by Alec Muffett
From the Guardian – full data and spreadsheets are there.
So remember:
Pedestrians killed by cyclists = 2 = 0.52% = zero point five two percent
…next time someone is complaining of the dangers of lycra-clad hooligans hurtling around the streets and pavements.
All deaths are tragic but risk is inevitable; to understand and deal with it proportionately makes sense.
From personal experience with accidents (of the non-fatal kind, self-evidently), it’s “honours even”; I’ve been clipped and spun around by a car while walking across a zebra crossing in Bristol, and upended onto my back by a cyclist while walking on a pavement in Cambridge…
Another useless statistic from the DoT. It of course needs to be weighted by passenger miles since we use transport for a reason. My guess is with that correction motorbikes are relatively more dangerous than cars to pedestrians. The same issue arises with HGVs, which are less numerous that cars, but do a lot of mileage, and passenger miles are not really the measure for haulage. I don’t know what the passenger mile correction does for cycles, but I’d hazard a guess that cars do a lot more mileage each day than bicycles, so it would at least narrow the relative risk.
The same mistake is often made by those in favour of wind power (and other low density renewals), who get quite upset when I point out wind is probably more dangerous than nuclear if you compute fatalities per terawatt hour generated, rather than absolute fatalities.
I’m not convinced that the cycle-statistic requires normalisation; depends what you’re trying to prove – which forms of traffic are safest for pedestrians per passenger-mile, or that reports of people killed by cyclists are overblown.
Also, if you try normalising you will also have to compensate for passenger-miles where pedestrians cannot be, eg: motorways.
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