In 2024 the main annual national “road safety” conference featured a presentation by Mr V. Stops arguing against Britain emulating the Netherlands (NL) high share of cycling on the basis of the numbers of cyclists killed in NL. This was re-published in Local Transport Today (although editorial staff were keen to say that it’s message was not endorsed by LTT). There was then a riposte to it by Simon Munk, and one issue later by myself here which is posted here.

Why post this now?

This may seem to be either a rather arcane discussion about metrics, or else what Basil Fawlty may have described as “stating the bleeding obvious”. But it is crucial to any understanding of what the problem of danger on the road to be clear what we are trying to measure: is it danger, risk, officially reported casualties (in this case deaths) or casualty rates – all of which are different things. As discussed below, these numbers can be presented to get to not only the wrong, but diametrically opposed, conclusions. That’s why we post this article here: it is crucial to be clear what we think the problems are, so that we know what we should trying to achieve. (See also this article LTT kindly published as well.)