Cycling safety

[lectureral]

Ran across this article Copenhagenize.com - Building Better Bicycle Cultures: Cycling, Safety & Health by Thomas Krag

Summary: t's misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer. Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if people give up their cars, they will travel a lot fewer kilometers! According to the article, in Denmark in 1992 (!), cycling was about 3x as dangerous per kilometer as driving, but was essentially equally safe per hour and somewhat safer per trip.

 

[indalo]

Good find lectureral!

I can't make up my mind whether the article is confused or confusing but the hackneyed expression, "Lies, damned lies and statistics" sprang to mind while I read it.

Regardless, cycling is nice in Denmark.

Regards,
Indalo

 

[Mussels]

I think he was careful to say statistics can be misleading and then quoted lots of different ones to make his point, whilst being thorough it's confusing.

The figure used in the denominator for risk calculations is often the number of kilometres travelled. This can be relevant for some purposes but disputable for others. The number of kilometres travelled has been growing year by year for most western societies while the time spent in transport and the number of trips generally has been found to be stable. When calculating risk on a societal level the latter figures will thus be a better choice than the number of kilometres travelled.

 

[lectureral]

It's clearly written with a view to supporting the promotion of cycling generally - so aimed at policy makers rather than the individual cyclist but there are some interesting points for us as individuals, I thought.