another round of mostly useless road death statistics [and a terrible graph]

Another terrible report on (French) road accidents and deaths Le Monde pointed to. The entire analysis does not consider once the number of people on the roads or the death per kilometer ratio. Which makes the absolute figures as those represented in this ugly graph hard to comment. For instance, the number of persons cycling to work has increased more than the number of bike deaths. (And, contrary to a urban myth, cycling in Paris should not be considered as a extreme sport: only one  [too many] cyclist died there in 2022.) I also find surprising the (a)symmetry in the age distributions of (overall) road deaths,

since the percentages of evolution between 2019 and 2022 almost exactly compensate for one to the next across the age groups. Any significance in these figures? The statistics that makes the most sense in the report is the comparison of counties where the 90km/h speed limit was reinstated and those where it stayed at 80km/h: an increase of 1% versus a decrease of 2%… As signaled by Le Monde car doors are bike killers: when getting off a car, use your right hand to open the driver’s door (except in Australia, Britain, Japan and 72 other left-hand driving countries!!).

Insanity

The other day, I was driving on the Paris beltway (le “périphérique“) on one of these annoying occurrences I have to be at both of my offices (and thus cannot use my bike nor the métro), and I passed a car with a mother (?) driving with her (?) very young] toddler on her knees!!! While the beltway is not particularly dangerous, the traffic on it is quite intense, with sudden and frequent jams.  Not mentioning the bikes driving between the two leftmost lanes at high speed. So I could not believe this woman was ready to risk her child’s life in such an insane way! (When I risk mines, I can at least pretend ignorance!!!)