How safe is your nearest town/city?

[mjr]

So... I was just comparing two towns on www.cyclestreets.net/collisions/ and one looked like it had a much higher density of collision pins than the other, so I checking by using the draw-an-area tool, and refining it to get key cyclist-involved collisions numbers and I was quite surprised by the difference:

Town A - Population 46,000 (2011 census at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html ) - 21.5% cycling (DfT table CW0111a but for the district containing it) = 9890 cyclists - 139 injuries including 3 serious and 0 fatal.

Town B - Population 28,700 - 18.5% cycling = 5310 cyclists - 122 injuries including 12 serious and 1 fatal.

So B is a much smaller town, almost as many injuries and many more KSIs. So what's good and bad here?

England (sorry but the stats are fragmented) - Population 53,012,456 - 15% cycling = 7951868 cyclists - 160k slight, 24k serious, 1k fatal (rounding because my tracing the border wasn't perfect). So I think it averages out to about 200 injuries per 10,000 cycling population, including 30 serious and 1 or 2 fatal... and Town B is slightly high on both total and fatal but slightly low for serious, while Town A seems much safer than average.

Could you check where you think are good and bad towns/cities and post what you find, especially if you find particularly good or bad rates? Any guesses at why they're like that would be interesting, too.

 

[marknotgeorge]

Numbers I've got from my amateurish shape drawing, and filtering only by selecting 'Yes' in the cyclist-involved box:

Derby (Derby City Council) - 2011 population 248,000: 1016.
16.3% in DCC cycle at least once per month = 40424 cyclists.
25.13 incidents per 1000 cyclists.

Burton on Trent (part of East Staffordshire Borough Council) - 2011 population 72,299: 261.
14.6% in ESBC cycle at least once per month = 10555 cyclists.
24.72 incidents per 1000 cyclists.

Countrywide (per your figures above) work out at about 23.2 incidents of all types per 1000 cyclists.

Much of a muchness really, especially when you consider that ESBC also includes Uttoxeter, and my area of Burton might include parts of South Derbyshire. I would say that the cycling provision in Derby is much more overt than in Burton, and possibly of better quality - Burton has some pathetic schemes such as painting cycle lanes on a road (Wetmore Road) that is barely wide enough for two traffic lanes. Both my areas are higher than the countrywide figure, but I suspect this is because they're relatively large urban areas.

 

[srw]

I suspect that Town A and Town B differ in the KSI stakes only by statistical uncertainty - in this sort of analysis there will always be much more varation than anyone expects intuitively.

And without looking at the data I suspect these are 10-year datasets. The annual "K" rate for cyclists nationally is about 100 - which includes those people who died of natural causes while on the road, those people who died while cycling off-road and those people who died in an incident not involving any other vehicle.