In response to Adrian Setter's letter ('Twisting the stats', March 28) claiming I had misrepresented Department for Transport Accident data, it is important to point out that the figures he quoted himself are misleading because they have been quoted out of context.

Adrian's main point was that there were 26,147 accidents involving pedestrians and cars in 2003, while there were 1,854 accidents involving pedestrians and buses. So he concluded that there were 14 times as many accidents involving pedestrians with cars than with buses.

What Adrian failed to mention was that there were 281 times as many cars on Britain's roads as there were buses in 2003 (27 million cars and 96,000 buses). Considering the total vehicle population of buses and cars, this means that two per cent of all buses were involved in accidents with pedestrians, yet only 0.09 per cent of all cars were involved in accidents with pedestrians.

Indeed, if two per cent of all cars had been involved in accidents with pedestrians, we would be looking at over 540,000 accidents with pedestrians.

So even using Adrian's figures, and putting them into the appropriate context of accident ratio for each vehicle category, one can only conclude that buses are more likely to be involved in an accident with pedestrians than cars.

Oliver Starzynski,

Murton Way, York

Updated: 09:32 Thursday, April 07, 2005