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!!).

wrong statistics

The Guardian reported today on a larger probability for men drivers to kill/injure a pedestrian, when compared with female drivers. Which is somewhat misleading. The figures report on the probability that the driver is male, given a serious collision occurred. But it does not directly reflect on the (very probable!) gender difference in dangerousity, i.e. the difference in the probabilities that a female driver vs. a male driver run over a pedestrian because it does not account for the probable difference in women vs. men drivers on the road at any given time, or on the mileage accumulated by each gender over a given year. Which differs by almost two…  (As mentioned in the article, a disproportionate percentage of accidents are due to vans, which again are more likely to be driven by men.)