A friend sent me an article saying that in London, women were experiencing crashes more often than men while cycling (BBC article). He asked if this was true about Chicago. So I crunched the numbers. This is very low-level, initial, take it with a grain of salt analysis. It appears that that is not the case for Chicago.

It appears that men walking or cycling are involved in disproportionately more crashes with automobiles than women, but not very disproportional.

1. Men make up 72.73% of people cycling (to work, the only trip purpose for which I have data). And they experienced 75.75% of the crashes with automobiles (to where is unknown).

2. Men make up 48.45% of people walking (to work, again, the only trip purpose for which I have data). And they experienced 53.38% of the crashes with automobiles (again, to where is unknown).

This analysis also points out shortcomings in our data. Even with National Household Travel Survey I don’t think I could get very detailed (as the statistics would be too aggregated and the sample size for Chicago would be small). This data is based on two sources: motorist crash reports from 2007-2010 from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT); and American Community Survey “means of transportation to work”. The last time a household travel survey was done in Chicago was 2008 and I just acquired that data last week. I need to figure out how to connect the people and trip tables and then I can do more analysis, getting exposure data for all trips, not just work.