BBC article on cycling accidents

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.

By looking at what is spent on improving safety on the roads, you can calculate an implied value of life, and i seem to remember hearing that you get numbers in the range from tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In the rail industry, they make explicit calculations of whether safety improvements are worth it, using 1.4 million per life (when i was working there, it has gone up since), but they also try to factor in 'societal concern' as extra multiplicative factors that apply in certain circumstances. Lots of people dying at once is one case were societal concern applies strongly, but risk falling disproportionally on a vulnerable group is another that might apply to the current discussion.