Is cycling in Great Britain getting safer? We crunch the numbers

The fatality figures for 2012 and 2013 show a continued drop in road deaths for the UK. The CTC needs to do some more number crunching with more up to date data.

A couple years on... quoting from The London Evening Standard, 6 February 2014 in article titled "London hospital that saved 668 cyclists: 'Do more to prevent crashes'":

More than 660 critically injured cyclists have been saved by London’s main trauma hospital over the last decade, new research shows.

The Royal London’s full trauma team has been activated for riders 708 times since 2004, with 668 people surviving their injuries, including all five taken there last month.

But experts believe the success at keeping the death toll relatively low — 40 cyclists have died at the hospital in 10 years — is masking a lack of focus on preventing collisions.

I am puzzled why the DoT continues to publish STATS19 data without presenting hospital admission data alongside it. Neither are perfect data sets: both have strengts and weaknesses and are best viewed together. Below are stats for ENGLAND.

2010-11 cycling injuries resulting in emergency admission to hospital bed: Non-collision 11,131, Collision 3,606 Other 1,305

Hospital Episode Statistics

The NHS Information Centre, Hospital Episode Statistics for England. Inpatient statistics. Activity in English NHS Hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector. Please see HESonline [http://www.hesonline.nhs.uk] for more information on data quality.

(These are numbers of people (all ages) admitted to a hospital bed in an emergency following a travel or transport related incident. The numbers exclude people treated as outpatients in emergency departments. Emergency department attendances is included in the polices definition of a serious injury).

2008-09 2009-10 2010-11 2008-11
Pedestrian 8601 8684 8956 +4.1
Pedal cyclist 13668 15592 16042 +17.3
Motorcyclist 9830 10112 9503 -3.4
3-wheeled 297 380 346 +16.4
Car occupants 15888 16289 15152 -4.7
Occupants of heavy transport vehicles, pick up trucks and buses 2568 2655 2638 +2.7
Other (inc. animal riders, unknown and unspecified) 6769 6897 6788 n/c
Water craft 428 546 531 +24.0
Aircraft 208 244 272 +30.7

Two points.

Firstly, the latest data are not just bad news for cycle safety - they are bad news for road safety in general. 2011 saw the first increase in ovreall road fatalities since 2003, and the first rise in serious injuries since 1994.

It is difficult to prove, but my strong hunch is that the Government's earlier rhetoric about "ending the war on the motorist" has a lot to do with this - see http://beta.ctc.org.uk/press-release/2012-06-28/serious-injuries-to-cycl...

Secondly, to respond to Paul M. There is a myth doing the rounds among some bloggers that CTC's 'safety in numbers' campaign (www.ctc.org.uk/safetyinnumbers) was developed in opposition to their own campaigns for segregated infrastructure. There is not a fraction of a nanogram of truth in this - it is a pure bloggers' myth. The argument that cycling gets safer "purely" by increasing numbers, therefore you don't need segregation, would be a stupid argument - and at no point did we EVER make it. It is very boring to have to keep responding to critisism for something we never said.

Roger Geffen
CTC, the national cycling charity

Media is only interested in " Sensationalism and it's Advertising Revenue " so the Motoring Lobby tell it to ignore " Cycling Bad News Issues " and guess what ?
IT DOES !
UNTIL road engineers get back on a bike on a daily basis they will continue to ignore what strikes cyclists in the face each day . Doubt that whilst they sit in traffic , their minds are even ticking over , let alone thinking about how to solve the problems causing their delay ?
Cyclists need to WEEKLY put their bike on the roof of their car and create the chaos , that is needed to remind the " commutter " of the benefits of helping the Cyclists to get the Infrastructure that is needed to ensure " Safety on the Roads "!
UNTIL the Motoring Bodies support " Cycling Infrastructure " Politicians will Voice support and sit on their hands ! They want to be re elected by the Majority not by the minority of Cyclists !

most distressing is that this hasn't exactly grabbed headlines - it seems to have been largely overlooked by the media.

Would be interesting to know how blurred the line is between a serious and minor injury, and whether there's been much change in how they are classified during the period covered by these stats.
Just one more factor that makes these figured inconclusive, I suppose.

I think, as mentioned, it's very hard to infer anything from the data. It does suggest that the rate of injuries has gone up but there are three likely causes for this:

1: the percentage of injuries being reported has gone up
2: the number of miles cycled in 2011 was an underestimate
3: the rate of injuries has actually gone up

It’s probably a combination of all three but I would suggest that 1 is the most likely, followed by 2 and then 3.

That slightly injured list might as well be retitled the frames damaged in minor incidents list.

I do think there is a case for some sort of 'group leader' training. Many clubs are fine, but some look like they are trying to herd wasps with a machine gun. When there are novices spread across the road tootling along, I start to sympathise with irate drivers.

I don't really buy the "safety in numbers" argument. I suppose you could say on anecdotal evidence that more cyclists will mean greater awareness of cyclists and lower likleihood of them not being noticed by drivers, but the statistics don't prove that one way or another.

Strikes me that CTC was grasping at straws in arguing safety in numbers, due to their well known antipathy to real engineering interventions, presumably out of fear that their main membership of keen-as-mustard cycle tourers, time triallists and sportivers would be told they can't use the roads anymore.

Occasionally you see references to critical mass (there is at least one above) and I wonder whether safety in numbers is a forlorn attempt to make the CM theory apply to an evolutionary situation.

The CM theory is that cycle safety improves once you reach critical mass. That is a cliff-edge proposition - things continue much as before until a certain point at which a radical change occurs - and it doesn't explain how you persuade people to get out there in increasing numbers before the cliff-edge is reached.

Critical mass is however a theory provable in practice, not just in what happens when the ride goes out every last Friday. You probably have to be middle-aged to remember this, but there was a time when the hordes of workers exiting a factory or shipyard on their bikes formed a veritable tsunami, which no motor vehicle could withstand. This used to be a common site outside the naval dockyards at Portsmouth and Devonport, places where car parking had historically not been provided (Nelson had never seen a car, remember), residential areas around about were densely built and car use was simply not practical. The last time I personally saw anything like this was 22 December 1988, a date you cannot forget as it was the day after Lockerbie, at the Vickers trident submarine construction yard at Barrow in Furness.

I wonder if some of the increase can be attributed to greater numbers of inexperienced cyclists? It's almost impossible to measure accurately but my experience says that the roads have not got any worse however the average standard of cycling has dropped.

Don't take this as an endorsement for more training - I think we are already doing enough on that front - more an indication of the unreasonably high level of skill and experience required to ride safely on our roads.

"But while the figures do suggest that a serious incident is slightly less likely now to result in the death of the cyclist, the fact remains that such incidents appear to be increasing at an alarming rate, up 14 per cent over the 2004-09 average,."

So it's the level of medical care that is saving lives - rather than anything motorists or cyclists are doing to improve the KSI figures.

It's a shame that the rise in KSI rates is in tandem with the rise in numbers cycling. I imagine onc cycling reaches critical mass it gets safer. Interesting to compare again with Holland and Denmark. Not at a national level but comparing two similar sized cities such as, off the top of my head, Cambridge and Copehhagen.

Can you re-format the tables in this article - the ads on the right hand side are overlapping the columns of numbers.