Oh and for comparison, the chill, well-fed adults of the Iberian peninsula score a 3.7 (Spain) and 6.3 (Portugal) per 100,000.
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You know you're getting old.... (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Kermit McDermott
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On my recent holiday in Georgia I noticed that the rule seemed to be that if you can see a car coming towards you on the other side of the road and you're 100% sure the road isn't wide enough for three cars then wait until it's clear to overtake. If there might be room for three cars or you can't see anything coming towards you (e.g. you're approaching a blind bend) then by all means go ahead and over take.
I looked it up, we have the 7th lowest rate of traffic-related deaths in the world at 2.9 per 100,000 people:
I think the wiki is old data but current data from the WHO is backing this up - their site is making my phone shit the bed though.
And while I love to complain about how bad driving is in this country, we’re actually doing pretty good based on the numbers.
It depends on what numbers you want to use though.
On that wiki we are 7th - but what if you cross reference that with population density and driving conditions?
Hong kong is as dense as soup. a lot of these are fake countries, the UK has the same driving culture as us and the rest of of them drive on snow through mountains a lot.
the first comparable country is germany, which is three times as population dense as us and has roads with no speed limits.
Then you have to also add on that in ireland we drive newer posher cars than spain / portugal that have safety features and stuff.
Population density in Europe | TheGlobalEconomy.com
The average for 2021 based on 47 countries was 599 people per square km. The highest value was in Monaco: 17604 people per square km and the lowest value was in Iceland: 4 people per square km. The indicator is available from 1961 to 2021. Below is a chart for all countries where data are...
And all the numbers say are road deaths, they don't depict behavoir or attitudes or infrastructure.
Like I cycled 9 days in spain and 1 person beeped at me, they had a romanian number plate. I cycled 4 days in portugal and the cycle/car interactions were all so relaxed. I cycle 2 hours in galway in a day and there is a guaranteed road rage, a few pointless beeps, close passes and all the rest. There are cycle lanes not just in big cities and people aren't losing thier minds because they have to slow down for a few seconds, it's just a civil interaction. People are scared to cycle in ireland, in portugal/spain kids are tearing around on everything from pedal to ebike to motorbike in greater numbers with shittier cars and worse roads. a number offf wiki doesn't really depict those differences and how they are accomodating them
Lots of ways to slice up the data.
I think NL's fatality rate is about 20% higher than here - but imagine what would happen here if people were cycling in the same numbers. To compare cycling rates, I think the number of secondary school students who cycle to school here is approx 3% but over 60% in NL. Granted, we're probably more rural on average.
More than half their road fatalities are cyclists, and I think more than half of those are in people over 60, so less likely to survive a collision.
But if you remove cyclists from the stats (so you're not comparing the effect of the two very different sets of cycling infrastructure), NL is measurably safer than us.
I think NL's fatality rate is about 20% higher than here - but imagine what would happen here if people were cycling in the same numbers. To compare cycling rates, I think the number of secondary school students who cycle to school here is approx 3% but over 60% in NL. Granted, we're probably more rural on average.
More than half their road fatalities are cyclists, and I think more than half of those are in people over 60, so less likely to survive a collision.
But if you remove cyclists from the stats (so you're not comparing the effect of the two very different sets of cycling infrastructure), NL is measurably safer than us.
And on that point of the age profile of the deaths of NL cyclists - I wonder how (or if) the age profile of a country affects the road death rate in general. Ireland has a younger population, and the younger you are the better chance you have of surviving a collision, but there could be an effect of younger people more likely to crash a car (I saw some mention of the age profile of the deaths here leaning towards the under 35s)
Considering all the above mentioned points I would expect things to be worse on Irish roads. The road network being very substandard especially for cyclists.
I wouldn't think of cycling in an urban area - those folks are brave.
But UK, Holland etc are doing well considering populations and millions of Dutch cycling everyday
I wouldn't think of cycling in an urban area - those folks are brave.
But UK, Holland etc are doing well considering populations and millions of Dutch cycling everyday
when you go out to meet people you went to college with and and it's mentioned that it's a quarter of a century since you first sat in a lecture hall together.
Aside from road deaths being a good indicator of driver behaviour (increasingly risky behaviour will lead to more deaths), I couldn’t find data on just accidents or on injuries. So in the absence of other data, this is the only quantifiable measure I could find at 1am in bed. Having another search now, I still can't find any info on accidents generally as opposed to fatalities. I'm sure it's out there but not in a dataset I can find.It depends on what numbers you want to use though.
On that wiki we are 7th - but what if you cross reference that with population density and driving conditions?
Hong kong is as dense as soup. a lot of these are fake countries, the UK has the same driving culture as us and the rest of of them drive on snow through mountains a lot.
the first comparable country is germany, which is three times as population dense as us and has roads with no speed limits.
