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garethrees comments on How can I spend money to improve my life? - Less Wrong
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I only glanced at the paper, but my suspicion is that they are using something like 100K cyclists per kilometre of road, not per kilometre actually cycled. They admit to not knowing the miles cycled, but if you guesstimate the number of cyclists and you know the length of roads in London, you can produce a "cyclists per kilometre of road" metric. I am not sure how meaningful it is.
Deaths per cyclist per kilometre of road is a crazy unit of measurement. I mean, sometimes you have to report the statistic you've got rather than the statistic you'd like, but I don't see what possible practical significance this has.
The statistic we'd like to know is deaths per kilometre cycled. The average person in the UK cycles about 60 km a year (source: Department for Transport) and the population of London is about 8.5 million (source: Wikipedia), so the 19 deaths in 2006 correspond to about 3.5 deaths per 100 million kilometres cycled.
This is slightly higher than the UK average of 3.1 deaths per 100 million kilometres cycled, and on the high side for Western Europe (compare Netherlands: 1.0; Germany: 1.8; France: 3.1; Italy: 3.4).