BBC article on cycling accidents

Clustering does come into it. Even if we look at fatalities in general it's still a small sample. You mention people knowing nothing about probability theory but one of the main principles about extrapolating probability is that you can only predict future events from very large groups of numbers. It's the Monte Carlo fallacy.

Either way isn't clustering or not rather missing the point? Any death on the road, cyclist or other wise, is a terrible event. but why are roads more dangerous than trains or planes for example? because any major incident of mass transit invloves a "cluster" and so a large amount of time and public money will be invested into ensuring it doesn't happen again. (I can't find it now but there was an Economist article a few years ago about how much more money was being spent on per life saved on the railways by introducing ATP compared with how many more lives could be saved on the roads for the same budget by improving bad junctions etc) Be it true or not if you can create a public perception of a lorry incident cluster won't it drive a action to work on the problem? Shit as it is, it's an arguement about politics as much as fact.