Pedestrian Falls in Europe

After writing Friday's post about pedestrian injuries, I found out that Malcolm wrote about the subject last year for the European Cyclists' Federation. He writes that pedestrian falls are often ignored in The Netherlands and United Kingdom too.

The 2007 edition of the Road Casualties Great Britain report gives data on pedestrian falls for the UK, see pages 77-78. The number of pedestrian falls on streets and roads is three times the number of pedestrians injured in traffic accidents (ie motor vehicle collisions). And the number of pedestrian falls in unspecified places is fully thirteen times, which suggests that some of these actually occurred in streets and roads but weren't recorded as such by the hospital. About half of pedestrians injured in falls were over 70.

So if you just look at traffic accidents, it looks like cyclists suffer quite a lot of injuries. But when you include pedestrian falls as analogous to cyclist falls, you get a very different picture.

The data jungle – understanding casualty statistics. European Cyclists' Federation

Road Casualties Great Britain 2007 (PDF)