While I don't disagree with a lot of the points made in this article, I did find this statement strange:
"...of the 400 or so pedestrians killed on the roads each year in the UK, about one or two are struck by bicycles.
Leaving aside the slightly odd wording, that figure seemed high to me. I am aware of one fatality in 2016 (the one that led to the court case that's been comprehensively reported this year), and one this year.
The official source for this kind of information seems to be table RAS40004 in the DfT's annual Reported Road Casualties Great Britain complete report. Four the last four years for which this report is available (2012-2015) the numbers are 1, 6, 4 and 2. Anyone have any idea what happened in 2013 and 2014 to make the figures for those years so high?
The links for those reports are as follows:
2012
2013
2014
2015
FWIW, and as far as I can tell (it's not entirely obvious to me how the numbers add up, either within or between tables) the total numbers of pedestrians killed by motor vehicles in each of those years was 419, 392, 442 and 406. And the total number of cyclists killed was 118, 109, 113 and 100. (Those figures were taken from table RAS30019 in each report, with the pedestrian fatalities figure reduced by the number due to cyclists in each year, taken from RAS40004 as above.)
Anyway, bottom line: it looks like the Guardian's information is not quite so wonky as I first thought.
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