Cycling in Ottawa

Archive for the ‘statistics’ Category

A reader pointed us to this report from the Greenways and Neighbourhood Transportation Branch of the City of Vancouver. It documents cycling and pedestrian traffic based on StatsCan census data and the city’s field research.

As you’d expect, cycling and walking are highest in the downtown, with walking being more popular in the core, and cycling being more popular slightly outside of downtown. However, I would have guessed that in a dense, fair-climate city like Vancouver, that the combined walking and biking share for the downtown would be higher than 50%. Are the other 50% taking the Skytrain to workplaces outside the downtown? Or are they motorists? Although the purpose of this report is to highlight cycling and walking, but I’m instantly curious about the traffic breakdown (although I could dig it up on StatsCan).

Bad Science deconstructs and rebuts some silly, fearmongering cycling accident statistics from a British insurance company:

“Mounting financial pressures have led to a surge in inexperienced cyclists taking to the roads,”say LV in their press release: “resulting in a 29% increase in road accidents involving cyclists in the past six months.” It’s topical, it involves death and fear, it’s dressed in the cloak of statistical authority: this is totally going on the telly.

The first thing to note is that LV were comparing accidents in the 6 months leading up to November 2008 against accidents in the 6 months prior to that. What these insurance geniuses have failed to account for here, we might reasonably suspect, is the well-documented seasonal variation in road traffic incidents, since fewer people cycle in winter. I shall not be buying shares in this insurance company.