Rising cycling casualties: policy needs to catch up, and fast

We had new statistics on road casualties in 2011 at both national and London level yesterday, and in both cases the figures on cycling make for grim reading. The number of cyclists killed or seriously injured increased from 2010 levels by 15% nationally and by an even worse 22% in London. As the chart below shows, fatal or serious cycle casualties in London are down over the long term but up sharply in recent years.

Naturally people are interested in what this means for the rate of cycling casualties per trip or mile cycled. Some other DfT figures released yesterday indicate that miles cycled nationwide rose by only 2%, which implies a large increase in the casualty rate (see road.cc's number crunching). TfL will probably not release statistics on cycle trips in 2011 until their next Travel in London report (probably just after Christmas) but I don't think anyone seriously expects cycling to have grown more than 22% in a single year.

And anyway, even if I'm wrong and cycling levels were up by more than 22%, would that make such a large increase in the absolute number of casualties okay? To illustrate the point, say the number of trips cycled in London grew by 25% each year for five years and the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured by 20%. Going by TfL's figures for 2010 from this report and assuming everything else stayed the same, then by 2015 we'd have 1.5m cycling trips a day, a modal share of 6%, a lower cycling casualty rate BUT over 1,000 cyclists killed or seriously injured a year. Should that really be considered a success? 

Of course that's a slightly unrealistic scenario, but the point is that cycling casualties are rising at an alarming rate, in part because more and more people are choosing to cycle (for whatever reason). We all like to see cycling growing, but if it is not to result in truly horrific numbers of deaths and injuries then we need a complete transformation in cycling conditions in this city. 

Fortunately there is, on the face of it, a political consensus around this issue, as in the run-up to the 2012 mayoral election every major candidate endorsed the London Cycling Campaign's 'Go Dutch' manifesto, which entails dropping our current approach to road design and embracing the Dutch ethos, including high-quality segregated cycle lanes on busy main roads. So really there should be no debate about the general principle of what do do, just about the details of how to do it. I hope the forthcoming London Assembly transport committee inquiry into cycle safety adopts this approach.

Of course Transport for London and various individual politicians will say that it can't be done in London because we don't have the space on our roads. But I think these latest casualty figures show that we have no choice but to make the space. To turn the old slogan on its head, we haven't built the infrastructure but the cyclists are coming anway, and as a result they're getting killed or injured in greater and greater numbers. They have forced the issue, and policy has to catch up.

Despite what I said before, maybe cycling casualty rates aren't strictly comparable between Britain and the Netherlands. How about fatality rates then?

Back in April I posted an analysis of fatal and serious casualty rates for cyclists in Britain and the Netherlands, which reached the eye-catching conclusion that "just over 500 British cyclists are killed or seriously injured in collisions with motor vehicles for every billion km cycled, over eight times the rate in the Netherlands". I used data from the British Department for Transport and the Dutch road safety institute SWOV, but as a couple of commenters pointed out these do not in fact seem to use completely consistent definitions of what constitutes a 'serious' injury, so the comparison might be misleading. For example, snigbo said,

On comparing serious injuries: as discussed in DfT rrcgb2010-6.pdf, GB "serious" includes all admissions to hospitals, many of whom will have a MAIS score of 1. Table 11 suggests that 28% of hospital-admitted cyclists were MAIS 1, so reducing the GB number by that amount would be appropriate.

There is also the problem that for both countries the casualty figures are based on what is reported to police, and there may be differential rates of under-reporting, particularly for incidents not involving motor vehicles.

These are valid concerns, so I've updated that post with a health warning over the data. I'm grateful to the commenters for pointing these issues out, and I apologise if anyone was misled.

Can we then make any useful comparisons between the two countries? Well, it may be tempting fate to go back to the same data sources, but as was also pointed out the data on fatality rates should in principle be more comparable. After all, a fatality is a fatality wherever you are, and you would also expect minimal problems of under-reporting.

The problem here is that the SWOV data on contributory factors in cycling fatalities includes a large number (a majority, in fact) of cases described as 'Not matched', i.e. they don't say whether a motor vehicle was involved or not [Update: Note, this doesn't affect the total fatality rate, which is known - it's just that not every case is allocated to a particular type of incident]. You can just exclude all these unmatched cases and look only at the breakdown of the remainder, which is what I have done in the chart below. Having been burned before I would be cautious about putting too much weight on the results, mainly because of the large number of 'not matched' cases in the Netherlands data, but they do at least seem to be telling a similar story to the previous data, i.e. that the relative risk posed by motor vehicles to cyclists is higher in Britain than in the Netherlands.