Going for a walk is a joyful thing. Even if it is raining, or blowing a gale, I’m still glad to get out, but a new study shows that my urban perambulations may be more risky when it is wet.
Across the EU pedestrians account for one in five of all road fatalities. In the UK pedestrians are seventeen times more likely to be killed and twenty-two times more likely to suffer serious injuries than car-occupants. But how much does the weather skew these statistics?
Using weather and road accident data from the Portuguese city of Porto, scientists have shown that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of pedestrian-vehicle collisions increases on rainy days. Their models, published in the journal Weather, Climate and Society, show that light rain increases the number of collisions by 6 to 10%, whilst heavy rain increases them by up to 58%.
But they also show that pedestrian-vehicle collisions decrease if it is a wet week, perhaps because people avoid walking and/or drivers take more care. However, if the rain sets in for a month, collisions rise again, probably because people decide to go for a walk regardless of the weather, and drivers revert to ordinary driving behaviour.
