My youngest son had a bike wreck this summer: a driver cut him off on a steep downhill. Peter managed to avoid the car by tumbling over the curb, but the fall inflicted some nasty road rash. It also inspired me to dig into the question of bicycle safety more rigorously than before: Is it safe for Peter to be biking so much?
Here's what I learned: Biking is safer than it used to be. It's safer than you might think. It does incur the risk of collision, but its other health benefits massively outweigh these risks. And it can be made much safer. What's more, making streets truly safe for cyclists may be the best way to reverse Bicycle Neglect: it may be among communities' best options for countering obesity, climate disruption, rising economic inequality, and oil addiction.
The alternative -- inaction -- perpetuates these ills. It also ensures the continued victimization of cyclists and pedestrians. It means the proliferation of GhostBikes. (Pictured here, photo by Paul Takamoto.) GhostBikes are guerrilla memorials to car-on-bike crashes that artists place at the scenes of injuries and deaths in, for example, Seattle, Portland, and New York. (View striking GhostBike photos from Portland and the whole world on Flickr (choose "view slide show").)
Let's take these lessons in turn.
Biking is safer than it used to be.
Biking is increasing in Cascadia's cities; cycling crashes are not. As a result, the crash rate for cyclists has declined, by 70 percent in the Rose City, according to the City of Portland. In Vancouver, B.C., during the period in which the number of cycling trips has almost tripled, the number of insurance claims involving bicycle collisions hasn't budged, according to the Vancouver Courier (sorry, the link is no longer available).
Cycling is safer than you might believe.
Any activity that allows you to travel fast, unshielded, and unrestrained involves risk -- whether it's cycling, or skiing, or base jumping (insane video). Cycling involves the added risks that you're balancing on two wheels and that you're surrounded by moving one- and two-ton steel boxes. If you're trying to avoid getting hit by such objects, being on a small, nimble vehicle is an advantage, as Peter discovered when he was cut off. (Former University of Washington professor William Moritz conducted surveys a decade ago showing that more than 80 percent of bike wrecks -- generally the less serious ones -- involve cyclists falling or colliding with things other than a moving car or truck.)
But if you actually are hit (and car-bike collisions are usually the dangerous wrecks), you'll do far better strapped into a steel case of your own than if you're astride a two wheeler. The bigger the case and the more restraints and cushioning you've got, the better you'll do. So getting hit on a bike is worse than getting hit in a car, which is worse than getting hit in a bus, which is worse than getting hit in a train or a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
In fact, the best published estimates I've found -- developed by Rutgers University researchers John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra -- suggest that per trip, bike riders face about three times as much risk of dying as car and light truck riders. Because car trips tend to be longer than bike trips, Pucher and Dijkstra estimate that the safety gap stretches to tenfold when it's calculated per mile traveled.
That's a substantial gap, if Pucher and Dijkstra are right. But how big is the risk, really? In the United States, for every billion kilometers of cycling, they say, roughly 100 bikers die from collisions. For every billion kilometers of driving, roughly 10 drivers and passengers die from collisions. From 1999 to 2004, in the entire United States with its approximately 300 million residents, an average of 784 people died each year in bike accidents. That's a consequential number but it's no pandemic -- nothing like the more-than-40,000 deaths from auto accidents each year. It's reason for care but not for alarm.
Four other pieces of information put these figures in context. First, if the danger of cycling seems excessive, consider that riding a bus or train is 10 times safer than riding in a car, per mile, according to the same researchers. Many people won't bike because it's "too dangerous," but not many people refuse to drive because transit is so much safer. Why? As I've said, we're not entirely rational about transportation decisions.
Second, the same published estimates indicate you're at much greater risk of getting hit by a car when you're walking than when you're cycling. Per mile traveled, according to Pucher and Dijkstra, more than three times as many pedestrians die from auto collisions as do cyclists. Yet few people think walking is too perilous to attempt. (Ditto re: rationality.)
