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.