Many people seem to think that cycling in this country is a particularly dangerous thing to do. They may not know that the UK has almost the lowest death rates for car drivers worldwide, so everything else is bound to be higher, as Jenny Mindell explores.
Cycle deaths are so rare that they are given a israel rcs data lot of media coverage. Most people are surprised to learn that on average there are still five people killed on the roads in Great Britain every day. Most of these casualties are car users (46%), pedestrians (25%) or motorcyclists (18%).
But as users of the UK Data Service will understand, what we need to make fair comparisons are rates, not numbers: we need to put the number of people killed (or injured) into context.
But how can we do that?
A UK Minister of Transport famously stated that cycling is much safer here than in The Netherlands; he cited death rates per 1000 population. That of course ignores the fact that cycling accounts for about 2% of commuting trips in the UK but about 25% in the Netherlands!
Colleagues and I have now published four papers where we used the National Travel Survey as the ‘denominator’, the exposure data for which we calculated the death rates.