Third, Pucher and Dijsktra may be wrong. The statistical challenge that all safety analysts face is that no one really knows how much cycling -- or walking -- people do. Estimates vary widely. Pucher and Dijkstra accept a low figure for total cycling to calculate accident risk. Others use higher figures for cycling, which makes crashes seem less common. In the early 1990s, for example, Failure Analysis Associates (since renamed Exponent), one of the world's leading engineering firms in the specialty field of quantifying risk exposure and preventing mechanical failure, estimated that riding in a car for an hour is almost twice as likely to kill you as is riding a bike for an hour. Repeat: this credible source suggests that biking is not more dangerous than driving but is, in fact, half as dangerous. Unfortunately, the analysis was proprietary. Only one summary table (see below) is in the public domain. The engineering journal Design News published it with little comment in 1993 in an article on a different subject. (I've asked Exponent for supporting documentation but have yet to hear back, probably because the estimates are so old. I'll update this if I learn more.) Several bicycling advocates tout this table, and one has even demonstrated its quantitative plausibility. Still, as of now, Pucher and Dijsktra's estimates are the only ones published in a peer-reviewed journal, so I'll assume they're about right.
| Cycling advocates' favorite comparison of cycling's collision risks. | |
| Activity | Fatalities per million hours activity |
| Skydiving | 128.7 |
| On-road motorcycling | 8.8 |
| Scuba diving | 2.0 |
| Living (all causes of death) | 1.5 |
| Snowmobiling | 0.9 |
| Passenger cars | 0.5 |
| Water skiing | 0.3 |
| Bicycling | 0.3 |
| Flying (scheduled domestic airlines) | 0.2 |
| Passenger car post-collision fire | 0.0 |
| From Charles R. Murray, "The Real Story: Overdesign Prevents Cars from Exploding," Design News, October 4, 1993. | |
Fourth, because of the widespread perception that cycling is dangerous, the existing population of cyclists may be disproportionately made up of risk-takers. If everyone thinks biking is unsafe, the people who do it will be the ones who don't mind danger. And such people are more likely to get hurt in just about any activity. In his 2004 book The Art of Urban Cycling, Robert Hurst cites evidence that as many as half of car-bike crashes are the cyclist's fault: the cyclist ran a stop sign, made an illegal turn, rode against traffic, or otherwise broke the law.
(Aside: a smattering of bike riders clearly seek out risk intentionally. They're risk junkies, shown in the following video "drag racing" through New York).
What this means is that if you're a cautious, law-abiding, risk-averse cyclist, biking is far safer than you'd think from the aggregate statistics, which are inflated by the proliferation of two-wheeling daredevils.
Put all these considerations together and it looks like the added increment of crash danger you put yourself in from biking, rather than driving, is small, if it exists at all. Furthermore, if you care about not imperiling others -- assuming you want to avoid both dying and killing in a collision -- then cycling looks substantially safer than driving, because bikers almost never kill or injure others. But even assuming you don't care about anyone but yourself, cycling is still the healthy choice, because crash danger isn't the end of the story.
Biking's health benefits massively outweigh its health risks.
Cycling is the kind of low-impact, moderate exercise that humans need in abundance in order to enjoy vigorous, healthful lives. One study (hat tip to Todd Litman) followed almost 30,000 Danes, monitoring their physical activity and health. Lars Andersen and his co-authors concluded, "Even after adjusting for other risk factors, including leisure time physical activity, those who did not cycle to work experienced a 39 percent higher mortality rate than those who did." In other words, nonbikers -- even if they were active in sports -- died 40 percent more often than bikers.
Similarly, Pedalling Health, an Australian study published in 1996, concluded that an hour of biking a day -- normal for a regular bike commuter -- prevents four times as much heart attack risk as it adds in collision risk. The iconoclastic British transport researcher Mayer Hillman did a study for the British Medical Association in 1992 (not online but summarized here and here) reportedly showing that for every year of life lost to a bike crash, twenty years of life are gained from stress reduction, greater cardiovascular fitness, and improved mental health. As I've noted, the time you spend in moderate exercise is added to your life, with interest.
