Who, where, when: the demographic and geographic distribution of bicycle crashes in West Yorkshire

Abstract

Factors associated with cycle safety, including international differences in injury and mortality rates, protective equipment and bicycle training, have been subject to increasing academic interest. Environmental variables associated with cycle safety have also been scrutinised, but few studies have focussed on geographical factors at the local level. This paper addresses this research gap by analysing a geo-referenced dataset of road traffic incidents, taken from the UK's STATS19 dataset (2005 -2012). We investigate incidents involving cyclists within West Yorkshire. This is an interesting case study area as it has an historically low cycling rate but very ambitions cycling plans following investment from the Department of Transport. West Yorkshire is found to be an unusually risky area for cyclists, with an estimated 53 deaths and 1372 serious injuries per billion kilometres cycled, based on census commuting statistics. This is roughly double the national average. This riskiness varies spatially and temporally, broadly in line with expectations from the previous literature. An unexpected result was that cycling seems to be disproportionately risky for young people in West Yorkshire compared with young people nationally. The case study raises the issue of potential negative health impacts of promoting cycling amongst vulnerable groups in dangerous areas. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for increasing cycling uptake via measures designed primarily to improve safety. The analysis underlying this research is reproducible, based on code stored at github.com/Robinlovelace/bikeR.

Patterns of Traffic Accidents Among Elderly Pedestrians in Sweden

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Are e-bikes changing the social representation of cycling? An exploration of articles on cycling in Italian online publications

“…Cultural and symbolic factors (e.g., Aldred and Jungnickel 2014; Lourontzi and Petachti 2017) affect the variability of mobility choices across and within countries in critical ways (e.g., Jensen 2009;Murtagh, Gatersleben, and Uzzel 2012). Various authors agree that it would be of paramount importance for planners to understand the social and cultural differences in how bicycles are perceived because: they are closely related to differences in people's needs and preferences (e.g., B€ orjesson and Eliasson 2012; Lusk 2019; Lusk, Ferreira da Silva Filho, and Dobbert 2018); and they may have important implications for an individual's choice of mobility style (e.g., Daley and Rissel 2011), as well as for the related safety and security issues (e.g., Alveano-Aguerrebere et al 2017;Lovelace, Roberts, and Kellar 2016).…”

Türkiye’deki Bisiklet Kullanıcılarının Trafikte Görünürlükleri ve Renk Değişkeninin Bu Bağlamda İncelenmesi

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