One cycling death for every 300 man-years of non-stop cycling

[frank9755]

This was in the CTC newsletter this week. One death or injury is too many, but I think it's useful to have data like this to put risks into perspective.

"The Department for Transport has published its annual bulletin of road casualties. As usual, it reveals that, despite another annual decline, the shocking toll of injuries and deaths remains far too high – 8 people killed a day - and is almost wholly a result of motor vehicles. Almost 80% of non-illness deaths among teenagers occur as a result of road collisions, compared to just 20% of those in their 60s. But cycling isn’t as dangerous as is often thought. There is 1 cycling casualty for every 2 and half years of non-stop cycling, and 1 cycling death every 300 years of cycling."

There was also a link to the full report

 

[Mussels]

The Department for Transport has published its annual bulletin of road casualties. As usual, it reveals that, despite another annual decline, the shocking toll of injuries and deaths remains far too high – 8 people killed a day - and is almost wholly a result of motor vehicles.

What does that mean? It sounds to me like they are implying almost all cyclist deaths are the fault of motor vehicle operators and because they know that is rubbish they have changed the wording to this meaningless drivel. I expect many cycling accidents are at least partially due to the riders inexperience or poor judgement and thus avoidable, the link is only to a brief summary of the report and doesn't contain enough data to make a judgement.

 

[frank9755]

That was not how I interpreted it. My reading was that virtually all deaths on the road, ie not purely cyclist deaths, were the result of motor vehicles and a minority are caused by pedestrians or, less frequently, cyclists. I wouldn't have thought that was particularly surprising to anyone.

You're right that the link unfortunately does not have the data behind the headlines, and I couldn't be bothered to go hunting for it, but I still found the two main cycling-related statistics somewhat reassuring.