One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs. A case in point is a group that calls itself People for Bikes that issued a report last week that claims that Bicycling Is Improving in Cities Across the U.S.
New bike lanes, but are they really safe?
Does it measure that improvement by the number of people cycling in those cities? Or by a reduction in bicycle fatalities and injuries from traffic accidents? No, it instead measure the miles of bike lanes, the reallocations of street space to dedicated bicycle use, reductions in automobile speed limits, and changes to intersections favoring bicyclists. The fact that these “improvements” have been accompanied by increased bicycle fatalities and reductions in bicycle commuting aren’t considered.
People for Bikes ranked 2,300 U.S. cities by these measures and encourages cities to “improve their ranking” by doing more. But if doing these things doesn’t increase cycling or bicycle safety, there isn’t much point.
The Census Bureau says that 731,272 people commuted to work by bicycle in 2022, down from 785,665 in 2012. That’s not an improvement.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality and Injury Reporting System says that 907 bicycle riders lost their lives in urban traffic accidents in 2022, up from 506 in 2012. That’s not an improvement either.
The scary thing is that some of the practices advocated by People for Bikes may be responsible for some of the increase in fatalities, which in turn may be responsible for some of the decline in bicycle riding. We don’t know because People for Bikes never bothers to ask whether the policies they support are making cycling safer or more dangerous.
I compared People for Bikes’ city rankings with recent American Community Survey data to see if there was any correlation between high-ranking cities and more cycling. The 2022 survey only has commuting data for 208 cities, so to increase the sample I used five-year data, meaning the sum of survey results for 2018 through 2022.
This produced results for close to 5,800 cities, but not all of them were in the People for Bikes rankings. I was able to match up commuting data with People for Bike rankings in 1,441 cities. I fully expected that there would be some correlation between the two because cities that have lots of cyclists — often college towns — are more likely to install bike lanes and so forth.
Instead, the correlation between rankings and the percentage of workers in each city who bicycle to work was a dismal -0.18 where 0 is no correlation while 1 is a perfect correlation. A coefficient of 0.18 shows there is a weak correlation but it is much smaller than I expected.
People for Bikes ranks Mackinac Island number 1, and nearly 50 percent of workers on the island cycle to work, so that looks pretty good. But Washburn, Wisconsin is ranked number 5 and it only has 2.0 percent of workers commuting by bicycle. At number 32, Minneapolis is the highest ranked major city, but cycle commuting there (2.6%) is lower than in Seattle (2.8%), which is ranked 56, and where cycle commuting is lower than in San Francisco (3.4%), which is ranked 62, and where cycle commuting is lower than in Portland (4.1%), which is ranked 97. No wonder the correlation between ranking and cycle commuting is so low.
Fatality data are more difficult to compare, partly because bicycle fatalities are rare enough that most cities have had zero such deaths during at least one year of the last decade. The League of American Bicyclists reports fatality data by five-year periods for 76 cities. These data show that bicycle fatalities tend to be highest in sunbelt cities. This is probably not because these cities are unfriendly to cyclists but more because people can ride bikes in these cities year round rather just a few months of the year. Among sunbelt cities, Austin is ranked higher than San Diego even though San Diego has fewer fatalities per bicycle commuter.
The League data also calculate bicycle fatalities per commuter for two different periods: 2013-2017 and 2018-2022. The results show that fatalities per commuter have increased in most cities even though many of these cities have been following People for Bikes’ prescriptions of installing bike lanes, reducing auto speeds, and reallocating roadway spaces to exclusive bike lanes.
Of course, people bicycle for a lot of reasons other than commuting, but we have very little data on the amount of total cycling and practically none on a city-by-city basis. The one good thing about the People for Bikes report is that it urges cities to collect better data. However, merely collecting data is pointless if that data won’t be used to improve policies.
What I see is that People for Bikes is more of an anti-automobile crusade than a pro-bicycle group. It cheers when cities reallocate automobile lanes to bicycles even if such reallocation doesn’t increase cycling and may even reduce bicycle safety. Instead of blindly following these prescriptions, cities should adopt a data-driven process to find out how they can truly improve bicycle safety and see if that leads to increased bicycle riding.
The size of the bicycle is a testament to it’s overall fuel efficiency, not it’s practicality. Me thinks urbanists mis-appropriate that word “Efficient”. Yes the Bike is very ENERGY efficient. But where needs/demand warrants, energy is expended as in ALL activities.
