Imagine if we’d arranged the bus service so that the overwhelming majority of the time your bus was actually waiting for you as soon as you walked up to the stop. Imagine that we then gave you almost unlimited travel on this miracle for 25p a day. You’d be pretty happy, I think.

Good as London’s buses are, they will never be that good — and the last time I looked, the fare, per trip, was £1.40. We do, however, have one transport network that already delivers precisely that service, at exactly that price: Barclays Cycle Hire. The passengers are indeed pretty happy: they rate the scheme, on average, just under 70 per cent. But the media? Not so much.

Items regularly appear in the news under slight variants of the admittedly tempting headline that the “wheels are falling off” the scheme. Satisfaction has crashed from a soaraway 70 per cent at the beginning to a humiliating, sub-basement 69 per cent now! It’s got the highest cost to the taxpayer of any hire scheme in the world, except for some of the others! The charge to users has gone up from a quarter of the price of a cup of coffee to an indefensible, extortionate half the price of a cup of coffee! (Puzzlingly, this last one is often coupled with the complaint that the public subsidy is too high.)

David Cameron yesterday dipped a prime ministerial toe in the cycling shark-pool, promising £77 million for bike projects in eight provincial cities. It follows a commitment in March by my boss, Boris Johnson, to spend £1 billion on similar projects in London. It’s good news — but don’t expect an easy ride, will you, Dave? There’s something about cycling, you see, that seems to destroy people’s sense of proportion.

There are, as I told the Standard last week, some problems with bike hire — mostly availability, which we are fixing — but they need to be kept in perspective. The scheme accounts for about one-thousandth of all journeys made in London each day — and an equally tiny percentage of TfL’s capital and operating budget. It gets a lot more than a thousandth of the coverage. It might be the most over-scrutinised transport initiative in history.

Lack of proportion affects other people in the debate, too: whether it’s the anti-cyclists fuming that bikes are a menace to other road users, or some of the campaigners angrily attacking the Mayor for the “growing carnage” of cyclists killed on the roads. Here are some numbers for both sides to ponder. Across the whole of London, in the last year for which figures are available, the actual number of pedestrians seriously injured by cyclists was nine. And in 2013 so far, seven and a half months in, the actual number of cyclists who have died on London’s roads is six.

That is nine pedestrians, and six cyclists, too many — but six cyclist deaths is, as it happens, a third less than the number at this point last year. In 2002, there were around 110 million cycle journeys in London, of which 20 ended in death. In 2012, there were around 180 million bike journeys, of which 14 ended in death. That is not carnage, and nor is it growing.

The number of fatalities may, I think, be too small to take as the best indicator of trends — but it is the ground the cycling community has chosen to fight on. As a cyclist, I’m glad that every single bike death gets massive, blanket media coverage. But I do wonder what a pedestrian (69 of whom were killed on London’s roads last year) or a motorcyclist (27 deaths) has to do to make the news.

Only yesterday, in Acton, a father and his 10-year-old son, a pillion passenger, died together on their motorbike. Only last month, in Upminster, another dad was killed in front of his nine-year-old son as a car mounted the pavement. These terrible cases, and most others like them, don’t tend to get a lot of media coverage. But they remind us that cyclists aren’t the only vulnerable road users.

That’s one of the reasons why we can’t do what some in the cycling community want, and rush through in a few weeks the cycle changes we’re planning. Have no doubt, those changes will be major — and you’ll start seeing the first fruits in about two months — but they have to work for both cyclists and pedestrians, and if they’re not thought through, they mightn’t be safe for either.

Since we don’t own 95 per cent of the roads, and Boris hasn’t yet got dictatorial powers, we also have to think of the politics. If we slapped in some instant scheme without working out what to do with the traffic, the lights, the buses or the parking, we could create chaos and a big political backlash. We might well be forced to take it all out again, thereby preventing ourselves from doing anything serious for cyclists at that spot for all time to come. And one further general principle of government: never do things in a panic as a consequence of a tragedy. That road leads straight to 90-day detention and the Dangerous Dogs Act.

Cycling in London is clearly less safe than it could be. It is less safe than it should be. It is less safe than, under our plans, it will be. But it is still fairly safe — and it is safer than it was. For that reason, I confess to mixed feelings about the all-consuming emphasis on cycle safety. Part of me applauds it, recognises that it has helped create the political space to do more for cycling. But the other part worries that it has scared new cyclists away. Last year, as it happens, when the clamour about safety was at its height, was also the year when London’s previously stellar growth in cycling tailed off.

I’m not saying we should stop talking about safety. It’s the key reason people give for not cycling. But I am saying we should think more carefully how we talk about it.

Andrew Gilligan is cycling commissioner for London