Northbourne Avenue is a hot spot for bicycle crashes, with intersection smashes and side swipes among the most common ways for cyclists to come to grief in Canberra.
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And if you want to stay out of trouble, stay off your bike between 8am and 9am, and on Wednesdays.
The information is contained in a new online database of bike crashes set up by the ACT government, which displays bike crashes as a heat map.
The site maps 726 accidents involving cyclists reported to the police since the beginning of 2012, and will be updated as new data is fed in. The data showed 331 crashes caused injuries, and there were two deaths: one at the intersection of Ainslie Avenue and Doonkuna Street in February 2014, and the other in Fitzhardinge Crescent in Evatt in September 2012.
Reports of the accidents at the time say neither cyclist was wearing a helmet.
Territory and Municipal Services Minister Shane Rattenbury is encouraging cyclists to report accidents so the government can better understand when they happen and how.
Northbourne is a clear black spot, the site of 87 of the reported crashes across the city, or 12 per cent.
Wednesday is the worst day of the week, with about 150 Wednesday crashes reported. The finding matches car crash data, which also show most car accidents in Canberra happen on Wednesdays. No one has offered an explanation for the Wednesday phenomenon.
Twenty-two per cent of bike accidents occur between 8am and 9am, an hour of trouble that far outstrips any other hour of the day, also the worst time on a Wednesday. Forty-seven of the crashes happened between 8am and 9am on Wednesdays, followed by the same hour on Thursdays (32 crashes).
The bike crash data show "right-angle collisions" – essentially intersection accidents – are the most common, accounting for 265 of the 726 crashes, or 37 per cent. Side swipes involving cars and bikes travelling in the same direction are also a common accident, with 111 accidents described as same-direction side swipes.
There were 26 rear-end collisions (whether bike to car, car to bike, or even bike to bike is unclear), and two head-on collisions. One cyclist struck an animal in an off-road accident and another struck a pedestrian, also off-road.
Mr Rattenbury said it was estimated that up to half of crashes went unreported, with the data only taking in accidents reported to police.
The concentration in Northbourne and around the city was not surprising, given the number of cyclists in the city area, but the data would also improve the government's understanding of the types of accidents and specific locations.
Feedback from the community would help the government improve safety for cyclists and guide decisions about new infrastructure.
