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.
It seems a good majority of the accident reports fault the cyclist.
[…] Bicycle accident map from Bike Denton by howard 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 http://www.batchgeo.com. You can click on each dot… […]
A lot of cases reporting ‘wrong way – one way road’, so it sounds like sound advice to just not do that anymore. I wonder which driver is usually meant in case of ‘driver inattention’. Anyway, interesting map!
As always, thank you for the continued resources you all provide for the pedalin’ citizens in Denton. A cyclist was hit in my neighborhood a few months ago but no one called the police. Makes me wonder how many more dots would be on the map if every incident was called in.
@neener, you mention a key point that I forgot in the article. Bicycle accidents are seriously underreported, and we try to implore cyclists to report accidents, because if there’s no paper trail, there’s no problem. I wonder if it’s a self-perception problem that “hey, I’m on a cheap 30 pound bike, not a costly 3000 pound car that has insurance and a payment”, leading cyclists to not report accidents? Thanks for the kind words!