Then you have to also add on that in ireland we drive newer posher cars than spain / portugal that have safety features and stuff.
View attachment 17824
Population density in Europe | TheGlobalEconomy.com
The average for 2021 based on 47 countries was 599 people per square km. The highest value was in Monaco: 17604 people per square km and the lowest value was in Iceland: 4 people per square km. The indicator is available from 1961 to 2021. Below is a chart for all countries where data are...www.theglobaleconomy.com
And all the numbers say are road deaths, they don't depict behavoir or attitudes or infrastructure.
Like I cycled 9 days in spain and 1 person beeped at me, they had a romanian number plate. I cycled 4 days in portugal and the cycle/car interactions were all so relaxed. I cycle 2 hours in galway in a day and there is a guaranteed road rage, a few pointless beeps, close passes and all the rest. There are cycle lanes not just in big cities and people aren't losing thier minds because they have to slow down for a few seconds, it's just a civil interaction. People are scared to cycle in ireland, in portugal/spain kids are tearing around on everything from pedal to ebike to motorbike in greater numbers with shittier cars and worse roads. a number offf wiki doesn't really depict those differences and how they are accomodating them
And while driver behaviour in Ireland is definitely rude and aggressive, it isn’t leading to increased deaths which is pretty much a bottom line indicator of whether driving is bad or not. If you want to get into population densities and whether having newer cars have an effect, I've got an hour free and ran the statistics. I found 57 countries where I have the following data for all of them:
1) Traffic deaths per 100,000
2) Population density (and I realise there's a typo in the axis title)
3) New car sales, which I converted to per 100,000 using populations for each country to normalise it.
Running a correlation analysis, there is no significant relationship between deaths and population density but there is a negative correlation between deaths and new car sales so maybe there is something to the safer cars argument? *Insert correlation does not imply causation caveat here*
With both of these in mind, Ireland performs really well - I've circled Ireland in green in both graphs. In the first graph showing deaths versus population density, everything on a vertical line above us has a similar population density but we perform better than all of them (and interestingly, Spain is the one that overlaps with us). If you look at the second graph showing deaths versus new cars graph we perform better than most of the countries that have a greater uptake of newer (arguably safer cars).
So maybe being angry, hungry children is the best way to drive a car?
I feel I have crossed some kind of middle-aged man on the internet rubicon with the previous post.
Well people are afraid to use the roads by bike or on foot, how do we adjust for that?
Quantify it in some way and get back to me.
Getting fatality rates is a hell of a lot easier than getting modal rates.
We had zero deaths from swimming in shark infested pools in Ireland last year, so the data shows that swimming in shark infested pools is safe.
More seriously, to go back to the comparison with NL, I think approx 2% of primary school students cycle to school here, compared with IIRC about 18% in NL. And 3% of secondary students compared with something like 60% in NL. The reason road deaths are lower in Ireland in that one comparison is that vastly fewer people take the 'risky' option, but the stats bandied about capture the risks but not the benefits of cycling - which outweigh the risks.
We had zero deaths from swimming in shark infested pools in Ireland last year, so the data shows that swimming in shark infested pools is safe.
More seriously, to go back to the comparison with NL, I think approx 2% of primary school students cycle to school here, compared with IIRC about 18% in NL. And 3% of secondary students compared with something like 60% in NL. The reason road deaths are lower in Ireland in that one comparison is that vastly fewer people take the 'risky' option, but the stats bandied about capture the risks but not the benefits of cycling - which outweigh the risks.
Cormcolash
Well-Known Member
I was swimming in a shark infested pool yesterday, it was fine, I only lost a toe.
People are actually using roads with cars on them though, this is observable and measurable. We also know that death is a common and serious outcome of using roads with cars. So whole fatalities might not be the most comprehensive indicator for road safety but it’s an appropriate indicator that is actually measured and can be analysed.
On the other hand, we also know that sharks are (1) dangerous, and (2) unable to live in fresh chlorinated water, so we deliberately don’t put them in swimming pools built for human use. Therefore we know the data around fatalities in shark-infested pools is meaningless and comparing that to road fatality data is only used to bolster a fallacious point that data is meaningless.
That’s fair enough but as I said above, if you can actually capture it in real numbers, then you can say something more definitive about it. Percentages are fine but they are crap for understanding the real effects of a phenomenon.
And are we now talking about cycling behaviour or are we still comparing Ireland to other countries based on driver behaviour?
citation required
The Zambezi river shark is the only freshwater shark, bull sharks can manage some time in fresh water but chlorine levels in pools are 1000x higher than the levels that are recommended for anything with gills. The LD50 for marine fish is about 1% of the concentration of a swimming pool and about 2% for freshwater fish:
we need empirical data.
You can tie yourselves in knots over over measurable stats of you can JUST DRIVE BETTER.
Or don't drive at all.
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