Here it is: our new cycle collision tracker

We are delighted to introduce to you our new Active Travel Collision Tracker.

We hope you’ll use it to report hazards, near collisions, and collisions – anywhere in Ireland. And that, over the long-term, this will help make cycling safer.

Anyone will be able to go to the website, and see what people have reported. And journalists at Dublin Inquirer, IrishCycle.com and Tripe + Drisheen will be keeping an eye on the reports.

We’ll be looking for clusters, so we can report on danger spots and how they could be made safer, or trends and what they say about how to make the roads safer – that kind of thing.

We also hope that local councillors, council staff, and others will be interested in the reports we’re gathering and put them to use to make the roads safer.

It usually takes a long time to make changes to the roads to make them safer, but the first step is knowing where the danger spots are and what other factors may be in play.

There’s less information available on that than you might think.

Research in Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Sweden indicates that more than 93 percent of collisions and near-collisions are not reported to the authorities.

Closer to home, academics in Ireland have highlighted challenges with data access and quality around cycling safety too.

Only the most serious incidents show up in official reporting, and that data is generally only released years after it is gathered.

Dublin City Council officials and councillors have said they are largely in the dark as to where the collisions are happening on the roads.

The Road Safety Administration (RSA) used to share this data in an online map until 2016. But no longer, apparently due to GDPR concerns.

At a meeting of the council’s transport committee in November 2022, Brendan O’Brien, the council’s transport chief, said the council was looking for the location of collisions that caused serious injuries from the RSA.

“We’re not getting that in a timely fashion, there’s a real problem getting that,” he said.

Off the back of that discussion, independent Councillor Noeleen Reilly – who chairs the council’s transport committee – wrote to the RSA’s chief executive officer, Sam Waide, to invite him to talk about that, among other things. But in January 2023, Waide declined that invitation.

However, in his foreword to Dublin City Council’s road-safety strategy for 2023–2030, Waide wrote that “the number of serious injuries increased during the 2013–2020 strategy … there has been a lack of progress in reducing cyclist and pedestrian deaths”.

“The need to protect cyclists and pedestrians is more vital as we strive to meet vital national climate action objectives in promoting a modal shift towards active travel and public transportation,” he wrote.

We hope our Active Travel Collision Tracker can play a role in gathering the data councils need to make the roads safer for all road users – especially the most vulnerable, like cyclists and pedestrians.

Please use this tracker, and ask others to use it, and share it widely. The more data we can gather, the better.

Thanks to Brian Rogers, of Orbiter, who built the Active Travel Collision Tracker, and to all our readers who have been so generous with their time reviewing early versions and offering feedback on how to make it better and better.

If you have questions about the Active Travel Collision Tracker, they might be answered in the FAQs at the bottom of the home page. If you have questions that are not, or want to get involved, you can contact me at sam@dublininquirer.com.