Live blog: Puntastic! – our fave headlines from the MSM after they picked up the Porn Pedallers story we broke yesterday, Epic fail for BMW pedestrian (and cyclist) avoidance system, Olympic champ Callum Skinner retires + more

@Rendel Harris "Perhaps lethality should be measured as drivers/cyclists found guilty of causing death per chosen metric, rather than simply numbers killed?" Given the filter of the court system that would a) likely only introduce another source of bias and b) mean the cycling numbers had dubious statistical meaning relative to the motoring ones since after removing e-motorbikes (unless we didn't? But even then...) that is ... one or two in the last 5+ years?

@mdavidford You've made me curious so checked: in Devon and Torbay (in common with many councils, apparently), any project under £500,000 can be internally approved by the Corporate Director for Strategy, Performance, and Sustainability, whereas any project costing in excess of £500,000 needs a full cabinet vote. So it looks suspiciously as though there's been a bit of jiggery-pokery with the numbers to avoid full cabinet scrutiny.

From the screenshots, the software looks very similar to the Coospo CS600. I used it for a tour in Ireland and on the first day, I realised that the map of Ireland wasn't loaded by default. I could see my route as breadcrumbs but not the road or anything else around me. It looked very similar to what you saw when you went off-route. Are you sure you had the map of Scotland in your unit? Luckily for me, at the end of the first day, after tons of searches, trials and errors, I managed to download the map of Ireland into my phone, connect the Coospo to my phone as an external drive and upload the map. Not an easy task but that solved the problem. For the next five days I had a proper map to navigate. Regardless of that, I sent it back. Loading routes into it was a real PITA, the routes the app plotted were terrible compared to Komoot's and it didn't have re-routing.

@Rendel Harris I'm not sure why trips made is a better metric than miles travelled, but yes, that does yield a 9x difference for cars vs bicycles in pedestrian deaths. The real anomaly using that basis, though, are motorcyclists, who are a staggering 72x more likely to kill a pedestrian per trip than a cyclist. That suggests that speed, more than mass, is the real danger. And that young men are the greatest danger of all.

@chrisonabike Indeed, you put your finger on another problem with the fatality statistics in that we don't know in how many of the fatal incidents the driver/cyclist was to blame. If the two cyclist-caused-pedestrian fatalities the pedestrian was drunk and fell off the pavement into the path of the cyclist that could obviously change the lethality ratio considerably if factored in. Perhaps lethality should be measured as drivers/cyclists found guilty of causing death per chosen metric, rather than simply numbers killed?

Finally (on cyclists and junctions) cyclists may not be as observant themselves there. While junctions are high-mental-workload spaces (or should be...) for all road users I suspect cyclists - mixing with the motor traffic - are going to be focusing strongly on that for obvious reasons. Which is again why in places which are more advanced in this respect not only are junctions given better designs *, but network-level thought goes in to routes for each mode, the better to minimise the need for interactions. Especially when speeds might be higher. * Separation in space and/or time when modes cross, explicit space for different modes so it's clear who goes where / what to expect...

I'm not sure about the "60% of pedestrians killed at junctions are killed by cyclists" number, but i *could* believe it's relatively high. Why? Other "qualitative differences" - "noticeability" and "expectation". In the simplest sense cyclists are smaller and quieter than motor vehicles. (There's a lot of "looking with our ears" when eg. crossing roads believe). But more: in the UK we *expect* cars. We've learned to deal with cars both by formal teaching and daily experience. We know "how drivers behave" - where to expect them. I strongly suspect it's not just drivers "only looking for the motor vehicles". We don't *expect* cyclists. And (if taken at face value) there's a lot of quote anecdata that people are genuinely surprised by them / completely unfamiliar with cyclist behaviour on roads (except "they all jump red lights"...) - "came out of nowhere" / "never saw them" / " they were down the road, then suddenly they were right there" / wasn't expecting them to"...

A key one is "speed" as obviously injury is strongly related to that, and the 20-30mph region is where IIRC "mostly injured" crosses over to "mostly killed". Cars would be expected to be at higher speeds, for more of the time. That may be reduced in some places however eg. congested rush hours, and where "mixing" may be most likely the environment may cue lower speeds (narrow streets).

Stepping back, given that humans operate both cars and bikes maybe a *qualitative* "what differs" might be instructive? (Putting to one side for a moment what may be mostly a motornormative prejudice: that drivers are in some way "more responsible". Variations "more to lose because they've paid for a car" / "but trained and licenced" / "more accountable because number plates" / "only (man)children and crims who can't afford cars cycle" etc).

@AidanR I wonder how it would change the stats if one looked at deaths per trip? According to the NTS the average person makes 15 cycle trips a year and 357 as a car driver, so 23x more driving trips than cycling ones but 182x the pedestrian deaths so by that calculation cars are 8x more lethal. Take out the 20% of car trips on motorways and you have one death per 51M trips motoring and one death per 487M trips cycling, so motoring becomes almost 10x more lethal. I know one can make statistics do anything one wishes by changing the metrics but that figure seems a more realistic approximation of relative lethality to me. All this of course is before we count all the other deaths caused by motorists that cyclists almost never cause, i.e. motorcycle riders, car passengers etc, almost five times the pedestrian numbers, cars then become 50x more lethal than bikes...