Cycling is not as safe as it should be.
Still, in the world's centers of Bicycle Respect, cycling is radically safer. Pucher and Dijkstra wrote in the American Journal of Public Health (PDF), in 2003, "per trip cycled, American bicyclists are twice as likely to get killed as German cyclists and over three times as likely to get killed as Dutch cyclists." Per kilometer of travel, the gap is larger: Dutch cyclists are more than ten times safer than their American counterparts. European safety records are improving faster, too. In Germany, for example, collision deaths per bicycle trip have fallen by more than 80 percent since 1975, according to Pucher and Dijkstra. (Of course, we should use caution with all these figures, because, like previous ones, they all depend on estimates of how much biking people do.)
Making cycling safer is a main chance for healthy, lasting prosperity.
I began this by wondering about my son Peter, but it turns out that bike safety isn't just an issue for worried parents. A few years ago, when the Puget Sound Regional Council asked cyclists why they did not commute by bike more often, the leading answer by far was "unsafe routes." This finding was not unusual. Pucher and Dijkstra, writing in Transportation Quarterly this time, noted, "Almost every survey finds that the perceived danger of cycling ... is one of the major deterrents to increased bicycle use in the U.S." People are afraid of traffic.
Making cycling safer, therefore, may unleash more two-wheeled travel more than any other thing that communities can do, with huge benefits in stemming obesity, oil imports, and climate disruption.
The keys to cycling safety in Europe are facilities, traffic laws and enforcement, education, and numbers:
- Good cycling facilities. Bikeways, bike boulevards, traffic calming, blue lanes, and cycle signals save lives. In Copenhagen, for example, major intersections painted with "blue lanes" to mark bicycle routes have seen a 40 percent drop in deaths and injuries to cyclists. In Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, traffic-calmed neighborhoods -- those where streets re-engineered with curb bubbles, traffic circles, and the like slow car traffic and shield nonmotorized travelers -- have seen half of traffic injuries disappear.
- Bike- and pedestrian-oriented traffic laws save lives, too. For example, one key difference that helps make northern European cyclists safe is low speed limits. In Germany and the Netherlands, speed limits in residential neighborhoods are commonly under 20 miles per hour, while arterial speeds are typically limited to about 30 miles per hour. Slower driving means fewer -- and softer -- impacts: 95 percent of people hit by a car at 20 miles per hour survive; just 15 percent survive at 40 mph, as we noted in Cascadia Scorecard 2006 (see page 52, login or registration may be required).
- Educating drivers and cyclists also boosts safety. German and other northern European drivers licenses are much harder to get: you must be 18 and have completed a rigorous and expensive private training course. But traffic education is not just for drivers. German and Dutch schools, for example, provide comprehensive cycling and walking instruction to all schoolchildren by the time they're 10 years old, as detailed by Pucher and Dijkstra. German third- and fourth-graders take bicycling classes, at the end of which they demonstrate their skills to traffic police on special courses that simulate local streets.
In Cascadia, school-based cycling and pedestrian education is mostly limited to the occasional bike-to-school day. Notable exceptions are found in Corvallis and Eugene, Oregon. Eugene runs cycling school buses: parent volunteers lead groups of bike-riding students to school together, following routes that collect more students as they go. And Corvallis provides week-long bicycle training for all fifth graders.
My ultimate hope is that Cascadian communities will replace "driver's ed" with mobility education -- training young people to safely navigate their communities by a variety of means, from automobile to bicycle to foot to transit. (The just-formed champion for this bold and necessary idea is the new Seattle-based Mobility Education Foundation.) - Safety in numbers. As we noted before, the more cyclists and pedestrians on the streets, the safer they become. Health consultant Peter Jacobsen of Sacramento, California argues in the journal Injury Prevention that it's because drivers become more attentive as cyclists proliferate. It could also be that cyclists become more law-abiding as they proliferate, if the risk-takers already on bikes are being joined by large numbers of risk-avoiders. Either way, the beauty of this finding is that safety improvements in facilities, education, and law enforcement will induce additional cycling, which will bring further safety improvements through numbers -- a kind of virtuous cycle (sorry).
