Is road cycling more dangerous than mountain biking?
I think I can save you all the effort of pondering this one… the answer is: it depends.
It depends first and foremost on the scope of your survey. A new report – breathlessly relayed in Road.cc – says that road cycling is more dangerous than mountain biking.
But.
Dig a little deeper and the study reveals a sample size of 149 visits to the Emergency Trauma Department in Parc Tauli Hospital between 1st November 2020 and 31st October 2021. That’s Parc Tauli near Barcelona!
So what we are really looking at is a fairly narrow survey of injuries to predominantly male riders occuring at a time soon after people had been cooped up for months with lockdowns.
Not only that, but Barcelona is not far from the road biking holiday hotspot of North East Spain. I’d like to know how many of those riders were tourists or new cyclists and how many were club riders versus touring riders or commuters.
About two thirds of the injuries were to ‘mountain bikers’, yet the remaining third of ‘road cyclists’ tended to present with worse injuries. Lower extremities, head, neck, thorax, spine and abdomen injuries all tended to be worse for road cyclists.
Not a surprise
This to me is not a massive surprise. I am not tempting fate when I say that mountain biking inherrently entails a more considered approach to risk.
Helmet coverage is broader, body armour is often used, outright speeds tend to be lower and mountain bikers do not ride in close quarters with each other or traffic. Before anyone quips, yes I do have a bad habit of riding too close to people in front!
In contrast, road cyclists are likely to ride in close proximity to each other, with little time to react to hazards. If the cyclists are club riders then you get the competitive element too.
There’s no body armour, very little protection and generally higher speeds. Add in long distances and you also start to introduce issues of fatigue. And ultimately, there’s the problem of mixed traffic with bigger speed differentials on shared roads.
From that perspective it’s probably no surprise to hear that road cyclists tend to come off worse when events occur. Even so, I think the basic concept of road riding – be it commuting, touring or sport riding has a much more benign expectation of injury to casual observers.
Not massively helpful
I’m not sure these surveys are terribly helpful.
Location, infrastructure, local culture and rider profiles play such a large part that these sort of headlines serve only to reinforce in people’s minds that cycling is dangerous, full stop. This is very much not the case in absolute terms.
Cyclists are of course vulnerable.
The hazard of injury is ever-present while little thought is given to understanding the risk of injury occurring. Rather than focusing on the outcomes it would be better to understand the causes of injury in order to mitigate those risks.
Or maybe, given their omission from these statistics, we should all just be riding gravel bikes??
Every cyclist loves coffee!
☕Buy Matt a coffeeThere are 5 replies to Matt so far
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October 14, 2025 at 8:07 am
Tony says:
Gravel the answer? Road bike speeds but without the protection of MTB equipment? Actually I think that gravel biking is probably the safest. No cars. You make you own decisions about cornering and fairly tame routes with non of the trail hazards of MTBing like trees (ahem Matt!), roots and jumps. Just some moles don’t get gravel!
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October 14, 2025 at 10:23 am
Matt says:
I mentioned gravel in jest but actually I think we’d all agree* that gravel is probably the safest option.
I feel the quoted report is extrapolating a lot from the data though but that’s research reporting for you.
* for the avoidance of doubt, ‘all’ does NOT include JR!
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October 16, 2025 at 4:57 am
Dandy says:
That wouldn’t be a certain gentleman named Karl in your picture, would it? 🤦
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October 16, 2025 at 9:45 am
Matt says:
Andy, it is indeed a picture of Karlos, from a year or two back. Seemed to fit the bill, but I’m not sure how well it reflects on us that I had a surfeit of riches to choose from. Many of which seemed to be of you!!
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October 17, 2025 at 4:46 pm
Dandy says:
I have a book of those pictures of me ! 😳
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