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Bikes and pedestrians (CC licensed image by samsaundersleeds:Flickr)Are drivers and cyclists just as dangerous to pedestrians?
Cyclists are just as dangerous to pedestrians as drivers. That’s the claim made by an article on The Times website today.
According to transport correspondent Phillip Pank, analysis of the 2012 road accident figures published by the Department for Transport reveals: “When serious injuries are measured as a proportion of distance travelled, cyclists injured 21 pedestrians per billion km travelled in 2012 compared with 24 pedestrians injured by drivers.”
To steal a phrase from debunker of Bad Science Ben Goldacre, we think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that.
What you really want to know here is how much of a risk different road users pose to pedestrians. It could be therefore misleading to take as your starting point the distances travelled by the those road users. You want the distances travelled by pedestrians.
road.cc doesn’t have an in-house statistician (applications are open, but be warned: the pay is lousy), so no doubt there are serious flaws in what follows and we expect smarter people than us to point them out in the comments.
The national travel survey says the average person travelled 6,691 miles in 2012. There 60 million people in the UK, so that's just over 400 billion miles.
Of that distance, 3 percent is walked so that's 12 billion miles of walking. For the sake of argument, let’s say that half of that is in the kind of urban environments The Times is talking about.
That’s 6 billion miles of walking which would get you out to Pluto’s orbit, if the frigid outer reaches of the solar system are your thing.
There were 79 pedestrians killed or seriously injured (KSI) by bikes in urban areas in 2012, so that’s one KSI per 75 million miles walked.
By contrast, there were 4,679 pedestrian KSIs involving motor vehicles - one KSI per 1.25 million miles walked.
That means for every mile you walk, you are 60 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a driver than a cyclist.
Another criticism of The Times’ analysis, and one that the paper touches on, is that the injuries sustained by pedestrians who are hit by cyclists are likely to be less severe than injuries to those who are hit by drivers.
The DfT’s classification of serious injury is:
Serious injury: An injury for which a person is detained in hospital as an “in-patient”, or any of the following injuries whether or not they are detained in hospital: fractures, concussion, internal injuries, crushings, burns (excluding friction burns), severe cuts, severe general shock requiring medical treatment and injuries causing death 30 or more days after the accident.
An injured casualty is recorded as seriously or slightly injured by the police on the basis of information available within a short time of the accident. This generally will not reflect the results of a medical examination, but may be influenced according to whether the casualty is hospitalised or not. Hospitalisation procedures will vary regionally.
So a broken collarbone or mild concussion comes under the same heading as multiple broken bones and severe brain damage.
On the basis of its pedestrian-injuries-per-billion-vehicle-miles analysis, The Times concedes that “drivers are five times more likely than cyclists to kill a pedestrian.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that they are also far more likely to inflict the most severe injuries.
After all, what would you rather be hit by, a Mondeo doing 30mph, or a skinny cyclist doing 20mph?
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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Another old chestnut. Having dragged myself through the statistics on this over a number of years, I have to say:
1. A tiny proportion of pedestrian KSIs involve cyclists. When walking you are far, far, far more likely to be hospitalised (let alone killed) in a collision involving a cyclist than a motorist.
2. When you bear in mind that there are far more motorists than cyclists and try to compare the chances of a pedestrian being hit by a cyclist per cyclist mile as compared to being hit by a motorist per motorist mile. (Of course , as one of the posters above points out, maybe as a pedestrian you are not really interested in that, but let's proceed anyway.) Even here as a cyclist you are much less likely to be involved in a collision where a pedestrian becomes a KSI statistic than you are if you are a motorist.
3. One of the reasons why the differential in 2 above is only 2 - 6 times (depending on annual variations in figures etc., etc.) is because pedestrians tend to be far less careful re-cyclist traffic than motor traffic, as pedestrians are less careful of cars/lorries etc. than cyclists - if you drive and cycle compare pedestrian behaviour to yourself. So the threat posed to pedestrians by cyclists compared to motorists goes down again.
4. Unlike Germany, Japan, and the USA, pedestrians cannot be prosecuted under the criminal law for careless behaviour - yet the can endanger cyclists (often just as much as cyclists can endanger pedestrians).
5. I am against this, but the Highway Code does recommend that pedestrians wear hi-viz. But not helmets. Yet.
F= MxA
Motor vehicle always has more M and will often be travelling faster thus creating more A when it strikes the walker.
As Scottie says........
Lies, damned lies, and statistics, etc.
How about we stop blaming others and start taking responsibility for ourselves and for others, when we're driving, when we're cycling, when we're walking.
Another nail in the coffin of the pro-cycling Times, whose pro-cycling stance pretty much withered on the vine almost as soon as new editor John Witherow took over from James Harding last year.
