Friday 26 September 2008

Accident statistics

The Department for Transport has just published the accident statistics for 2007. 

The number of pedal cyclists killed or seriously injured works out as one every 500,000 journeys, or one every 1.9million kilometres (one every 1.2million miles). 

The risk of death is similar for a pedestrian and a cyclist, over the same distance, but a pedal cyclist is around three times more likely to be killed on an average journey than a pedestrian because the average bicycle journey is longer than the average walk.

Pedal cycle casualties have decreased by 34% compared to ten years ago, but remain at a similar level to 2006, despite an 8% decrease in cycle traffic - in other words, the rate has increased by  9%. 

The number of pedal cycle fatalities has fallen by 7% from 146 in 2006 to 136 in 2007, and shows a 27% decrease from the number 10 years ago (the actual baseline they use is in an average of the figures from 1994–98).

The full report is here

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was surprised to see the no. of km cycled went down between 2006 and 2007 because certainly in London, the no. of cyclists around went up, but I suppose the poor weather last summer kept the number of leisure trips down.

gom1 said...

Me too. Whatever technique they are using to estimate the number of cycling trips, I'm not sure that they are capturing all of them. There do seem to be a lot more cyclists around, and not just in London. But presumably the number of cycling accidents is also related to the number of other vehicles, and the experience / skill level of cyclists. However, it seems reasonable to expect some fluctuation from year to year, on relatively low numbers, and the long-term trend is down.