How often are children injured in bicycle related accidents?

How often are children injured in bicycle related accidents?

Pat Hines (Traffic Safety Educator & Executive Director, SafeMoves) gives expert video advice on: How can my child stay safe while riding a bicycle?; How do I check the quality of a bicycle helmet?; How often do I need to replace a bicycle helmet? and more...

It's interesting because you only know about injured children in bicycle related accidents if there's a report made by the police, a vehicle involved or if the relative or witness takes the child for emergency care, and tell the physician that the child was injured while riding their bicycle. Often a child will break their arm and their carer will say, "Well, he broke his arm", not always relating precisely how the injury occured. So there's a real discrepancy in the number of children injured in this manner, but I believe in my business and knowing children, a child is probably hit by a car or falls off a bike every hour. A tremendous amount of children are injured riding a bike. The national data certainly makes bike riding a dangerous sport, but you need to look at how it happens to make sure that there's a real understanding how dangerous bike riding is. But often the reporting happens when it's not reported as a bicycle crash. A child hit by a car, is often not recorded as a bicycle related accident and the bike is secondary. So we don't have any unbiased data. We're now creating that with law enforcement to indicate if a bicycle, a scooter or a skateboard was involved, but often these are indicated as a pedestrian crash.