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Safety in numbers is a terrible fallacy and quite unhelpful.
At any point on your journey the risk of being involved in a collision with another road user is completely unrelated to the overall number of other cyclists there are in the country, city or indeed borough.
The factors affecting probability can be divided into two broad categories. a) The opportunity for a collision to happen and b) the likelihood that it will. A is about environmental factors such as infrastructure and traffic density. B is about road user behaviour.
The only time when you can support an argument of safety in numbers is when the number of journeys being made by bicycle means that traffic density declines below motorised congestion levels. London isn't there yet and it isn't dependable across the whole of the road network at all times. You could argue that the presence of higher volumes of cyclists make you safer because they make drivers more familiar with their presence on the roads but that only really works at peak travel times to again isn't dependable across the whole of the road network at all times. This is even less credible an argument while cyclists still occupy a position as an out group and are viewed by a portion of drivers as an obstacle, not an equal part of traffic.
The_Seldom_Killer-
So the fact that absolute numbers of KSIs and fatalities have dropped year on year, while number of trips by cycle increased is a fluke?
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The only time when you can support an argument of safety in numbers is when the number of journeys being made by bicycle means that traffic density declines below motorised congestion levels.
Why is that? Cycle numbers may increase while there are still motorised congestion levels -whatever you mean by that.
Drivers awareness and better behaviour around riders and likelihood of riders in the environment could reduce incidents
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The factors affecting probability can be divided into two broad categories. a) The opportunity for a collision to happen and b) the likelihood that it will. A is about environmental factors such as infrastructure and traffic density. B is about road user behaviour.
This doesn't make sense. Why is 'opportunity' linked to infrastructure and 'likelihood' to road user behaviour?
skydancer
Cycle casualties were down in 2015 13% on 2014 and 47% on 2005-2009! as many more people took up cycling.
Safety in numbers?