Cost of fall injuries in traffic are for pedestrians and bicyclists - municipal respons needed

Abstract Motivation Pedestrians and bicyclists have been posting in news and social media with reflections on municipal efforts to clean bicycle paths and sidewalks in icy and wet conditions. The municipality have lowered budgets for these cleaning efforts in recent years. Methods Analysis of A&E department registration data with the Nomesco core dataset allows for separation of location, age, sex, time of day and date of injury. Injury severity is classified according to diagnosis of treatment (minor/major). Cost calculations are based on national scales from the Ministry of Transport (ambulance/police/treatment/rehabilitation). Cold weather was defined as lowest day temperature < 5 degree C (Danish Metereological service DMI). Results During 2023 all pedestrians or bicyclists (n = 2516) treated at the A&E following an incident on sidewalks, streets or bicyclepaths (population 225.000) were included. Non-serious were (total/cold weather): sidewalks (699/266), bicyclepaths (414/117), streets (762/277). Serious: sidewalks (290/130), bicyclepaths (123/32), streets (228/100). Assessment of economical costs was DKK: Non-serious were (total/cold weather): sidewalks (20.8/7.9), bicyclepaths (12.4/3.5), streets (22.7/8.3). Serious: sidewalks (42.2/18.9), bicyclepaths (17.9/4.7), streets (33.2/14.6). Discussion and conclusions The economic burden for the population and municipality far exceeds the costs for cleaning the streets, bicyclepaths and sidewalks in icy and wet conditions. With appropriate injury surveillance and communication to municipal authorities revised cleaning principles was decided at the political level Key messages • Appropriate and focused injury registration is needed for targeted political level decision. • Standardized and targeted economic calculations are persuasive in the political arena at the local level.