Where, how and why do people on bikes really crash? We have prepared unique research on accident rates

You don’t even have to ride a bike to know that not all accidents that happen to cyclists make it into the official police statistics. How many can there be, where do they happen more often, and for what reasons, Michal Šindelář from AutoMat investigated in a pilot study.

The research report Self-reported and official accident rates involving bicycles aims to lay the foundations for understanding the overall accident rate of persons on bicycles in the Czech Republic. She worked with a set of data on a total of 313 accidents from 2017–2022, obtained from 177 people riding bicycles, mainly in Brno and Prague, who described their course and consequences in a questionnaire. We compiled this for this purpose and it includes many variables including a verbal description of the accident. A number of conclusions emerged from this dataset of accidents. From them, it is then possible to form a picture of what the real accident rate looks like and how big a fragment of it gets into the official statistics.

There is no accident like an accident

For each accident, it was monitored whether it was investigated by the police. In 11% of recorded accidents, respondents said they were investigated by the police. The proportion varies by gender (women’s accidents are investigated more often) and by age (the older a cyclist crashes, the more often the accident is investigated). Accidents with serious injury or greater material damage are saved more often. Accidents on side streets and cycle paths were investigated less often. But even collisions with moving motor vehicles, according to the respondents, were not avoided by more than 21%.

Riding in traffic is a risk

We also looked at the causes of these accidents, which can be divided into several categories and are related to the behavior of other road users, the condition of the road, but also the effort of people on bicycles not to obstruct cars too much on the road. We looked into the same thing when it comes to motor vehicle collisions. It is obvious that cycling is more demanding and risky compared to walking, driving a car or using public transport, especially if cycle transport is carried out in mixed traffic with cars on poor-quality roads.

You can’t cheat physics

An increased severity of injuries can then be expected in collisions with cars. Collisions with pedestrians and cyclists typically occur on bicycle paths, according to accident descriptions. However, these collisions do not involve vehicles weighing more than one or more tons, and collisions typically occur at lower speeds than in collisions with automobiles. Driving cyclists in mixed traffic will automatically generate collisions with cars, from which cyclists almost always come out as losers from the point of view of injury due to their increased vulnerability given the absence of a protective vehicle body.

What to do with cyclo-accidents statistics

The presented survey is a pilot of a limited scope, the purpose of which is to verify the feasibility of a large-scale nationwide investigation of cyclist accidents. It is likely that official statistics contain only a fraction of the total accident rate, and that apparently 89% of accidents involving people on bicycles remain hidden. Official statistics are significantly distorted numerically, and at the same time structurally, because accidents are not recorded evenly in them. In order to be able to evaluate the safety of cycling in the Czech Republic, it is necessary to “correct” accident statistics so that they reflect the real situation. This report is a necessary first step towards that remedy.

Read also how to proceed if you have a traffic accident on your bike

The research report, which was created as part of the Central European Active Mobility Lab (CEAML) project supported by the European Climate Foundation, can be read and downloaded here.

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