The number of road deaths among motorists has fallen sharply in the past twenty years, but barely among cyclists. Between 1999 and 2019, the number of killed occupants of passenger cars decreased by 60 percent and the number of cyclists killed by 11 percent, according to an analysis by Statistics Netherlands.
In 1999, 587 passenger car occupants were killed, twenty years later this number had fallen to 237. Statistics Netherlands attributes the decrease in the number of road fatalities to measures against drunk driving, the introduction of the driver’s license in 2002 and the criminalization of the use of a smartphone behind the wheel. The decreases now seem to have stopped, both numbers of victims have been fairly stable over the past five years.
Cyclists reported a drop from 227 to 203 deaths. The greatest number of fatalities on bicycles was reported in 2000: in that year, 233 cyclists were killed in road accidents. The number of cyclists aged seventy or older who died in a road accident was 68 percent higher last year than in 1999. A majority (59 percent) of the cyclists killed in 2019 were over seventy. However, this increase can also be explained; the number of older people in society has increased.
If you zoom in on the past year, you will see that in absolute terms more people died in a car accident (237) than in a bicycle accident (203). However, based on kilometers traveled, this is the opposite. Per billion passenger kilometers, many more cyclists died than car occupants (11 against 1.6 fatalities).