TfL has published its annual report into trends in London transport, looking over both 2012 / the financial year 2012-13 and it's got some bad news on cycling safety.
During last autumn's series of cycling deaths, the one thing City Hall kept citing was that when the number of deaths and injuries was looked at against the overall increase in cycling, it was getting safer. But we're now able to calculate the number of KSIs (killed and seriously injured) per million journeys, and the rate is on the increase.
The number of cyclists killed or seriously injured per million journeys was 3.17 in 2012 – the highest the rate's been since 2003. KSIs hit a low of 2.33 per million journeys in 2009 but has been rising since, at 2.37 in 2010 and 2.74 in 2011. The BBC quotes Andrew Gilligan, the Mayor's cycling commissioner, as saying
The rise in the number of serious injuries is precisely why we relaunched the cycling programme 10 months ago, more than trebling spending and committing to far greater levels of provision, including many segregated junctions and lanes.
A few other interesting snippets from the report:
- On an average day in 2012, 25.9m full-length trips (by all forms of transport) were made to or within London. This is a rise of 1.5% over 2011.
- 44.2% of the individual parts of those trips were made by public transport and 33.3% by private transport (mainly car). The rest are made by cycling or walking. Depending on how you measure it, there's been a 8-9% shift away from private towards public transport since 2000.
- Growth rates in bus usage have levelled off, with a 0.4% drop in 2012-13.
- The latest data for 2013 show traffic levels in London increasing from the equivalent months in 2012. TfL says it's too early to tell if this is bucking the recent trend of falling traffic levels. Car ownership levels, however, continue to decline in the region.
- Following increases in cycling of 15% in 2010-11 and 9% in 2011-12, 2012-13 saw a rise of 1.8%.
Photo by unslugged from the Londonist Flickr pool
