We know very little about what is injuring cyclists. That appears to be the finding from recent research reported for the Toronto area between the years 2016 and 2021. The research authored by Dr. Alison Macpherson and Dr. Linda Rothman was reported recently in a webinar presented by the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals (CARSP). The webinar was entitled “Comparison of the number of pedestrian and cyclist injuries captured in police data compared with health service utilisation data in Toronto, Canada 2016– 2021”.
While 2,362 cyclist incidents were reported in Toronto’s police data, there were 30,101 cyclist visits to hospital emergency departments and 2,299 resulted in hospitalizations. The research also noted that 26,083 of those cyclist incidents, or 87%, did not result from cyclist involvement with a motor vehicle.
The Key Findings from the study are the following:
“Toronto Police Services (TPS) data, which only captures collisions, represents only 8% of ED visits for cyclists treated in the emergency department (ED).
Cyclist injuries are involving motor vehicle have increased since the start of the pandemic (from 3,629 in 2019 to 5,459 in 2020 for ED visits and from 251 in 2019 to 430 for hospital admissions).
This suggests that using police data alone when planning for road safety is inaccurate, because it doesn’t capture cyclist injuries not involving a motor vehicle. Health services data is essential to improving the safety of the built environment for pedestrians and cyclists.”
If 87% of cyclist injuries did not come from motor vehicle collisions, where did they come from? That should be an obvious question because these 87% were serious enough that they involved a visit to a hospital emergency department. It can be imagined that many more incidents of cyclist injury do not result in visits to emergency departments. It is well-publicized by hospitals and health officials that emergency department treatment should be sought for immediate health threats and injuries not posing immediate health threats should be treated by visiting family doctors or drop in health clinics. So it is a reasonable expectation that many more cyclist injuries are occurring that are not captured in the emergency department data.
Cyclist injuries are occurring from sources that are unknown. The problem is that none of this information is collected and available for proper education of the public who are the ones being injured and killed.
You must be logged in to post a comment.