Safety in Numbers more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking英文资料.pdfVIP

Safety in Numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling[1] Review of the Inj ury Prevention Editor ’s Choice article and new examples from Australian data The idea of ‘Safety in Numbers’ has been known for years. Mike Hudson wrote in 1978: thef act that cyclists ’ rights are Fig 3. Smeed’s law applied to NSW data more resp ected in towns where cycling is p revalent suggests (from Knott 1994) than an increase in the number of cyclists on all roads would condition car drivers to exp ect and allow f or them.[2] Safety in numbers for motorists For motor vehicles, research into Safety in Numbers was published in 1949. RJ Smeed showed the risk per vehicle is lower in countries where more people drive. Fig 1 demon- strates the strong relationship between the risk per vehicle (represented by the number of deaths per vehicle (D/V)), and the amount of driving (represented here by the number of vehicles per person (V/P)). For the 62 countries shown, the curve is a remarkably good fit, suggesting some important underlying principle of road safety may be involved. Fig 1. Smeed’s law fitted to data from 62 different countries (from Adams 1985) ) s e l c i h e safety issues in 1990-91 were among the few measures to V 0 stand out as real improvements above what would be expected 0 0 from changes in vehicle numbers (Fig 3). 1 ( / s h Safety in numbers for cyclists t a