The bike cabal are largely young single and white and they assume the rest of the world lives the same lifestyle as them. Let’s see how this bike works for taking kids to school, weekly grocery shopping, taking senior parents or disabled people to medical appointments, and the myriad other things ppl do daily.
Europeans ride bikes, A lot. THere’s reasons for this…
– Absurdly high energy prices: . The persistent belief gas will stay cheap,is “Wishful thinking” and it heralds what US foreign policy turned into in order to keep gasoline and oil cheap…..
Another reason is Europe as a whole has largely a homogenized climate, South is Warm and dry (Mediterranean) and North is cool. Whether and Terrain in US cities like Vegas/Phoenix are very hot.
Steamy humidity in places like Atlanta/New Orleans, especially in Summer.
In any case, Europes widespread use bikes has other culprits
– High energy prices
– Biggest is how European society functions: In Europe it is extremely rude to ask “What do you do for a living”
Huge swaths of population are unemployed or under employed. In Sweden, 1/3 working populace is state employed, hence wide dispersal of biking for urban jobs in civic work.
Also a street grid, instead American neighborhood design of deadworm and cul-de-sac.
https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/styles/public_square_feature_image/public/neighborhood-vs-sprawl1.jpg?itok=JZS788Q6
Traditional neighborhood design and Suburban sprawl, have roughly same Density patterns, only difference is the Grid diffuses traffic volumes to manageable levels to various destinations.
Cul-De-Sac’s feed onto collector roads which in turn feed freeways.
As Anti-planner mentioned “The most dangerous roads are non-freeway arterials.” https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=21126
non-freeway arterial, or STROADs. which typically carry large volumes of traffic at high speeds, are the most dangerous for people on foot, accounting for 60% of all fatalities in US. But as the Antiplanner aruged 6. in his Mobility principles. Segregation of use.
Segregation of Use is the problem. Without sidewalks/crosswalks; Contemporary zoning practices that segregate retail from housing, it’s extremely dangerous to leave suburban enclaves for pedestrian/bicycle related activities.
Practical solution? Transportation Departments; SKIP the Megaprojects and just install 1 Billion bollards nationwide. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuFUr6eWAAAtGZK?format=png&name=small
Watch walking and biking suddenly rise for people who WANT to use it. If “People for Bikes” want to succeed, need stop their Anti-Car crusade and Focus on Biking as transportation for its…. limited but applicable uses. Bicycles themselves are a mature technology with not that much to improve upon. They don’t need rails, overhead lines, traffic management systems, traffic lights, smart grids, smart phone aps, gas stations, batteries or superconductors, charging ports, digital doodads, computerized gizmos except the latter of EV bikes.
The EV bike may offer some resurgence in activities; because their infrastructure needs are fairly small. All they need is modest degree safely integrated space. And because the EV bike is largely invulnerable to energy prices; their weakness is full scale utility and poor time efficiency. The Average road bike has a speed of 8-11 mph. The EV bicycle has a top speed of 20+ miles per hour, 10x faster than human locomotion and only slightly slower than local road traffic (Or faster in traffic conditions) A Bike lane can effectively move over 2,600 people per hour. Average calculations, 1% city residents utilized biking traffic flow improves 5%. That’s because the Bicycle requires only average five square feet of space to occupy where as the automobile average requires 153 sq ft.
People for Bikes ranks Mackinac Island number 1, and nearly 50 percent of workers on the island cycle to work, so that looks pretty good.
There’s a reason for that …
Out of more than 4 million miles of public streets in the United States, there’s an 8.2-mile stretch of road on Mackinac Island that stands apart. M-185 is the only state highway in the country where motor vehicles are not allowed.
Instead, the traffic on Mackinac Island consists of pedestrians, bicyclists and horse-drawn carriages.
WHY THERE ARE NO CARS ON MACKINAC ISLAND
So instead of being injured or killed in a bike vs. car accident you will be nursing a colles fracture or broken shoulder as you take the ferry back to automobile-rich mainland Michigan.
There are plenty of places where cycling infrastructure can benefit, especially Geographic concern.
Such as Hawaii, namely Oahu.
Oahu is roughly 20×30 miles, so hypothetically, there’s No where you cant go non-automotive means in an hour across the whole island or 20 minutes modest distance.
EV bikes and EV scooters may sound ridiculous but they are and will be a critical aspect of pollution reduction strategies. And mitigating long term geopolitical energy trends….Especially for a state 100% dependent on imports for its fuel supply.
