BBC news online today.
But what's the difference in the number of people cycling since 2009? A figure of 7% is kind of meaningless without knowing otherwise as it can represent an overall increase or decrease or, in fact, no change at all.
You brought in the percentages, don't try and shift it to individual instances when your argument falls apart.
I not sure what the original point of the thread was, but I think some people are now trying to determine if you are more or less likely to die whilst cycling on roads today than you were two years ago.
0.5% increase. I think your argument fails if you think it depends on usage or do you think that we would be putting up with 40,000 motorists deaths in a year (take the late 1960's death rate and multiply it up by increase in car use). Everybody thinks that there has been a massive increase in cycling throughout the uk but in most areas this is not true. Until we have some public outrage about the number of deaths there won't be a change in attitude. Personally I have seen enough of the carnage - blood on the road, a cyclist under the wheels of a lorry or cyclists being taken away in ambulances. Not to mention comforting a rather traumatised guest at a party who witnessed the death of a cyclist on blackfriers bridge. Not to worry though as in mussels' area they are improving the roads, so everything is ok!
The relationship between number deaths and serious injuries was much the same until the late 1990s and then they started to change - there were more serious injuries in relation to deaths from that time on and there didn't appear to be a reason for this. However when they analysed the hospital data it seemed that they hadn't changed at all, it was all in the way the Police had reported them. It does lead us to the suspicion that they were manipulated so the figures looked better. So as it is not possible to fiddle whether a person is dead or not it is better to compare the number of people killed on our roads year on year (sad as that is).
Of course the reason for them trying to fluff the figures is the number of pests like me who watch them all the time for any fiddling! I've picked them up on many examples over the years, but the worst example of false figures came from the Home Office. Several times they'd released a consistent figure for the number of known paedophiles nationally, but on one occasion made the mistake of releasing a figure for England and Wales.
This is true, the Dutch for instance spend a lot on social engineering to encourage the young to keep cycling - its a fallacy every Dutch youth enjoys cycling, they like cars just as much as anyone else, but Euros are spent to encourage them to stay on two wheels (and it pays off in less collisions and better health).
But the effort to bring about change needs to be as great. Huge efforts were rightly made to change those earlier racist attitudes, but with the exception of a large scale poster and newspaper campaign on behalf of cyclists by the previous Mayor of London, cycling has had nothing like that. Since the present government to save money have just closed the COI which produced their propaganda material, the outlook is not good.
It's way below that, indeed the grand total of all UK deaths on the roads is less than that. As usual and as I complained above, the government deliberately seeks to hide the truth by combining deaths and serious injuries as soon as one tries to get into specifics. However, since it appears the ratio of serious injuries to deaths appears to be about 10 to 1, it's possible to extrapolate that about 1200 car occupants are killed per year. You can check those figures on this site.
