Bike Items That Have Little to Nothing to do With DC (11/08/09)

This local TV news story about drivers and construction companies and dumpsters blocking bike lanes in Philadelphia could just as easily be done in DC.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Design Trust for Public Space sponsored a contest to redesign the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Several of the designs involved adding bikeways, some at ground level and others above the street.

On the heels of the braking doctor conviction is a distracted driver case out of San Francisco. The crash happened on Easter.

The Mercedes driver testified he didn't see the 6-foot-tall orange rabbit driving a pedicab because he was fumbling for a dropped cell phone.

After a daylong trial, Judge Karin Immergut found Edward Cespedes-Rodriguez guilty of hit and run driving for leaving the scene of the crash last April 12.

But Immergut cleared the 34-year-old Portland man of recklessly endangering another person.

I guess hitting someone because you weren't actually driving your car (just pushing the gas pedal) is OK if you don't leave the scene. (tip Contrarian)

The Mineta Transportation Institute hosted a discussion on Using Bicycles for the First and Last Mile of a Commute.

The Myth of the Scofflaw Pedestrian.

A new study determines that on-road bike facilities are the safest for cyclists

“Results to date suggest that sidewalks and multi-use trails pose the highest risk, major roads are more hazardous than minor roads, and the presence of bicycle facilities (e.g. on-road bike routes, on-road marked bike lanes, and off-road bike paths) was associated with the lowest risk.”

I do wonder if the sidewalk data removes wrong-way cyclists from the equation and if the data considers young cyclists and other self-selecting cyclists who only ride on trails and sidewalks because they feel they lack the skill to ride in the road. BikePortland points out:

many types of infrastructure now common in North America have not been studied at all, including bike boxes, sharrows, and the relationship between cycling and speed bumps.

Blumenauer proposes expanding Safe Routes to Schools to high schools.

Comments

[Contrarian]

A new study determines that on-road bike facilities are the safest for cyclists.

I think you're overstating the case there. What the study found was that the streets that facilities have been put on tend to be the safer streets. No effort was made to compare similar streets with and without facilities, or the same street before and after facilities, to see if adding facilities makes a street safer.

There is a fundamental problem in bike safety research that no seems to have been able to crack. Bike fatalities themselves are rare -- about 700 per year, on about 2 million miles of paved roads in the US. That's such a statistically miniscule number that it's impossible to use fatalities as a measure of safety, any sort of causality gets lost in the noise.

On the other hand you could use something that you can measure, and researchers do this all the time -- passing distances, bike speeds, car speeds. The problem with these measures is that no one knows how they correlate to safety.