Stats reveal London's deadly cycling zone… if you're a woman

When you look for patterns, you find them.

I live right in the centre of that circle.

Great stat capture by Adrian. This is the nexus of the main freight routes out of London to west and north. So the more chauvinistic driving styles when dealing with women cyclists can be explained. Particularly vicious is the left turn west towards Hammersmith and Heathrow at the north end of Vauxhall Bridge. Here, drivers worry more about freight and check-in deadlines than human lives.

Disappointing to see Southwark Council arguing for a narrowing of Cycle Superhighway Route 5 along the A202, to accommodate wider pavements as part of TfL town centre plan for Camberwell. The Council's RevitaliSE5 team refused to acknowledge there were potential lessons in road space allocation to cyclists from the Walworth Road regeneration, which is now widely regarded as a more hazardous cycling experience than previously. It is the A202 which leads up to Vauxhall Bridge. Southwark Council also elevated freight vehicles in road prioritisation in its Transport Plan 2011, which doesn't help stem the flow of blood.

Would be good to see full KSI stats for this kill zone to confirm the trend.

@austen.croydonc

What do you suggest? Make women ride more like men?

Just read Mersey Travels study into increasing cycle use. 123 pages with no mention of improving cycle routes. I can't fault Mersey Travel's interest in the subject but there is no point in training target adults to cycle and give them bikes if the routes into central Liverpool - like do many other UK cities - are developed so poorly if at all.

The councils concerned – looks like City of Westminster, City of London, Islington and Camden – and Transport for London, are all bound by the Public Sector Equality Duty.

Part of the Equality Act 2010, they are obliged to have due regard to the need to, amongst other things, “Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not”. A “protected characteristic” is legalese for things like gender, ethnicity and disability.

Since significantly more women cyclists are being killed than men, then something is clearly going wrong – and should be addressed as a matter of urgency.

I ventured, with some trepidation, into the circle of death from the its eastern sector yesterday evening at seven o'clock. I was on foot, it was dark. A little murky. It was cold. And I believe I may have stumbled on another reason why so many cycling accidents occur in this benighted and treacherous part of the world: NO LIGHTS ON ONE IN THREE OF THE BIKES. Not totally scientific, I grant you, but I reckon the sample must have been around fifty bikes in ten minutes, and there were more than fifteen with either no front light or no back light, or neither front nor back lights. I think statisticians would deem that a reliable survey. Were this a debate about wearing helmets, some would say that it's just natural selection.

@MattS - genius. Venture east of Tower Bridge on the south side and you'll see the Bermondsey Death Star.

Agreed, this sounds like clustering co-incidence, particularly as the area was carefully and manually selected.

When you manually filter large enough data sets, you tend to end up getting whatever the person(s) doing the filtering wants to see.

Not sure the circle really means anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

But the ratio of male_deaths:female_deaths compared to the ratio of male_miles:female_miles would be interesting to me.

Does anyone have figures for total cycling miles split by gender in the city?

I'm not sure that the massive over-analysis (as alluded to by Matt_S) is actually helpful.

You end up not being able to see the wood for the trees. Analyse enough circles, squares, triangles or whatever and you could probably write a thesis on geometry but it won't help with the central tenet of road safety in London.

Let's face it the ladies are generally (not always) less assertive; but there are blokes who aren't experienced and less assettive too. Thos who aren't assertive, don't insist on going to the front of the traffic queue at junctions and lights. If there are large trucks buses turning left and you haven't pulled in front of them as our Advance Stop Lines (ASLs) enable us to do, you will be placed in the danger zone, and this is where most fo the fatalities have aoccured.

Remember if we don't have the inside filter and these ASLs and boxes (and we don't in many areas) approaching a junction or stop line is much more dangerous.

I travel at at average of 30kph and DO take the lane where necessary (Lower Thames underpass for example) and it works with everyone except black cabs, and the odd minicab, who think that we shouldn't take up their roadspace , so they try and scrape past your elbow - frightening at any speed let alone 30mph.

