed. Would that make a difference?
Not in the slightest. The lightning just jumped across 5 miles of open air to get to your head. Do you think the 1/2" of air between the bottom of the bike wheel rims and the road is any kind of obstacle? It’ll go around or through the rubber tires with no issue at all.
The reason it’s supposedly safer in a *car * in a storm is not that the tires insulate the car from the earth.
Instead it’s that *if *the car is struck, the vast majority of the energy will flow *through *the car body and out the car bottom into the ground instead of rattling around *inside *the car and frying you.
Unlike a car, with a bike you’re on the outside, not the inside. Which affords no protection at all.
While I agree that the bike’s insulation isn’t going to provide any protection against a direct lightning bolt hit, it may provide some help against the effects of an indirect strike nearby.
Let me re-phrase the question–
Would the odds of being struck go up, near, far, or whatever?
Allowing for the shorter time spent traveling the same distance.
Very little difference, hard to say whether the slight difference would be leaning towards more or less likely to get struck. But other factors would overwhelm any difference.
I’ll disagree with Telemark & support Chronos.
Per unit of *time *there’s no meaningful difference in risk between biking and walking.
But your total risk is proportional to how long you spend outside exposed to the storm. So as between biking a mile at 15mph and walking a mile at 3mph, you’ll cover the same *distance *but be outside 1/5th as long on the bike and have 1/5th the overall likelihood of getting hit.
OTOH, if your idea of fun is to either walk or bike for an hour in a thunderstorm, again there’s no difference in total risk over the hour.
We’re in agreement, I think. I interpreted the restated question to be about risk over the same unit of time.