I refer to the letter by George Debono, ‘Artfully dodging the truth on bicycle safety’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, February 23), which is a direct response to a letter of mine in the previous issue of the newspaper and which implies that I am a manipulator of facts.

I sincerely apologise to readers of the paper for this tedious tit-for-tat. Although I seriously considered ignoring the letter, especially since Debono admits to not being able to copy a statistic correctly, letting it lie would only strengthen his original arguments in some people’s eyes.

Debono is promoting the local introduction of presumption of responsibility of the car driver in an accident between a cyclist and/or pedestrian and a car. In the Netherlands, such a policy promotes cyclists to regularly run red lights.

Indeed, cyclists who diligently stop at a red light are badgered by other cyclists for blocking the cycle path. Honestly, what is the point of traffic lights if people can ignore them? I spoke to a Dutch friend who stopped cycling in Amsterdam for this reason, and she is not alone.

Debono patronisingly challenges me to consider the number of deaths per billion kilometres travelled, and thus trivialises my reporting of the alarming 162 cyclist fatalities in the Netherlands in 2010 and 8,000 cyclist injuries in 2009. I take up this challenge.

In the Dutch SVOW (Institute for Road Safety Research) report of July 2013, the figure for cyclist deaths per billion kilometres travelled in the Netherlands in, for example, 2006, is graphically depicted in Figure 2 as around 17. A corresponding figure for car occupants is less than five in 2006, and two in 2011. Compare two, or even five, to 17. As such, by Debono’s own method, the successful promotion of bicycles as a car replacement would produce a massive increase in road fatalities in Malta.

Debono has failed to tell us in his numerous letters that the serious injury rate for cyclists, moped riders and motorcyclists has been increasing in the Netherlands year by year, while that for car occupants has been falling steadily. Such is the fact, despite the effective ‘presumption of guilt’ policy for car drivers that is hated by many Dutch road users.

Additionally, the serious injury rate for cyclists is actually higher when the accident does not involve a car. This fact alone, should it be taken in isolation, means that Debono should be advocating safer cycling, rather than safer driving, and that he should be promoting lower speed limits for cyclists, not cars.