One way to greatly reduce bicycling deaths is to outlaw it and make it as dangerous and impractical as possible. Oddly, bike fanatics never consider this.
OUR streets are safer Today than at any point.
Bicycling fatalities since 1970 have declined 14 fold.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRLBOsWWoAAu-_9?format=jpg&name=medium
ONE great way reducing current bicycling deaths
– Yes, Cities should ban RIght turn on red.
Second biggest is how fix intersection, instead of GOING thru the JOY of spending billions to convert America’s 2.1 MILLION intersections into Roundabouts, better idea is simple repaint.
Set the White STOP line at intersections ONE car length behind further and paint a YELLOW pedestrian line for crossings thus making right turn on red.
CDC on Bicycle Safety …
Nearly 1,000 bicyclists die and over 130,000 are injured in crashes that occur on roads in the United States every year.
Bicycle trips make up 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicyclists account for over 2% of people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle on our nation’s roads.
The costs of bicycle injuries and deaths from crashes exceed $23 billion in the United States each year. These costs include spending on health care and lost work productivity, as well as estimated costs for lost quality of life and lives lost.
https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/bicycle-safety.html
Rather than wasting billions of dollars trying to make things safer for people outside of large SUVs, why not spend a far smaller amount of money helping everyone get inside a large SUV of their own? No social engineering needed – just affordable mobility for all!
“The costs of bicycle injuries and deaths from crashes exceed $23 billion in the United States each year.”
By providing a large SUV to every bicyclist (and prohibiting bicycling in public), we’d reduce those costs to 0. It would be a net savings for society.
“ONE great way reducing current bicycling deaths
– Yes, Cities should ban RIght turn on red. ”
Make congestion even worse for long-suffering drivers so that a few elitists can stroll across the street at their leisure? No thanks, LazyReader. Take those ideas back to streetsblog or wherever else you found them.
janehavisham wrote, “why not spend a far smaller amount of money helping everyone get inside a large SUV of their own?”
Assuming that the “buy” is for just the 131,000 who are currently killed or injured each year and that the SUVs were purchased for $30,000 each, the cost to the American taxpayers would be $3.9 billion. That’s billion with a “b”. Of course buying an SUV to replace each and every dust covered bicycle stored in garages and basements from Alaska to Puerto Rico might up the number quite a bit.
Maybe the taxpayers could buy electric buses and issue free bus passes to every man, woman and child to get the cars off the road as well as the bikes.
The reality is that people make bad decisions and live carelessly and we can’t legislate that away … no matter how hard we try.
rovingbroker, as I showed above in my post buying an SUV for each person would actually save money since no one would be permitted to bicycle in public, thus saving $23 billion that bicyclists would have otherwise incurred with their foolish habit of getting in the way of drivers.
Advocacy groups like People for Bikes blame large SUVs with limited visibility as a cause for more pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities, but often forget that these deaths are far quicker than they would be with smaller cars, granting a relatively quick demise and sparing thousands of pedestrians and bicyclists a long, lingering stay at a hospital with diminished quality of life.
The limited visibility available in SUVs also spares the driver and passenger of seeing an unpleasant sight of the remains of the pedestrian or bicyclists, which as many of us know is one of the most traumatic parts of being a driver who runs someone over.
janehavisham wrote …
” … as I showed above in my post buying an SUV for each person would actually save money since no one would be permitted to bicycle in public, thus saving $23 billion that bicyclists would have otherwise incurred with their foolish habit of getting in the way of drivers.”
You forgot to include the cost of all those SUVs. Tsk tsk tsk. Or perhaps you were being sarcastic …
“You forgot to include the cost of all those SUVs.” No, as you said yourself, buying enough SUVs is only 3.9 billion, so we save 23-3.9 = 19 billion dollars! This amount can help fund repairs and gas costs, stimulating the petroleum and tire industry, shifting more economic activity to these important parts of the economy and less to parasitical, harmful sectors like bicycle and shoe manufacture.
janehavisham wrote, “No, as you said yourself, buying enough SUVs is only 3.9 billion … ”
What I wrote was, “Assuming that the “buy” is for just the 131,000 who are currently killed or injured each year … ”
But since we don’t know in advance which 131,000 bikers will be killed or injured, we would have to buy an SUV for each and every biker.
The Census Bureau says that 731,272 people commuted to work by bicycle in 2022 …
Which works out to a little less than $22 billion. Lets buy them all a bus pass.
$23-$22 = $1 billion saved!
