This map looks cool but it doesn't tell us a lot about the safe and unsafe places to cycle in London. Because it's based on collision data by location, but we don't know how many people cycle on each road per year, so can't normalise for that.
To compare two examples, you can pick out Richmond Park in south-west London due to the low number of collisions in it. But this is actually a highly popular location to cycle. The relatively low amount of vehicles, 20mph speed limit, ban on large vehicles, high visibility, and few junctions, makes it a great place to cycle.
There are also a low number of collisions in the boroughs of Bromley and Bexley in south-east London. But this is not because they're safe, but because very few people cycle there. There are loads of fast roads in these boroughs and little cycle infrastructure, and more of an hostile attitude from drivers compared to many other places in London.
Not to pick on the original post, but one of my all-time biggest data pet peeves is map diagrams that aren't normalized by population/some kind of denominator. They all end up as slightly janky population maps with weird anomalies that only make sense if you know the true denominator anyway.
To your point, Kew Gardens and Richmond Park both show up with blank hexagons on the map. But Kew Gardens doesn't allow bike traffic while Richmond Park is full of bikes.
Side note: As someone who lives by Richmond Park and visits often, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more bike vs. deer accidents than bike vs. car accidents.
> Not to pick on the original post, but one of my all-time biggest data pet peeves is map diagrams that aren't normalized by population/some kind of denominator. They all end up as slightly janky population maps with weird anomalies that only make sense if you know the true denominator anyway.
Bromley is actually a fantastic borough for cycling: mostly rural, great walking/cycling trails, good rail connections for the way back, and it even has weird Victorian era dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park.
Why cycling's not more popular there is a mystery to me.
There must be datasets of cyclist activity in London. BeeLine is a private company that develops a device for cyclists to orient themselves; I know they worked on cleaning up relevant data. Not sure if they would be keen to share with the author.
Tooting or Elephant & Castle? Even the new design of E&C is terrible last time I looked, as ambiguous and confusing with little time to get into the right place
I agree. It's not too bad heading east to west because there is a seperated cycle path (although, it can cause issues with pedestrians and the bus stops). However, basically any other direction is awful - particularly going from Blackfriars towards Camberwell.
What really frustrates me is E&C has a lot of space. I'm not a city planner but you'd think having the room to fully seperate each form of transport would make it easy to improve.
>I can’t help but get upset when people call a crash an accident. I lost my leg in a crash with a lorry. It was preventable – and even though the driver didn’t intend for the crash to happen, it was still his fault – Victoria, crash victim
What word would you propose? Seems pretty accurate.
While I think it's possible you're right that the cyclists are usually the victims, that's not a foregone conclusion for at least two reasons:
- cyclists can hit pedestrians who are even more vulnerable. Pedestrians are also included in this analysis.
- as much as cyclists hate to hear it, they're the most reckless users of the road on average (even worse than scooter drivers). Every time I walk around in London I see them cutting red lights to conserve momentum, changing from using car rules to pedestrian rules when it helps them, driving quickly across pedestrian crossings (too fast for cars to see them coming), and other "convenient" actions that are hard for cars/pedestrians to safely deal with.
There are definitely a lot of reckless cyclists, but it's worth keeping things in perspective.
According to the Department for Transport's report, there were 41 pedestrians and 7 cyclists killed in traffic collisions in Greater London in 2022. Pedal cyclists were listed as the "other vehicle" involved in fatal collisions 0 times, while cars were listed 39 times, and goods vehicles 23 times. As stated "other vehicles" does not directly describe who is to blame for a collision, but it's a proxy measure for it. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/casualties-in-greater-london-2022...
I didn't mean to imply that cyclists are out there killing pedestrians all the time. That's the most extreme case, it's not that easy to get killed by a bike. Much more likely to get injured or have a big scare.
I speak from personal observation - not trying to write a research paper or an encyclopedia article here. I don't see any other road users engaging in those behaviours on a frequent basis.
