8th female London cyclist killed by lorry?
15.12.09 by Buffalo Bill
Reading the comments in the follow up to a report of a cyclist/lorry collision in Greenwich a couple of weeks ago, it seems that the cyclist has died of her injuries. This would be the 13th cyclist to have been killed in London, and the 9th to have died as the result of a collision with a lorry, of which, 8 have been female.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this stat. Regular readers of Moving Target will remember that the numbers of London cyclists killed by lorries in the period 1999 to May 2004 was 491. 21 were female, and 28 were male. So there has been an astonishing turnaround here which, in my view, merits further investigation. The gender correlation is, well, remarkable. Is it causal? Is there something about the behaviour of female cyclists that makes them currently susceptible to being run over by lorries than males?
Or is it more that males have modified their behaviour, and this modification makes them much less likely to be run over than they were 5 years ago? After all, in the period, roughly 5 or 6 men a year were being killed by lorries in London (the study period covered a 55 month period).
Given that whilst the numbers of regular cyclists in London has at least doubled in the last ten years, and the numbers of cyclists killed in collisions with vehicles that are NOT lorries has come down to 5 or less a year, from over 10 a year in the previous period, one would have to say that unless you are a female cyclist, cycling in London is far, far safer than it was. Why is there this massive discrepancy?
1 London Road Safety Unit statistics collected for a study of all recorded lorry/cyclist fatalities. See this Moving Target article.
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