The UK's road cycling blackspots

boy on bike
boy on bike Posts: 139
edited March 2009 in Commuting chat
Someone sent me a link to this today: don't know if anyone's already seen it. It's a map of the UK with every 2007 bike-involved RTA marked on it! So now you can confirm whether those dodgy junctions on your commute really are dodgy (mine was :shock: ).

http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009 ... accidents/

For those of you commuting in London - bad luck: it looks as if most roads are covered... :?

Comments

  • downfader
    downfader Posts: 3,686
    I think this is doing the rounds quite a lot now. We have to be careful to be level headed about it given how many people cycle. I can see this map becoming a weapon against cycling :?
  • nation
    nation Posts: 609
    The DfT have been stressing that it's impossible to use this data to determine the relative safety of given routes, all it is is a map of where accidents have occurred. The Times headline is a little misleading too, since it's not a map of "blackspots" either.

    If a road doesn't have any accidents on it, it might just mean there are no cyclists using that route, not necessarily that it's safer.

    Having said that, I counted nine accidents along my route in 2005.
  • girv73
    girv73 Posts: 842
    None at all in Northern Ireland :/
    Today is a good day to ride
  • tripwire
    tripwire Posts: 505
    Yaaay, I'm on the 2006 dataset! 51°22"27N 0°31"32W is me!

    Oh wait, that's a bad thing isn't it :roll:
  • Eau Rouge
    Eau Rouge Posts: 1,118
    Can you imagine how may dots you'd have for car accidents then!
    I can't help but feel whoever wrote the google app is very biased. At any sort of zoom out, the map looks like a sea of red, as if carnage lay beneath, but if you bother to zoom in, you're left with a dot or two.
  • roger_merriman
    roger_merriman Posts: 6,165
    nation wrote:
    The DfT have been stressing that it's impossible to use this data to determine the relative safety of given routes, all it is is a map of where accidents have occurred. The Times headline is a little misleading too, since it's not a map of "blackspots" either.

    If a road doesn't have any accidents on it, it might just mean there are no cyclists using that route, not necessarily that it's safer.

    Having said that, I counted nine accidents along my route in 2005.

    indeed if one zooms out can see it's centered on central london so in manny ways it's a bike dencity map.
  • nwallace
    nwallace Posts: 1,465
    indeed if one zooms out can see it's centered on central london so in manny ways it's a bike dencity map.

    If there is a 0.1% chance of having a crash on any given cycle, then the density of crashes should roughly match the density of cycling.

    If we move to a more extreme event, Head on Collisions between vehicles.
    Using local knowledge and understanding of the UK road systems I know that the A9 is probably one of the worst in Scotland for them and the M8 one of the safest. Despite the A9 having less traffic it's nature as a signal carriageway road switching occasionally to low quality Dual Carriageway with at grade junctions, means a head on is much more likely than on a Motorway which is a special type of HQDC and the chances are virtually nill for head on collisions.

    Back to our general road crash statistic, it probably is fairly proportional to the traffic flow, more traffic = more general cock ups.

    I would be worried if Dundee had a higher density of incidents than London. For a start there are a few million less vehicles on the road.
    Do Nellyphants count?

    Commuter: FCN 9
    Cheapo Roadie: FCN 5
    Off Road: FCN 11

    +1 when I don't get round to shaving for x days