Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Why Are Some Cities Safer for Cycling?

Evidence on Why Bike-Friendly Cities Are Safer for All Road Users (12 page pdf, Wesley E. Marshall, Norman W. Garrick, Environmental Practice, March 2011)

Also discussed here: Beyond Safety in Numbers: Why Bike Friendly Cities are Safer (Norman W. Garrick, Wesley E. Marshall, Planetizen, Jun. 27, 2011)

And here: Segregated Bike Lane Pilot Project (City of Ottawa)

Today’s review article – safety for cyclists- is quite timely for this blogger who lives in the first city in Canada’s largest province to get segregated bike lanes (opened July 10), prompted mainly out of a concern for cyclists’ safety when they have to travel in close proximity to vehicles. The article assesses factors from 24 cities in California, U.S. that seem to be linked to low accident and low fatality rates- ranging from safety in numbers (of cyclists) to street density to street design. The safest city (Davis) had a fatal crash rate which was 1/7th of the average for the country. Making a city safe for cyclists will also encourage more motorists to leave their polluting machines at home, of course, so that the safety aspect also affects the broader health interests of the public at large.



Key Quotes:

“With a fatal crash rate in Davis of less than 2.1 per 100,000 residents over that time, far fewer people are killed on their roads than in the United States as a whole, which averaged 14.8 fatalities per 100,000 residents over that same time frame.. compare extremely favorably with the countries reporting the lowest crash rates in the world, such as the Netherlands at 4.9 per 100,000 residents ..which happens to boast a bicycling mode share near 27%”

“cities with higher transit use also tend to have lower overall fatality rates”

“[Copenhagen] between 1990 and 2000, a 40% increase in bicycle-kilometers traveled corresponded to a 50% decrease in seriously injured bicyclists”

“when the number of bicyclists increases to the point where drivers begin to expect frequent conflicts with bicyclists, driver expectations and behavior could change for the better”

“For all road users, the chance that a crash would result in a fatality tended to be lower for the cities with lower-density street networks. This same trend was found for vehicle crashes, pedestrian crashes, and bicycle crashes.”

“street networks in these safer cities with high bicycling had a much higher degree of street connectivity as compared to the safe cities with low bicycling”

“safety for all road users may result from reaching a threshold of bicyclist volumes that compels cars to drive more slowly”

“high intersection density appears to be related to much lower crash severities”
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