TOTAL road spending in USA was 206 Billion dollars.
Where as Total US Transit spending approached 100 billion.
Of that 100 billion about 1 out of every 5 dollars was in New York-Long Island/New Jersey area transit systems alone carried 4x more than ALL the nations 16 major transit systems put together.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/fischer-baum-datalab-public-transit-chart2.png
For what it’s worth we could spend the same money from the bottom 10 and buy every car-less Household an economy/hybrid.
Honolulu’ HART cost over 9.9 Billion, Enough to buy a car for every Hawaiian state household.
“For what it’s worth we could spend the same money from the bottom 10 and buy every car-less Household an economy/hybrid.”
Instead, we bought every union transit worker a BMW and every union exec a Lamborghini.
Totally agree, LazyReader. If the government spent money getting these poor folks an SUV of their own, tragic incidents caused by overly dense urban centers would be avoided:
https://x.com/amNewYork/status/1809056896604594400
The Federal Aviations Administration’s burdensome regulations may *in theory* prevent airline crashes, but also prevent countless airplane journeys that could take place without the FAA’s arbitrary and capricious standards for pilot sobriety and airplane maintenance.
Unfortunately, many bicycle safety advocates want to apply the same burdensome regulations to drivers and our cities, despite the lack of evidence that inconveniencing drivers (for example by requiring them to obey stop signs and traffic signals and pay attention to what’s outside their cars) will do anything to improve safety for pedestrians or bicyclists.
Antiplanner’ own research….
“Measured in fatalities per billion vehicle miles, urban freeways, which are usually closed to pedestrians and cyclists, are the safest roads in the nation. Non-freeway arterials highways, which are open to pedestrians and cyclists, are the most dangerous roads. ”
60% all bicyclist fatalities occur at intersections.
The rest is common discipline. Unlike cars, Bicyclists don’t attend Drivers Ed courses. Thus social discipline, legal consequence aren’t taught or observed average biker.
Never the less. Our streets are Safer now than Ever before. Could it be safer? Sure…
Screw transportation mega projects and install pedestrian protection.
Washington DC has many claims/fame and title. But it’s newest, is City of Bollards. They’re everywhere. In the architectural canon, The bollard goes back, way back — all the way to Renaissance Rome as traffic control to separate Pedestrian areas from Carriage ways….
Maryland/Virginia DC area theyre as common as trees.
https://deltascientific.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/dsc600-frb-pittsburgh-001-1.jpg
And they fit every architectural style from classical *above
to the modern
https://images1.loopnet.com/i2/RITT5jFIRtVWkcxaSsCQyarPVrOW3PwDUP8AAVO-ufM/112/image.jpg
The decorative planter
https://www.cecilimages.com/img-get/I0000CunR5G3Wk2E/s/900/900/WashDC-4494.jpg
The unAssuming Bench.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d7/85/25/d785257d00b63213101c8ea527ba77b0.jpg
DC almost 18,000 people use bikes as transportation regularly; and Betwwen 2012-2022; there were observered 4,926 Cyclists involved in crashes in DC, according to data from the DDOT and Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in the Crashes in DC data set from Open Data DC. 73% of the cyclists involved in the recorded crashes involved some sort of injury and there were mere 13 fatalities.
or you could get the federal govt out of it all together. let states and localities figure out the best way to integrate various modes of transport. e-bikes are great ( I have had one since 2016) for alternate trips for groceries and errands and visits…and some better bike connections and links for recreation or commuting might serve some places well. but get the federal govt out of it altogether.
AP: “Instead of blindly following these prescriptions, cities should adopt a data-driven process to find out how they can truly improve bicycle safety and see if that leads to increased bicycle riding.”
I have an idea, maybe lower speed limits (and enforce them)? Let’s look at the data:
https://www.nrso.ntua.gr/review-of-city-wide-30-kmh-speed-limit-benefits-in-europe-may-2024/
“A paper titled “Review of City-Wide 30km/h Speed Limit Benefits in Europe” authored by George Yannis and Eva Michelaraki has been published in Sustainability. This study allows the quantification of the benefits in safety, environment, energy, traffic, livability, and health before and after the phased implementation of city-wide 30 km/h speed limits. Results from 40 different cities across Europe (including Paris, London, Brussels, and Helsinki) demonstrated that 30 km/h speed limits have led to significant reductions: 37% of road crash fatalities, 18% in emissions, 2.5dB in noise pollution and 7% in fuel consumption (on average), with very small variations of average traffic speed.”