As an example, it's extremely rare for cars in London to cut red lights, pedestrians sometimes do but they're much slower and therefore easier to see coming. The behaviour of switching back and forth from car/pedestrian rules is not something other road users do here. But cyclists do that extremely frequently, to the point that it seems hard data isn't necessary to form a reasonably certain (but not scientific) conclusion. If cars drove like cyclists, it would be complete chaos.
>As an example, it's extremely rare for cars in London to cut red lights, pedestrians sometimes do but they're much slower and therefore easier to see coming.
Anecodtally, I see motorists driving whilst using their phone on a daily basis. I rarely see cycling jumping red lights. I also see motorists jumping red lights, but rarely. I frequently see motorists on the wrong side of the road trying to skip traffic queues.
But you claim was about recklessness.
Poor driving is much, much more reckless than poor cycling, given the kinetic energy involved.
The people cycling in London are those who are not terrified by the SUV drivers, minivans, mopeds, HGVs… are you surprised that they skew less risk averse?
And why even bring this up? Does it follow that more risk taking behaviour (a claim which you did not substantiate) means that the infrastructure is safe enough and that this is not a real problem? Of course not.
Have had several incidents with dangerous cyclists ignoring zebra crossings (where pedestrians have right of way), even when I’ve been pushing a baby in the pushchair.
Seems to be getting worse now with the e-cycles and higher speeds.
And god forbid you're walking your dog on a leash longer than a meter - you have to pull it for dear life every 5 minutes when a e-bike rider zooms incoming at 20mph on the pedestrian lane because it happens to be empty at the time. I'm aware that interfering with their ride at that speed could easily mean death but the devil on my shoulder just won't shut up.
I see a number of responses along the lines of "why would you think cyclists are victims here?" so I took a look at the data. (I'm not sure that what I'm looking at is the exact same files as used by this map.)
Document RAS0601 there describes "collisions and casualties by vehicle and road user type involved".
This is for the whole UK, not just London. I'll look at figures for 2022, which unsurprisingly is the most recent year in the data. Other recent years look broadly similar.
Sheet "Pedestrians": 385 pedestrians were killed in road accidents. None of them were by pedal cycles. 5908 were "killed or seriously injured"; 159, or about 2.7%, were by pedal cycles. 19327 were casualties of some kind; 462, or about 2.4%, were by pedal cycles.
Sheet "Casualties_vehicle_type": In collisions involving at least one pedal cycle, 94 people were killed. (None of those can have been pedestrians; see previous paragraph.) 4026 were "killed or seriously injured". (159 of those were pedestrians; see previous paragraph. That's about 4%.) 16520 were casualties of some kind. (462 of those were pedestrians; see previous paragraph. That's about 3%.)
So it seems as if collisions involving bikes kill no more than about 1% as many pedestrians as cyclists, and kill-or-seriously-injure about 4% as many pedestrians as cyclists, and injure-a-all about 3% as many pedestrians as cyclists.
So, yes, overwhelmingly cyclists are victims rather than causes of injury and death in collisions. (And overwhelmingly when pedestrians are injured or killed in collisions, those collisions do not involve bicycles.)
Again, that's for the UK as a whole. I suspect London is more dangerous for everyone, but it seems unlikely to me that cyclists in London are more dangerous by a much greater ratio than that by which they're more in danger. (My guess is that it's the other way around.)
Somehow I can’t help but think that spatial SQL is much more convenient for such analysis. Of course Jupiter and python libs are very convenient, but also not very performant in a way that matters with larger datasets…
To compare two examples, you can pick out Richmond Park in south-west London due to the low number of collisions in it. But this is actually a highly popular location to cycle. The relatively low amount of vehicles, 20mph speed limit, ban on large vehicles, high visibility, and few junctions, makes it a great place to cycle.
There are also a low number of collisions in the boroughs of Bromley and Bexley in south-east London. But this is not because they're safe, but because very few people cycle there. There are loads of fast roads in these boroughs and little cycle infrastructure, and more of an hostile attitude from drivers compared to many other places in London.