Further evidence of institutional anti-cyclist bias (as if any was really needed) is in the following two sentences:
"Analysis of the past ten years of road casualty data by CTC showed that cyclists killed 23 pedestrians in the decade to 2012 and seriously injured 585. In the same period, 3,330 pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles and 46,081 were seriously injured."
Here, 'cyclists' are active killers and 'motor vehicles' - and not their drivers - somehow managed to kill 144 times as many pedestrians as the 'bikes' did.
Same lazy thinking, same lazy journalism as we're used to.
I think that's an excellent point.
The way drivers are erased from the picture and cars treated as if they are some sort of force of nature (like hurricanes, say), while cyclists are treated as moral agents with responsibility, seems very revealing of the way bias can be so deep that the biased party isn't even consciously aware of it.
I have been hit by a skinny cyclists most likely doing more than 20mph, in Richmond Park a few years ago, I was standing by my bike putting my coat away, and some one from a well known club inspite of clear visibility and rode into my leg.
I'm reasonably tall and athletic build he was somewhat shorter and slight, so I got moved along by the impact but remained standing, he went over the bars landing hard on his back cracking the rim of the front wheel (dura ace) in a few places and taking a few chunks out of the frame.
I did have a bruise and limp for a few weeks, I suspect he took rather longer to recover!
Point of the tale being cyclists often come off worse vs if they collide with someone.
What about the difference in the number of pedestrian miles covered on shared used cyclist/pedestrian paths compared to the number of miles covered on shared car/pedestrian road (eg road with no pavement). I think there is a big difference?
As others have said, the choice of an exceptionally broad category of "serious injuries" grossly misrepresents the facts. Deaths would at least be a clearer-cut issue but perhaps that doesn't suit the journalist's agenda.
Abuse of statistics to sell papers isn't really anything new though.
Don't believe what you read without thinking about it carefully. The classic is "doing x doubles your chance of dying from y". When actually whether or not you do x, you are extraordinarly unlikely to die of y. In fact doing x could even drastically reduce your risk of dying of z.
In the north east the difference in the figures would be massive as we get very few reported collisions between cyclists and pedestrians whereas there seems to be a lot more numptie cyclists and car drivers in London who all seem to be in a hurry.
Is that a sign of a capital city where everything seems to be at a greater pace or is it that people in the north east are more careful ?????? I honestly dont know.
I wonder if someone had the figures in London to hand ?
I think many statistics presented as national would be much more useful broken down between London and everywhere else, the disparity between the two in so many things you might want to measure and cook up stats for being so great as to make lumping the two sets of data together as good as meaningless.
Stumps - pretty sure it's to do with concentration of people and traffic density , there's no shortage of numpties - as you well know - but maybe there's more space and less likelihood of numpties conflict. Newcastle, for example, does not even come close to London or some other medium / big cities by for the number of riders on the road. This kind of data is almost certainly skewed by big clusters like that so it doesn't make a lot of sense to present it averaged out nationally.
That sounds a lot like drivers who says bikes shouldn't get in their way and shouldn't be on the roads.
Forget KSI's, what about straight deaths?
About one ped is killed by a cyclist every two years. In comparrison 8 are killed by Bees and 12 by their own bedding.
So you're 24 times more likeley to be killed by your pillow than a cyclist. I suggest all wear hi-viz and a helmet to bed from now on.
Most days I have to take evasive action around 3-5 pedestrians when cycling, at weekends maybe 1 pedestrian for every other journey by car. It's mainly a case of pedestrians taking the threat of a car more seriously. If pedestrians paid the same attention to me when driving at 30MPH as they do me to when I am cycling I would probably kill at least one pedestrian per week and on occasion a large group at Vauxhall Cross.
65% of traffic volume was on motorways. Assuming pedestrians were not injured in these roads, the figure of 24 becomes 37
65% of traffic volume was on motorways. Assuming pedestrians were not injured in these roads, the figure of 24 becomes 37
I think this point deserves more attention, because, as you essentially say, _if_ that 65% figure is correct then the stats as presented by the Times are badly flawed, to the point of being dishonest.
You can't compare the two if 2/3 of the distance travelled by one group is on a highway where pedestrian collisions are impossible due to there being no pedestrians to collide with due to them being barred by law.
Its nonsense-on-stilts to compare the raw figures like that, you have to at least start with confining it to travel on roads where pedestrians are legally allowed.
In fact the underlying issue goes beyond motorways - doing it by 'distance travelled' across the whole country gives hugely inflated weighting to long inter-city journeys along roads where there _are_ no pedestrians - and those journeys are precisely the ones far more likely to be taken by car.
