Publication - FOI/EIR release

Cycling related injuries during the COVID-19 lockdown period: EIR release

Published: 23 September 2020
Topic: Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Scotland, Public sector
FOI reference: FOI/202000075961
Date received: 6 August 2020
Date responded: 21 August 2020

Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004

Information requested

Looking at cycling related injuries during the COVID-19 Lockdown period.

We are hoping to look at the recorded number of cyclists per day vs. the road traffic use vs. the number and severity of injuries sustained with a comparative baseline in the same time period in 2019.

I can see from the Transport Scotland website there are published datasets of the automatic counters on the trunk road, however, do you have a way to count or get surrogate numbers for the other 60% of Scottish road use?

Response

We normally would not have non-trunk road data but as a result of Covid-19 we have some data which we have received from the Local Authorities. Please note the Glasgow data is publicly available from this portal: https://gcc.portal.azureapi.net/docs/services/traffic/operations/5b044adda611ad4c9b1c58b2/console

Data we hold:
- Stirling data from January 2020 to WE 9th August 2020 (attached, although please note some sheets had to be value pasted to reduce the size, the raw data is in hidden tabs)

- Glasgow data from January 2020 to WE 2nd August 2020 (attached)

- Inverness data from March to June 2020 (attached)

- Dundee data from Jan to Jul 2020 (attached)

- Two counters next to schools in Fife that have data from 2019 to WE 16th August 2020 (attached)

Please note this data has not been fully cleaned as only subsets were used. For fuller datasets I would recommend contacting the councils directly, Dundee City Council had mentioned that more historic data was available if requested and that they would be happy to share, the contact there is iain.black@dundeecity.gov.uk

For interest I plotted the Glasgow and Stirling data against a subset of trunk road counters we use, using the first week of March as a baseline and showing the data as a rolling 7 day average of the preceding days.

Please note that the data for Glasgow & Stirling has not been cleaned and so the spike in Glasgow is likely anomalous counters. Additionally the Stirling data is a single weekly average of each week rather than a rolling 7 day average like the other two.

For publishing, please find attached "Local Road Comparison Graph"

These counters should allow you to proxy the traffic levels on the other 60% of the traffic network. If you have any further queries on this please let me know.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.