Traffic Safety Report Statistics 2006-2008

Struck in DC got a copy of DDOT's Traffic Safety Report Statistics for 2006-2008 and I was able to get a copy from them. There's not too much in it about bikes, but there is some.

Factoids:

• In 2008 there 341 bicycles in collisions, 1 of which was fatal and 256 of which resulted in injuries. This gives bicycles the lowest survivability ratio (1:341) of any vehicle except motorcycles (8 fatalities in 230 crashes or 1:29). 15 cyclist injuries were described as disabling, 72 as non-visible, 87 as non-disabling. 54 as none and 28 as unknown. Pedestrians fared worse in survivability than cyclists too (14 fatalities in 592 crashes or 1:42)
• There were 249 bike collisions that resulted in injury or death in 2006, 230 in 2007, and 257 in 2008. These represented 1.54%, 1.52% and 1.59% of all cyclists respectively. [The report seems to mislabel these calling them just collisions instead of those with injuries, but the numbers don't match the ones above unless you qualify as such, so I've labeled them "correctly"]
• Men were in about 80% of crashes. And young adults were in more than children or those over 30.
• Maryland drivers were in the most crashes.
• Overall injuries, crashes, hit and runs and fatalities are all going down.
• The most common action for pedestrian injuries is "Pedestrian in crosswalk with signal"

Now I have to see if this changes any of my stats class posts.

One flaw with this is that it only uses MPD data. One bike fatality in DC in 2008 was under Park Police jurisdiction (Ian Wolfe), so that brings a lot of the data into question.

Comments

[SJE]

I think the results could be skewed by insurance. A minor scrape with a pedestrian, cyclist or other car, or fall off the bike, would probably not get reported unless the other party wants to make an issue of it. Given that the cost of even minor body work on a car exceeds the costs of most bikes, even fender benders are more likely to be reported.

The other issue is visibility. If two cars bump, the owners stop and chat for at least a few minutes. This blocks traffic, and you soon get a police presence. A scrape between two cyclists is unlikely to block traffic, as they can easily move to the sidewalk.

[Washcycle]

also skewed by MPD's policy of only reporting crashes with $1k of damage or an injury.

[SJE]

Yep, that would skew it enormously. You would only see the more serious bike accidents, but less serious car accidents. This makes bikes look unsafe.

It would be like looking at pedestrian safety only in those in which a ped was severely injured, and therefore not counting the number of times peds are almost hit or only bruised, or the total number of pedestrians.

[oboe]

In 2008 there 341 bicycles in collisions, 1 of which was fatal and 256 of which resulted in injuries. This gives bicycles the lowest survivability ratio (1:341) of any vehicle except motorcycles

Yep, as the posters above have implied, the only bicycle collisions that are reported are those where someone has been injured, or there's been severe property loss, or the bicyclist is some sort of tenacious pro-cycling malcontent [:)].