1.5m comes from 25% of all Londoners who say they'd like to travel by bike but are put off by road danger. Doesn't necessarily mean commuting. Probably does mean a lot of the sub 5 mile car trips that show up in the DfT statistics, and the army of chubby secondary school kids jamming the buses where I live.
A similarly unrepresentative sample in my office gives road danger - or, you might say, road unpleasantness - as by far the #1 reason (although as they're healthy under 35s in Z2+3, shame on anyone who complains of distance). Danger is not just the outright risk of being killed or injured, it's the mindset you have to maintain to stay safe.
Mindset vs actual situation is not black & white, I don't think people are that dense (at least when presented with the carrot of saving huge sums of money). It's perhaps more that they don't want to deal with the threat level, even if they know they're capable of doing so safely (after all, it's easier to not crash in to anything on a bike than it is in a car - something most people apparently think they can do).
Was at a talk given by LCC the other night. They are by no means anti-vehicular. Far from it, in fact. What they reject is one-size-fits-all solutions and dogma - what works in the Square Mile (narrow roads, slow traffic, adult commuters & couriers) isn't going to work around Orpington (wide roads, fast cars, 7-year-olds who'd like to cycle to school & grannies pootling to the shops), and vice versa. "Go Dutch" seems to be more of a campaign hook than anything else - they have been doing this stuff for years & know the (time, money) realities of rolling out that kind of engineering.
The reason LoB doesn't take sides in the infra debate is that, first and foremost, no solution (regulatory-vehiculal, infrastructure based or both) can be made to work well enough for all the people who would like to cycle without substantial political will behind it. Beyond that, we're just a bunch of people who ride bikes, so we in no way have the expertise or authority to recommend Dutch over Danish infrastructure, or the specifics of how Strict Liability would be implemented under UK law. What we are is a mechanism for building political will, by showing there's crucial votes to be won in a tightly fought election.