Curbed cycle lanes are not ideal for all the reasons mentioned above.

If people respected each other on the road - we would have very little of the issues that we have today. When not in vehicles people generally respect each other (walking along the pavement for example) much more. In the little (or large) metal box, the world becomes somehow unreal.

I've had a BRILLIANT idea. We need a public education campaign with a great tagline based on Nicola Adams and something about 'left-hook'.

Appeal to the womenfolk (by using one of their own) and make them aware that being left-hooked is a BAD thing.

"What the fook?
Mind my left-hook!"

(Far better than that).

Holy crap, did nobody notice the Bow Church Male Death Cross?

Quote:

I have very mixed feelings about segregated cycle lanes. They often dump you back out in to the traffic at the worst moment - right on a junction...

Nobody wants cycle lanes like this, but that doesn't mean we can't try and push for good quality ones.

If cycling safely requires assertiveness and "taking the lane" to be safe, its always going to be a minority activity for the fitter more confident people only.

Personally, I'd rather cycling was available to everyone and I don't think the solution to that is to make everyone dress up in high-viz, helmets and follow "Cyclecraft", then blame them when they don't. Its great advice on how to deal with the current awful infrastructure and road layout, but it is not a blueprint for how to create a nice cycling environment for most of the population.

I notice the box contains some for the worst junctions (eg Holborn, Aldwych, Tottingham Court Road) and roads (eg New Oxford St, Euston Rd, Kingsway) and for cyclist in central London.
Also there are many roads that are multi lane one-way which become race tracks for Taxis and cars between the lights.
It's not a pleasnt area to cycle through.

As so many of these roads are so wide, there is ample space for a segregated 2m wide cycle lane along them.

Well done on the thoughtful analysis of the raw data. Too often stats like this lead to knee-jerk conclusions, e.g. "Ban women from riding bikes within that circle".

How much of this relates to traffic light advance stop boxes with filter-up-the-inside lanes? One of the most dangerous aspects of 'cycle infrastructure' in any city imo. I never use them due to the danger of being caught out before reaching the box as the lights turn.

It's possible that male cyclists ride more assertively and are more likely to take the lane - I have noticed on my ride in that most of the male cyclists I see are on road/FGSS bikes and ride assertively, while many female cyclists seem less confident in their road positioning, but I think there is an issue with how some drivers respond to male vs female cyclists.

I ride a Dutch-style bike, but I'm not slow - I'm fit and can keep up a good speed. However, many drivers push past me and seem to assume that I'm not travelling that fast, because I'm a woman on a 'granny bike'. All too often I am forced to slow down rapidly because a driver has misjudged our relative speeds, and I think partly this is due to assumptions about how fast I'm going based on what bike I'm riding (it happens less when I ride my touring bike).

When I ride, I'm confident, assertive, and I stay the heck away from HGVs. But you can't control how drivers think or behave, and without better provision on our roads, we're going to keep seeing these problems.

Not convinced the female-only element is particularly significant. If I expand and move the circle just a smidge, I could bring in 5 males.

I'd say more interesting is the fact that across the entire area, the split is roughly equal. Anyone know the male/female split of cyclists in London?

I work slap bang in the centre of this 'death zone'. I am a passionate cyclist and regular cycle commuter myself, an LCC/BC/CTC member etc. I see terrible, aggressive driving on a daily basis but plenty of terrible cycling too - pavements, wrong way down one way streets, skipping lights, allowing themselves to be bullied into the gutter, glamour girls on Pashleys without helmets riding la-la style down the middle of the road, the works. I also walk through Bloomsbury most days and see the Utopian situation of segregated cycle lanes in that area. The more reports I read like this, the more I think segregated cycle lanes are the only way forward in all our cities. Some cyclists and drivers will just never learn so we should just do everything we can to keep the two factions apart. Obviously reverse-engineering modern cycle infrastructure into a city as busy and complex as London is no mean feat but I'm struggling to see other options right now.