Berkeley police handled at least eight crashes in June that resulted in injuries to pedestrians or cyclists, according to preliminary data obtained by Berkeleyside. In one of those crashes, a 24-year-old Berkeley man on a bike was killed.
That includes five injury crashes where drivers struck pedestrians and three involving cyclists. Berkeleyside put them on an interactive map.* Orange markers on the map above show pedestrian injury crashes. Blue markers show collisions involving cyclists. Berkeleyside also mapped the 13 vehicle crashes that resulted in injuries to motorists (purple and yellow markers).
At least twelve other collisions from the month, which may or may not have involved injuries, are still pending, so Berkeleyside could not review them.
In January, there were an estimated 30 injury crashes: 19 involved pedestrians and 11 involved cyclists. In February, there were 24: 14 with pedestrians and 10 with cyclists. In March, there were at least 13 injury crashes: nine where drivers struck pedestrians and four involving cyclists. In April, there were 17: 11 involving pedestrians and six involving cyclists. In May, there were 18: 13 injury crashes where drivers struck pedestrians and five involving cyclists.
One of the cyclist-involved crashes in June took place during daylight hours, while the other two took place after dark. Of the pedestrian-involved crashes, four took place during the day and one took place at night.
Last year in June there were 22 injury crashes that involved pedestrians or cyclists, according to BPD data.
A number of readers have pointed out that people walk and bike in Berkeley at much higher rates than in many other cities, meaning it’s actually safer to get around in Berkeley even if raw numbers for injury crashes may sometimes be higher than those elsewhere.
Berkeleyside has also asked the city whether it’s possible to get data related to injury severity on a monthly basis. Stay tuned for updates.
All that is known at this time is that BPD’s Fatal Accident Investigation Team has been called out at least seven times in 2019. In 2018, the team was called out at least four times. Currently, the department does not track those deployments.
More resources
Want to dig deeper into traffic safety data? Check out these resources.
- The Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (California Highway Patrol)
- A new interactive website called Street Story (UC Berkeley’s SafeTREC)
- Transportation Injury Mapping System (also SafeTREC)
* Please note: BPD said its list may be incomplete because not all the reports are done and because some of the incidents are tracked separately. Bicycle crashes could potentially involve fixed objects or the roadway rather than vehicles.
