An occasional update on items from the Velo-city.
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RISK
Thomas Krag weighs the risks of walking, biking, and driving. Phil of Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science summarizes:
[I]t’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer. Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if people give up their cars, they will travel a lot fewer kilometers! According to the article, in Denmark in 1992 (!), cycling was about 3x as dangerous per kilometer as driving, but was essentially equally safe per hour and somewhat safer per trip.
From Andrew Sullivan.
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WHAT IS A BICYCLE?
“An engine-less car or a pedestrian on wheels?”
That was the subject of a panel discussion at an international bike conference last month in Spain. And the focus of debate over cycling enforcement in Central Park, as reported in the New York Times.
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HITLER ON HORNBY STREET
Yup, maybe the most-used satirical clip on Youtube and I know all you Vancouverites have seen it – but this is for the record.
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HOW WOULD THE DUTCH DO IT?
A debate over state-of-the art bikeway design.
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COAST TO MOST
What a Haligonian thinks of Vancouver’s bike infrastructure. (Clue: better than Halifax’s.)
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That is a great article on Dutch intersection design. Some great ideas there. Hopefully some can be implemented here so as to make intersections safer and better for everyone.
Great collection of posts, as ever Gordon! Thanks!
“If more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die?” This question only makes sense if the speaker believes people on bikes sometimes kill people on cars. I’ve never heard of this happening. It is surely too obvious to state that fewer cars, and less street space for cars, would directly mean fewer deaths. Ergo politicians that enforce, through regulation, car-centric street design, are accessories to manslaughter (not to mention long, slow obese deaths and economic hardship as fossil costs rise).
“An engine-less car or a pedestrian on wheels?” The only important question is which metaphor for cycling is most likely to get most people doing it? And I think it’s clearly the latter. The City of Vancouver knows this, because it cited Portland’s “interested but concerned” study in its Hornby presentation, but nevertheless CoV released Keam’s god-awful Velo-City video into the world. Most pedestrians are not sprinters; most cyclists are not Lance.
“state-of-the-art bikeway design” – a.k.a “good” design, that doesn’t kill people. Vancouver insists it’s learning from other countries. And yet our tentative, ugly, two streets of cycling friendly infrastructure are about as far from a beautiful integrated network as it’s possible to get. I’ve asked the city how to turn on and off the separated bikelane and been explicitly told that intersections are intentionally abiguous: “you can choose” whether to behave like a car or get off and walk. How encouraging. ICBC data says intersections are exactly where drivers kill: again political negligence makes confusion and therefore death more likely.