The most widespread indicator for road safety in terms of cycling is currently the number of fatalities per year. However, this indicator does not give a complete picture of cyclists' safety if it is not combined with exposure data, i.e. data on the distances cycled or the time spent cycling. Without this additional data, it is not possible to determine whether e.g. a decrease in fatalities is linked to improved safety for cyclists or to less cycling. Therefore, ECF calls for the combination of crash data (including not only fatalities, but also serious and light injuries) with exposure data in order to create meaningful statistics on cyclists' safety.
Since proper exposure data is not yet widely available, cycling modal share has been used for this map as a proxy for exposure data.
Find out more about our work on road safety here.