In his letter ‘Road vehicle accidents’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, October 15), Jean Karl Soler could equally be accused of using statistics to mould his own world view. While conveniently combining serious injuries and fatalities to produce a stable 300 casualties a year, is Soler saying that this figure is somehow acceptable collateral damage at the altar of increased speed?

It is doubtful that the 300 or so victims seriously injured or killed in car accidents and their relatives feel that way. In reality fatalities reported were 11 in 2012, 18 in 2013, 11 in 2014, 11 in 2015 and alarmingly 23 in 2016 with 10 already by July 2017. Clearly the numbers are still rising and fatal accidents seem to occur when there is less traffic on the roads and cars are driven at faster speed.

Dr Soler tries to drag cycling into the fray to defend or rather justify car crash fatalities as a more acceptable social cost. However, there was only one cycling fatality collision with a car in the selected period. But Dr Soler picks on the Netherlands where as many as 75 per cent of trips are made by bike, people cycle into old age and some will naturally die cycling along instead of at home on the sofa.

These, even if standing still, are treated by the Dutch police as road fatalities rather than natural causes. These hit a spike in 2010, something that was well researched later by Dutch cycling organisations. Failure to observe these confounding factors, such as the prevalence of segregated cycling infrastructure, is at best academically inept.

In short, the Dutch prefer not to be run over by cars in their cities and have partially excluded them, swapping parking space for segregated bike lanes.