Back to where I began: is cycling safe enough for my son Peter? Easily. The modest risks are swamped by the benefits. Still, it's not as safe as it should be. All by myself, I cannot give Peter the safety levels of Germany or the Netherlands. I can't personally install city-wide bike facilities, pass new traffic laws, and provide comprehensive mobility education to all. But I can carefully choose his routes with him, teach him to ride legally and cautiously, and provide ongoing education about how to get around safely.
Beyond that, I just have to remember that what's really dangerous isn't biking (or walking), it's sitting around. Not pedaling can kill you.
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:07 am
09 Oct 2007
My six mile commute to and from work on bike is Heaven and Hell.
Heaven is the flat 3 miles I ride on the Interurban bike path. It's green, and sequestered from cars.
Hell is the 3 mile downhill slide on one of the most trafficked and unkempt streets ever -- Canyon Drive. Cars hurdle downhill. There are commercial areas with driveways. The sidewalk has pedestrians, and schoolkids, not to mention some broken sidewalk and low hanging branches.
On arriving in downtown Kent, it's a toss up which sidewalk will be entirely blocked with construction. (I refuse to ride in the street with the cars -- there's no bike lane or sharerows and drivers here are ignorant and ill mannered.) After this harrowing three miles of Hell, I make a right turn onto the Interurban and suddenly...Heaven.
All of this goes to say, that there is an unresolvable impedance between cars and bikes.
They don't and cannot mix. Bike lanes should not be alongside roadways, they should have their own matrix that runs on the least, not the most, trafficked corridors. New corridors, wide enough for two lanes of bike traffic, should be acquired and paved specifically for bikes...no cars allowed.
John Bailo
Sutext:
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copylicious Posted 5:01 am
09 Oct 2007
I used to bike down Market Street in San Francisco to and from work every day, during full rush hour, and never felt unsafe because I knew what people were going to do before they themselves did. You just have to assume everyone is impatient and in a hurry and that no one sees you, ever. Having a 'bike bell' and using it more than seems necessary helps, too.
This is the best bike safety tutorial I've ever read, helpfully titled "How Not to Get Hit by Cars":
http://bicyclesafe.com/
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PolluteLessDotCom Posted 6:40 am
09 Oct 2007
I lived in Munich, Germany for several years. I never owned a car there, instead I used public transportation or my bike. Traffic is bad there. If you want to drive a car it is often impossible because of traffic jams, if you want to park, you will not find a spot. So, not owning a car was just sensible. And riding a bike was faster too. Anyhow...
The first time I rode my bike on a three lane road I was terrified. It went away quickly because it seemed safe. The drivers there are used to bicyclists everywhere. There have been times of friction, but generally speaking, riding my bike in some cities in the USA has been more scary even when just riding across parking lots. Nobody expects you here. You are invisible. You are not supposed to use a road, but the sidewalk like any other person with a toy.
This has nothing to do with cars versus bikes. This has to do with education. When I was a child in Germany, we had the pleasure to be taught at school how to ride our bikes and how to behave when driving a car. Of course, we were not driving cars, instead they let some of us ride these really cool pedal powered go-carts while others used bikes. We practiced under supervision in our paved school back yard with lanes of roads and traffic signals painted permanently on the surface. I (an my friends) have been exposed to city traffic since we were around 10 years old. Unsupervised, but educated amongst educated vehicle operators. We learned, like generations before and after us, how it feels to be on and with bicyclists. I have yet to see anything like this happening here in the US, and even if we start, it will be a while before most people know this. The USA is a big, empty country in comparison and any change takes a while. Parents and even police officers still teach kids to ride on the wrong side of the road. Few of us share the road with bicyclists on a regular basis. Many are scared to let their kids ride bikes on the roads and who can blame them?
