Today’s head-scratcher: From London to D.C., Bike-Sharing Is Safer Than Riding Your Own Bike. Hmmmm… what’s up with that? Here’s some speculation:
For now, we can only speculate as to the reasons for this phenomenon. Streetsblog spoke with two experts on road safety, Professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Ian Walker of the University of Bath. Each offered a number of possible explanations for the discrepancy in safety numbers.
“It’s shorter trips, maybe,” proposed Garrick. If bike-sharing users are generally taking trips of less than thirty minutes so as to avoid additional fees, each trip might be fewer miles, leading to a lower crash rate per trip.
Considering there is no actual study about why sharing appears to be safer, this sounds entirely possible/reasonable to me. How about this:
Walker hypothesized that bike-sharing users might be less experienced riders than those who own their own bike. “They therefore avoid mixing with traffic as much as regular riders, and ride slower, and so have fewer serious collisions,” he theorized. That might be easier to achieve if bike-sharing stations are sited near bike lanes, added Garrick.
That does not sound right to me because, frankly, urban bicycle lanes and bicycle tracks tend to put bicyclists in more danger in cities. For example, people mixing in traffic usually don’t get right-hooked by trucks. This happens when bicyclists ride to the front of an intersection and stop to the right of traffic. Some stunningly bad bicycle lanes put riders in exactly this position (e.g. Seattle and Portland) , yet they keep building lanes that put novice riders in exactly this danger. (That’s immoral.)
I’ve thought about this a bit and have come to the conclusion that I do not have a hypothesis. What I’d like to see first is a map of bicycle accidents in these cities. I suspect that the reason bicycle sharing appears to be safer (OK, this is an hypothesis) is that such programs may be confined to immediate downtown areas, i.e. narrower lanes and lower speeds. I’ll bet a crash map would show a donut shape with most bicycle accidents occurring outside immediate downtown areas — those transition areas between an urban core and housing (this assumes the concentric zone model of urban places).
I hope someone studies this further.
Comments 5
Your hypothesis is definitely worth testing, Andy. Also, some others:
1. The riders are more risk-averse and may ride more carefully, as pointed out.
2. They ride slowly on the clunkers and have more time to react to threats.
We don’t really know the demographics of the riders and need to find out who they are, how they ride, etc. Or, for that matter, we don’t know how the studies were done yet.
All good grist for the mill, though! Thanks for posting this.
Posted 16 Jun 2011 at 1:51 pm ¶Safety in numbers, Andy. It’s why cycling crash rates have been decreasing in Portland for years despite what you call poor design. Same thing is now happening in New York.
For example, You could drive for a week in Springfield and not encounter a bicyclist. You can’t go a mile in Portland without seeing several. Drivers become more aware, etc.
Another reason might just be the cycling demographics. In downtown Chicago there are hundreds of tourists on rented bicycles. It’s true that they do not know what they are doing, but at least they are doing it cautiously. The regular commuters also do not know what they are doing but do it quickly and are aggresive! : )
On the Lake front trail you have guys wearing spandex, weaving in and out at 20 plus MPH on probably one of the most crowded trails in the United States……using aerobars!!. I’d take a group full of grandmothers on rented bikes any day.
Posted 16 Jun 2011 at 11:48 pm ¶They also come equipped with automatic lights. That may be the biggest reason. In Chicago the % of bikes with lights appears to be very, very low.
Posted 16 Jun 2011 at 11:50 pm ¶Robert … re: “You could drive for a week in Springfield and not encounter a bicyclist.”
Not any more. We’re crawling with bicycles in the urban core. We really need to do new counts.
As Robert Pirsig said (paraphrase): For any given phenomenon there are limitless hypotheses to explain it. But, yeah, your sounds very reasonable and certainly in line with what we know to be true re: numbers.
Posted 17 Jun 2011 at 9:01 am ¶One might want to compare cities with similar total bicycling numbers and see if the rental bike stats are influenced by total bicyclists. I suspect not.
My hunch is it goes to behavior. Like Robert, I’ve seen plenty of cyclists on their own bikes vying for the Darwin Award. I suspect bike rentals don’t go to people who exhibit as much of that behavior. That would include such variables as lighting at night being imposed on the rental fleet vs. few cyclists putting lights on their private steeds.
In Germany, I guess lighting is practically mandatory. Seems that every bike I saw in Bremen had a (somewhat dim) generator light. Those Gazelles and other similar bikes didn’t go very fast and the riders might have at times been clueless, but were clueless and slow. I think on average, their skills were commensurate with their speeds.
Just guessing, though.
I’ve rarely lived where such a bike would suit my needs, though. Since I began commuting, my homes have been 12, 6, 2, 3, 11, and 5 miles from work. Only in two of those cases (and they didn’t last long) would I want to be commuting on a clunker. The rest of the time, a fast cyclocross or road bike works much better. One has to ride commensurate with one’s speed and conditions. If I rode like Robert’s example of the spandex crew on the Lakefront trail, I’d have a lot more broken bones….and lawsuits pending.
Posted 17 Jun 2011 at 9:15 am ¶