Seems like the usual poor journalism we get in this country whenever any story involves statistics, science, or logical thinking. Why do professional journalists (at least any of them not called Ben Goldacre or Tim Harford) have such trouble with these topics? No wonder we do badly in those international tests.
(This is all assuming the data is as the Times describes, simple 'KSI per billion miles travelled' and have not in fact only about urban areas or something)
I guess what you need is some sort of 'proportion of all close interactions with pedestrians that end badly for the vulnerable party'. Per billion miles travelled is the wrong metric to use.
Serious injuries as a proportion of distance travelled is not a relevant safety statistic.
Lets look at another irrelevant safety statistic. Lets compare number of pedestrian casualties in urban areas vs motorways, which would show you that statistically the safest place to walk is on the motorway.
Exactly who cares how far the car/bike has travelled before it hits them?
It's weight, speed & required pedestrian safety features are more important!
I'm willing to bet a fair portion of pedistrians injured by cyclists was either from cyclists braking the law, or pedestrians walking accross the road without looking.
The classic 'I can't hear anything so nobody is there'.
And this is a newspaper that was once supportive of cycling or they have moved on to the next bandwagon?
Yep. Is that poor girl still in a coma? Last year's news it seems.
Not a clue tbh, last I read about her was she is : (
I hope she comes around.
"After all, what would you rather be hit by, a Mondeo doing 30mph, or a skinny cyclist doing 20mph?"
I recently posted the basic physics on this. And it's at a scale that is staggering.
The calculation is this (Mass X Velocity Squared) over 2.
Let's take a 13 odd stone cyclist on commuter bike. (Not a skinny one.) That's roughly 100kg of mass. Let's say he/she is going at a decent clip I'll use 22mph because that equates to a nice round 10 metres per second.
100 x 10 squared /2 = 5000 joules of energy impact.
Remember 5000.
Ok let's take a little car A smart car say weighing 750kg and a passenger (small one) let's call that 800kg. Now let's do that equation again.
800 x 10 squared / 2 = 40,000 joules of energy impact.
8 times more impact energy. If the car is doing 44mph you can make that 160,000 joules or 32 times the impact.
and that's a small car at the same speed as a cyclist. Make it a range rover with 4 passengers in and you have 500,000 joules or 100 times the impact energy.
We don't even consider the fact that a cyclist hitting a pedestrian is soft tissue and bone hitting soft tissue and bone thereby mitigating the force of impact (cos the cyclist gets half).
And then consider the fact that a cyclist 100kg travelling at 22mph will stop much quicker and avoid impact more easily than 800kg or 2500kg at the same speed (or double in some cases).
The Times could have done these calculation. If they had they would realise that they were talking tosh.
Or they could just have looked at the road casualty statistics and seen that it's not cyclist doing the killing and injuring out there.
Whatever happened to common sense and O Level physics anyway?
Sigh. So how many people were killed by cyclists in 2013? And how many by cars in the same year? I don't think the figures are even comparable (but cba to look them up - i'm sure soneone else will).
pedestrians should pay road tax and stop walking red lights
As far as damage from cars and bikes, oozaveared of this parish did a cracking job http://road.cc/users/oozaveared
http://road.cc/comment/reply/108884/224309
Also, regarding mode of travel versus miles versus KSI rates. The space shuttle was considered very dangerous per 'commute' but exceptionally safe by KSI per billion miles travelled
"After all, what would you rather be hit by, a Mondeo doing 30mph, or a skinny cyclist doing 20mph?"
neither personnally... I would hope the infrastructure kept the lemmings out of the road and off cyclepaths.
It would help themselves immensely if the lemmings stopped wandering out into the road with their head immersed in their mobile phone display and their ears blocked by their ear-buds blasting mindless pap into their ears to drone out the traffic noises... Also some idiots are out there wearing noise-cancelling headphones!!!! so they'll never hear your warning.
Just an example of using numbers to deliberately confuse the reader and make the headline only stand out. Where anyone mixes statistical format (mixing percentages and fractions) I tend to dismiss the whole article as its clearly not written with any expertise
And then the last 3 paragraphs are added in for click back purposes
We are truly doomed
> After all, what would you rather be hit by, a Mondeo doing 30mph, or a skinny cyclist doing 20mph?
In itself that's a pretty misleading question. IIRC most car accidents occur well below 30mph, many below 20mph, as the motorist involved had his/her foot on the brake pedal before the collision.
It's worth mentioning that some of the newest cars have given much thought to pedestrian collisions. Bonnets are designed not to intrude into the engine bay (no nasty pokey things hitting your head through the bonnet), bumpers are soft and deformable; Volvo even has an external airbag for just such a collision.
Which would I rather be hit by? Neither. Both are going to be very painful.
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