Figure 1.4.13 - Federal Data on Bicyclist Injuries

In April 2025, it was announced that the Consumer Products Safety Commission would stop collecting data on crashes through the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). NEISS data uses a survey of hospitals to collect data, which tends to report more bicyclist injuries than the police reports that are used in data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This change in data collection will result in a 71% reduction in the number of reported on-road bicyclist injuries and an 82% reduction in the number of all bicyclist injuries based on average reporting for 2009-2023.

A 2019 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley Safe Transportation Research & Education Center estimated that only 7 to 46 percent of bicycle crashes are reported. NHTSA data tends to result in fewer reported injuries because it is based on police reports, which often have reporting thresholds based on property damage amounts or whether an ambulance was called, which may be less likely in a bicycle crash. Some consumer product failures, like a mountain bike fork breaking off-road, cannot be captured by NHTSA data that requires a crash with a motor vehicle in motion.
Chart: The League of American BicyclistsSource: NEISS and NHTSAGet the dataDownload imageCreated with Datawrapper