Readers from last year will remember that when Nick Magruder was seriously hit and run on Bonnie Brae, the Denton Police were not collecting bicycle accident stats at that time. Naturally, we asked if they could, and they agreed to start keeping track of bicycle accidents. The police gave us a raw spreadsheet of accident data, and we plugged in the data to Google Maps via www.batchgeo.com. You can click on each dot and see the accident date and time, and “contributing factors”. The descriptions are pretty vague, and we’d like to get accident reports with these, but this will do for now.
In 2009, we had 23 reported accidents. The key word is “reported”, as cycling accidents are known to be greatly underreported. Remember this number, 23, because it seems to be from first complete year in which we kept track. Ideally we should see this number decrease as Denton’s population grows, more people ride (optimistically), and infrastructure and culture change.
Considering how many cyclists there are at UNT (~3,000), notice that there’s not a strong correlation to accident frequency around campus.
Here’s what we have so far, June 2008 to March 2010, and we’ll update this periodically:
These stats will be fascinating to follow as ridership continues to increase, because cyclists are safer in numbers. As NYC drastically added bicycle lanes, cycletracks, boulevards, etc, ridership went up, and injuries and fatalities went down.