Cycling safer than walking - Guardian

Initialised

Guardian Death Statistics

Not too bad, cycling is marginally more likely to be fatal than Schizophrenia or falling from a building and less likely than mood disorders, cot death, swine flu or being hit by traffic as a pedestrian.

bicyclepirate

Errr... actually cycling is more likely to be fatal than walking, it's just that a lot more people walk than cycle. Sorry *runs away in case of mass hysteria about statement of fact*

Initialised

Depends how you want to massage the stats I suppose.

SmellTheGlove

Had someone asked you "what percentage of the UK population dies (all causes) each year?" , would you have ticked the box <1%?
Don't think I would.

bicyclepirate wrote:

Errr... actually cycling is more likely to be fatal than walking

Unless you're wear... STOP IT!!

veronese68

Lis, damned lies and statistics. 96 died cycling and it gets a bubble. Quick bit of very rough mental arithmetic with heinous rounding to compensate for beer. 140,00 died of cancer, of which 120,000 get a bubble. So 20,000 deaths don't warrant a seperate bubble, but 96 cyclist did? A bit skewed methinks.
No knife crime, the Daily Mail would have given it the biggest bubble as it's a media favourite.

wyadvd

these figures are all meaningless, as they are not normalised to express a risk which is comparable for each cause. They merely state the proportion of people killed in a certain way from a sample (which is not an expression of the statistical risk of death from each of those causes)

Initialised

Still wondering where Murder, Manslaughter, Industrial Accident, Counter Espionage and Suicide featured.

Still a nice way of visualising mortality stats.

McBoom

Cycling is statistically safer than walking for a given distance.

Walking is much safer for a given time period.

shouldbeinbed

Initialised wrote:

Still wondering where Murder, Manslaughter, Industrial Accident, Counter Espionage and Suicide featured.

Still a nice way of visualising mortality stats.

3377 intentional self harm also lots of people thet fell out of buildings or suffered hanging/strangulation

but agree plenty of omissions that were no doubt more significant than cycling, plenty of 'sexy'cancers not recorded, Testicular???

meanredspider

It's an interesting chart but, yes, is distorted in a number of ways. Diabetes, for instance, whilst not the immediate cause of death in a lot of cases, will have been the cause for a good percentage of cardiovascular diseases and hence deaths.

eidolon

> Depends how you want to massage the stats I suppose.

This is a textbook case of someone not being able to understand basic concepts about statistics.

For the statement "cycling safer than walking", for a simplistic start you'd need to have the numbers of people who cycle and cycle to get a mortality % for each activity. A better way to look at it would be the number of hours spent in each activity, but numbers for that would be hard to estimate.