Cyclists are the darlings of road safety campaigns. Are pedestrians being overlooked?

Hilda Griffiths was walking her dog in Regent’s Park a little after 7am, when a cyclist came speeding round and knocked her unconscious. When she died in hospital two months later, it seemed at first like a freak accident — a tragic but vanishingly rare case of a pedestrian being killed by a cyclist. 

But since the 81-year-old’s death in August 2022, the idea of cyclists as a menace to pedestrians has gradually gathered steam. On behalf of the National Federation for the Blind, spokesperson Sarah Gayton has accused mayor Sadiq Khan of “looking the other way” on the safety of blind people and pedestrians in general, to advance the plans that Livingstone set in motion to make London a cycling city. 

Cycling campaigners, naturally, tend to disagree. But even Simon Munk of the London Cycling Campaign told me recently that pedestrians are the “elephant in the room” in conversations about road safety. “We're just a much more vocal lobby,” he reflected. “There seems to be a level of outrage about cycling fatalities, and there should be. But the same is also surely the case for pedestrians — and no-one talks about it.”

So, are pedestrians being overlooked in the mayor’s bid to cut deaths and serious injuries on the roads? We dug into the data on pedestrian safety and found out. Our investigation turned up some striking evidence how London’s surge of cyclists is impacting pedestrian safety — and found one surprise borough seeing a surge in pedestrian casualties.