The state of Maine helpfully makes available a mappable database of road crashes. If one is
a certain type of nerd, they can export the data and do their own analysis. Recently I did just that, for Portland and the neighboring towns, comparing crashes that involved people on foot or bikes, on the one hand, with those that only involved people in cars, on the other.

Anyone who likes numbers can feast on the details here. Some interesting patterns show up. For example, when a cyclist or a walker is hit, in about 50% of the cases, the investigating officer doesn’t record any cause whatsoever for the crash. In fact, this is the largest single subgroup of “cause” entries that we see. By contrast, in crashes involving only cars, these no-cause cases are only 16%.

Reluctantly, one wonders whether the police just don’t care as much about the foot-powered
as the car-borne, and don’t make as much of an effort to find out what really happened when
one of the former gets hit.

Speeding-related causes, according to the police reports, account for about 6% of car-only
crashes, but fewer than 1% of those involving cyclists or walkers. A counterintuitive result; it’s the slow drivers we footsters have to worry about. Who would have thought it?

Or again: perhaps the police aren’t so concerned to suss out how fast a driver was actually going when he hits one of us.

Michael Smith
Portland