One day, in a fit of idleness, I decide to travel across London by public transport. It is a mistake for many reasons (the bus doesn't come; there's vomit on the tube platform), but what really rattles me is a story in a local newspaper, which I pick up on the way home: "Cyclist dies in Park Lane collision with bus."
It isn't just the headline that upsets me but the final line of the report: "Statistics show that more than one cyclist is seriously injured on London's roads every day."
When I'm on my bicycle, I barely give a thought to the dangers. But now I feel a desperate need to find out if these statistics are as scary as they look. So I ring the reporter who wrote the article. He tells me the figures come from a news story in which police records are being challenged by the Association of Directors of Public Health as part of a campaign for better cycle paths. So the serious injury level is probably even worse than the 373 a year that the police declare.
Two bike accidents are mentioned in the report. One involves a lorry and the other a bus. I reassure myself that I try to avoid routes taken by lorries and I'm very wary of buses - particularly those dreadful bendy ones London has that slice into every corner. But I realise that I've never actually plucked up the courage to look the figures in the face, so I contact the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). The news isn't cheering. Though the overall number of fatalities on Britain's roads fell in 2005 - the latest date for which figures are available - cyclist deaths increased by 10% in the same period. RoSPA also states that nearly all these crashes were with large vehicles near junctions in built-up areas. About a fifth of fatal HGV accidents with cyclists occur in inner London, which is where I live and work.
I scan the figures for tips on how to stay alive and discover that most of the accidents involve heavy vehicles turning left. RoSPA's advice is commonsensical: avoid riding on the inside of large vehicles, especially near a junction. Don't assume that if there's a wide gap between a lorry and the kerb it's safe to sneak into it. "As the lorry begins to turn, it will swing back to the left . . . The gap between the kerb and the lorry will disappear in an instant." Reading this sort of thing is the equivalent to the anxious cyclist of fingernails scratching a blackboard, but it's suddenly very clear to me that only by facing up to risk am I going to learn how to keep safe.
The subtext, of course, is that cyclists shouldn't really be sharing the road with large vehicles at all, and under ambitious new plans for super-cycleways recently unveiled by the Mayor of London, we may not have to for much longer. But until these super-routes are in place, we have to live together, and now I've started facing the fear, there are more questions I would like to ask.
For instance, are there any statistics about the time of day that accidents are most likely to occur? My hunch is that if you're a city cyclist, it's a bad idea to travel in the rush hour. I'm lucky enough to have a job that enables me to be an off-peak traveller, and in the absence of hard statistical evidence I can only quote a traumatic recent rush-hour journey in which I was nearly knocked over by a motorist overtaking on the inside (he swore at me!), and was waved across the road by a friendly bus driver who had failed to notice that he was being overtaken at the time by a stressed boy racer.
Such anecdotes are the staple of bike-shed conversation, and are as reliable as the last incident that happened. But statistics can make everything seem equally risky. If I can contrive a journey to work involving no left turns, will I be safe? How will that advantage compute with the disadvantage of spending longer on the road as I make a large clockwise circle to my destination? Perhaps the real lesson is not to pick up newspapers on the tube.
