Child Pedestrians are at Increased Risk on Scotland’s Roads

Child pedestrians are two and a half times more likely than adults to be injured in road accidents, according to new figures from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH).

Although accident rates are falling, more child and adult pedestrians are injured in road traffic accidents in deprived areas compared with more affluent areas. Over the last decade, in deprived areas, three times as many child pedestrians were injured than in less deprived areas. Similarly, in deprived areas there were 2.5 times as many adult pedestrians injured than in less deprived areas.

For cyclists, there has been a rise in adult cyclist casualties in the last decade and casualty rates are consistently higher in the more affluent neighbourhoods, which is likely to relate to a greater number of cyclists commuting from these areas.

“It is clearly concerning that, despite a drop in pedestrian casualties over the last decade, the rate of child pedestrians injured on ours roads is still high – two-and-a-half times that found for adult pedestrians,” commented Bruce Whyte, a Public Health Programme Manager at the GCPH and
one of the authors of the study. “It is also worrying that pedestrian casualties remain significantly higher in more deprived communities.”

“The rise in adult cyclist casualties is also worrying,” he added. “It is likely that this increase is associated with an increase in cycling prevalence, but we should neither expect, nor accept, that cyclist casualties rise as cycling prevalence increases.”

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