I hope this will change by itself. It will be slow. The more bikes on the roads, the better. In the meantime, if you have to share the road, get a "Radlaufglocke" or "Laufglocke" (search on Google) if you really want to make some noise. These wheel driven bells are not allowed in Germany for good reasons, but you can still buy them and they are LOUD, especially is you are moving at a good speed and make a huge shrill noise. Gets you respect.
Karsten
http://www.polluteless.ocm
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Biodiversivist Posted 9:55 am
09 Oct 2007
It is a lot like rock climbing or flying a small plane. If you are really careful and remain ever vigilant, you improve your odds. But nobody is always vigilant and there are times when all bikers (or rock climbers or pilots) find themselves in a situation where they know that if something goes wrong there will be nothing they can do about it and the more you ride (or climb or fly) the higher the odds that will happen.
Cities must greatly improve biking infrastructure. I strongly suspect that hybrid electric bikes are going to be a major mode of transport in the future, but only if cities will accommodate them with safe passage.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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eriqa Posted 11:56 pm
09 Oct 2007
I also have to agree with John Bailo. (Oh my GOD, did I just write that?! And am I setting myself up for a Hansen-esque life of being quoted wildly out of context to endorse things I never meant?) The half of my commute that's on a bike path through the park is pure pleasure, and the half that's in the middle of rush hour traffic is... well, it's not that bad as urban commutes go, but it's definitely stressful, noisy, and un-fun.
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LeMigou Posted 4:08 am
10 Oct 2007
What I didn't like (and I see a similar theme in many of the comments) is the idea that it is safer to have bike-paths or bike-lanes.
These are nearly always more dangerous than riding on the road in a predictable lawful manner. There is a huge amount of controversy and discussion on this subject, much of which is very ably summed up in this wikipedia entry. There are great dangers in presuming that Dutch/Danish facilities will confer safety benefits in North America. Many environmentalists tend to have a "the ecosystem is greener in Europe" belief which isn't borne out by the facts. N.American cyclists tend towards a very different style of cycling because their country is larger and less flat than Holland. Painting a "bike lane" without also installing traffic signals, re-edcuating all road uers, changing the laws etc will and has been a disaster in that it encourages the most frequent class of dangerous car/bike collisions: the right hook.
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Steve Erickson Posted 4:33 am
10 Oct 2007
Steve E.
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dajolt Posted 7:23 pm
10 Oct 2007
commenting from Germany I would like to add that here the laws also require your bike to have certain safety features. This included working light at the front and the back of the bike.
So if you think that riding a bike is not safe, consider to get a bright LED lighting system that runs automatically, so you can have the lamps on your bike on whenever your ride it. Having your bike lit in daylight will get you noticed be motorists on the road earlier. For my personal safety, I just spent $70 on a new bicycle front light and it really makes a difference.
BTW, I also own a small Mercedes car, but prefer to use my bicycle to work and any other location within a 10 mile range.
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llamataboot Posted 12:54 pm
15 Oct 2007
How about simply not trying to pass a biker on a blind curve? We are allowed full use of the lane you know, which puts the onus on you to stay a safe distance behind us and only try to pass when it is clear.
If the choice is between hitting a biker in your lane or hitting oncoming traffic in the opposite lane, I think there was a driving error somewhere in there.
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racc Posted 7:58 am
17 Oct 2007
Please write:
Right Hon. Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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e0richt Posted 4:07 am
12 May 2008
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BruceMcF Posted 2:55 pm
11 Jul 2008
Presently, in small town Northeast Ohio, I have zero bike lanes and bikeways on my route to work. When I was living in Newcastle, Australia, I had bike lanes and bikeways for most of the route.
And in almost every case, my ranking in terms of preference is:
bikeway
riding in the regular lane
riding in a bike lane
There were one or two exceptions in Australia, mostly where there was no parking on the side and limited crossing streets ... but in general, neither bike lanes and intersections nor bike lanes and streetside parking mix.
One bike lane that I did like in Newcastle was on a busy two-lane-each-way street that had a lane that ended in a right turn lane, where there was a bike lane between the curb lane and the middle lane. That was especially handy when cycling during rush hour.
Virtually Yours, BruceMcF
Energize America 2020
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