Sir – I’ve been looking at the county’s statistics on cycling injuries in more detail. There are some positive trends.

Serious injuries to child cyclists in Oxford are notably down, with none in 2010 and only one last year.
This is probably not unrelated to Oxford children now being able to do almost all of their cycling on 20mph streets.


Cycling deaths in Oxford have declined. The bus companies have incorporated bicycles into their driver training, to good effect. A risk remains with construction lorries and while there have been efforts to brief and supervise drivers, we think additional measures are necessary — a voluntary 20mph speed limit to bring about a change of attitude and restrictions on manoeuvring without a banksman.


Most of the serious injuries to adults happen on urban main roads. As Rodney Rose says, we know roughly what needs to be done — get the traffic to slow down a bit and try to make behaviour a bit more predictable by providing cycle lanes.


The county has made improvements on Donnington Bridge Road, Iffley Road and The Slade in the last year but progress does seem rather intermittent.
The costs involved aren’t that great; we could perfectly well have cycle lanes on most of Oxford’s main roads in fairly short order if the county applied itself to the task.
The county and the city councils both want to promote cycling.
It’s one of the most effective ways to get around the city and has the distinct virtue of easing congestion.
It really should be possible to cycle around the city with negligible risk of serious injury. Rather than a probably-fruitless further investigation of injury statistics, the county should just get on with taming the traffic and filling in the gaps in the cycle lanes.
Richard Mann, Cyclox