The fatality data does show a huge 40% increase in cyclist deaths. Over a third of these happened in the ‘lockdown months’ of April – June when we saw the biggest rise in cycling, which was associated with quieter roads and largely fair weather. When the 45.7% increase in cycling is taken into consideration however this means that ‘cycling became 14% safer’. A similar picture can be seen for good vehicles which didn’t see a very large drop in miles travelled (-9.1% for light goods, -5.7% for heavy goods) whereas there was a reduction on good vehicle casualties (the drivers predominantly) of 18.2%.
But hold on, aren’t we missing something here? Are we really saying that the only thing impacting on cyclist and HGV deaths are the miles travelled by that specific mode? If there are more people cycling on the roads but there are fewer vehicles, surely we would expect the numbers not to rise just based on the traffic associated with that mode? Cyclists do injure themselves of course but predominantly they are killed in collisions involving a motor vehicle. Evidence from the PACTS ‘
What Kills Most on the Roads’ report from last year, to which we contributed, shows that only 14% of pedal cyclist deaths in 2019 didn’t involve another vehicle. Does this mean that we should only allocate a 14% weighting to the cyclist traffic figure? Well, that doesn’t seem quite right either and we probably do need to wait for the more detailed results to be published so we can understand the circumstances of those 140 tragic deaths in more detail.
The same can be said for age-group analysis too. We saw larger reductions in fatalities for older drivers, almost certainly due to reduced exposure as a result of self-quarantine for much of the year. It could be that there are a large number of explanations for the reductions we have seen and perhaps these all outweigh the effects of reduced traffic. Even though we would normally want to celebrate such a significant reduction in road deaths it seems far too soon to be certain that our roads are actually any safer at all.