Sir, – The Road Safety Authority report Review of Cyclist Injuries 2012 was given much prominence in your pages ("Death and injury toll among cyclists on the rise", August 5th). You claim that the numbers dying cycling on the road have been rising. In fact they have been clearly falling since the late 1990s, with occasional, scattered, temporary upticks. 2014 did show a sharp rise after a historic low of five cyclists dying in 2013, but the numbers in question are small, so strong swings in percentage terms can easily happen, only to revert to the mean the following year.
The next issue is interpretation of the sharp rise in injuries in 2012. It should be kept in mind, although your reporting did not make it clear, that the vast majority of these injuries were minor – 30 serious injuries to 600 minor injuries. If you look at the year-by-year trend in serious injuries alone, instead of serious and minor injuries combined, the 2012 spike is far less prominent. In fact, very similar values have been recorded before in the last 10 years. Again, the number of seriously injured is relatively small, and therefore can be prone to strong percentage swings.
It is prudent to monitor these trends, but it is, to say the least, premature to rush to judgment about the safety of any transport medium, particularly a very benign one, based on single data points in otherwise positive trends. – Yours, etc,
DERMOT RYAN,
Dublin 16.