New survey finds safety in numbers helps protect cyclists
Posted on in Cycles News
A pioneering study into the risks of cycling in London reveals that "safety in numbers" protects riders from injury.
Dr Rachel Aldred, a transport expert at the University of Westminster, who led the research, said: "A street with 1,000 cyclists per day is 13 per cent safer than one with 500 cyclists per day."
Two-thirds of injuries occur on A-roads in London but the researchers sought to establish for the first time if this was because they were more dangerous or simply used by more cyclists. Previous studies have tended to focus on locations where most crashes occur, typically at junctions and roundabouts.
The new research is thought to be the first to assess a cyclist's "exposure" to danger in the capital, by combining Met police casualty statistics with Transport for London cycle flow data.
Dr Aldred told the Evening Standard: "Just because most cycling injuries take place on main roads, that doesn't necessarily tell you that main roads are more dangerous.
"One of the things you can take from the paper is that if you get more people to generate more cycling trips, it should create a ‘safety in numbers' effect. If you get more cyclists that seems to keep people safer."
Cycling accounts for about two per cent of journeys in London but cyclists are over-represented in casualty figures by about eight times.
The number of cyclists killed or seriously injured rose 17 per cent in 2016, in the most recent Transport for London statistics. There were eight deaths, 446 serious injuries and 3,970 slight injuries reported.
The research, which also involved academics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College and Cambridge University, found a "clear reduction in injury odds" of 17 per cent in 20mph zones, compared with 30mph roads.
It found that while a quarter of cycling in London is on streets with fewer than 2,000 vehicles a day, only one in seven cyclist injuries occurred on these streets. There was strong backing for "mini-Holland" schemes - in boroughs such as Waltham Forest, Enfield and Kingston - that block off residential roads to "rat-running" motorists while making them safer for pedestrians and cyclists.