Originally Posted by
Pete Fagerlin
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Given the reporting methods and the difficulty in capturing data like "their exposure time to interaction with motor vehicle traffic" I would be interested to know how anyone can make a definitive statement one way or another about bicycle safety trends.
Yeah, grains of salt, grains of salt.
I sometimes think about the fatality numbers, which is admittedly lame. If anyone really cares about this they should know that these numbers appear to be going up again, for the past few years (final count on 2006 is not yet available), so any proclamations of a continued downward trend are premature. But what you say is true -- nobody can really make any definitive statements about bicycle safety trends with these statistics anyway, because available numbers on total numbers of cyclists, miles traveled, hours ridden, etc. are so spotty, so wildly divergent, in some instances so downright ridiculous that the whole business is a non-starter.
That said, there is some important info that is available from which we can make some more educated guesses about what might be goin on. For instance, we can see that the ratio of kids to adults among victims dropped dramatically as the fatality numbers fell. (1-in-3 in '98 to 1-in-5 in '04 (DOT), while number of adult victims was fairly steady.) Perhaps what we are seeing is simply a change in culture, with kids not riding bikes as much as they used to.
Robert