“The Cities That Spend The Most On Bike Lanes Later Reap The Most Reward,” says the headline in Fast Company.
For every dollar spent to build new separated bike lanes, cities could save as much as $24 thanks to lower health care costs and less pollution and traffic, according to a new study from researchers in New Zealand. …
While there’s already research backing up the facts that biking makes us happier, more energetic, better able to concentrate, less fat, and generally healthier–and that bike lanes make more people ride, and even boost local business
This is not news. This is common sense.
What makes the study newsworthy is this:
In cities dominated by cars, a small increase in cycling tends to lead to more biking injuries and deaths, making other people more afraid to ride. The way to overcome that problem, the researchers found, is to make a bigger commitment to better bike lanes.
Better bike lanes like this one, used to illustrate the article:
.
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Yes, that’s the Hornby bike lane – a pic source now being used by a financial editor to illustrate a good return on investment.
Isn’t this story, and the illustration, a variation on ” . . . prophets being without honour in their own land”. In this case more like “. . . success goes unheralded in its own land”.
The province should get smarter about this and reduce health care costs through significant investments in active transportation. Even if the 24x estimate is high from this study (OECD has quoted a multiplier of 19 on health savings), even supposing that the multiplier is 10 – let’s see an investment of $200-million from the province. That’s just a small portion of transportation spending. Cities everywhere should be calling for this investment.
Interesting. Did not know that. Perhaps if we made car use just a wee more expensive, say 20 cents a liter or $200/year more for licensing fees or actually removed free on-street parking from the property tax bill and added $2000 extra per vehicle, the money could easily be found.
The problem with this kind of study, is that they witness more a militancy biais than a scientific rigor
The above study’s numbers are first for Auckland, secondly are result of a model which is feeded with number coming of highly controversial papers, such the one from Lusk (see here an example of why it is controversial).
If the authors were right for example on the magnitude of healthcare saving: we should be able to see that the Netehrlands spend less on healthcare than other similar countries with much less cyclist modal share, isn’it?
It is alas not the case (worse, Netherlands tend to spend more!)
In all fairness, traffic projection studies for be the Port Mann bridge or Golden Ear bridge, were all more solid than this New Zealand study…
and we all know what the reality is.
The problem with dismissing this king of study is that there are many of them, in peer-reviewed journals, demonstrating scientific rigor. There is also a lack of studies showing the opposing position.
Tescheke et al at UBC did a review of several of these studies. That overview is here:
http://www.ubcmj.com/pdf/ubcmj_3_2_2012_6-11.pdf
+1
+1 with a *
The problem with dismissing this king of study is that there are many of them, in peer-reviewed journals, demonstrating scientific rigor. There is also a lack of studies showing the opposing position
…exactly the reason why we have a bike helmet law in BC!
Look at this peer reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious medcal publication showing all the goodies a legislation bring:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1614783/
What a shame Israelis have repealed their legislation in despite of the above evidence:
Thanks to our friends, something not soon to happen in BC !
Hey, here we respect peer reviewed papers…and unquestionably believe their conclusion whether we like them or not…or do we?
Oh no, those helmetless Israeli cyclists ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!! Alas, reality does not seem to like the assumptions in the paper you linked. The total number of cycling fatalities in Israel in the years 2010, 2011 (the helmet law was axed in August 2011), 2012 and 2013 are 18, 16, 11 and 13, respectively. (source: http://internationaltransportforum.org/Pub/pdf/14IrtadReport.pdf)
Of course the interesting number to look at is not the total number of fatalities but the fatality rates. Cycling in Israel has been growing at an annual rate of about 10%, so that makes the fatality rate decrease look even better than the total numbers.
Just like that recent study looking at fatality rates in North American cities that introduced bike share systems vs cities that did not. And bike share riders are much less likely to wear a helmet. And ALL THOSE HELMETLESS BIKE SHARE CYCLISTS ARE GOING TO DIE!!! Except that the total number of bike related fatalities in the bike share cities dropped while it stayed the same in the control cities, and the number of cyclists in the bike share cities increased faster than in the control cities.
Somewhere I read about the the total number of fatalities of (helmetless) people using bike share in the US, but where was that? With an annual Bixi ridership of over 4 million, just Montreal alone should have 1 Bixi fatality every two years if helmetless Bixi riders had the same odds of getting killed as other riders.
Reality can be harsh when it collides with studies full of (faulty) assumptions.
Tusk, Tusk… Helmets, last I checked, weren’t designed to stop you from dying per se… I daresay they were primarily designed to protect your brain from the pavement. May I kindly suggest that using fatality statistics to measure helmet effectiveness is somewhat disingenuous. There’s a whole rainbow of head injuries in between.
Not sure how this turned into a helmet discussion, but I guess I took the bait. Jenables, you are absolutely right on what helmets were designed for. And that head injuries are a better measure of effectiveness. And actually, the comparative bike share study I mentioned look at head injuries, and sure enough they actually went down in the bike share cities and stayed stable in the control cities.
Sounds counterintuitive? Only because there is a big difference between effectiveness of helmets of reducing risk of serious injury in the case of accidents (the “doctor’s perspective”) and the effectiveness of mandatory helmet legislation in increasing overall population health (the “population health perspective”). The former is pretty clean cut, most people believe helmets are effective in mitigating injuries in case of accident. The second case is much more complicated, but if it doesn’t get conflated by people with the “doctor’s perspective” it becomes very clear that there are much more effective ways to increase population health. People tend to focus on the “doctor’s perspective” because it is easier to understand, but unfortunately it has no implications on the question of helmet legislation, that question must be answered by the “population health perspective”.
(Btw, the rational for helmet legislation is usually mitigating the effects of bicycle – motor vehicle collisions and less people falling onto the pavement at moderate speeds. That’s why BC only requires cyclists to wear helmets when using the road, if you are mountain biking on the trails where the chance of hitting your head on the ground is much higher, you don’t have to wear a helmet. The helmet law doesn’t make sense, I know.)
Building safe bike infrastructure (and thus preventing accidents to happen in the first place, rather than mitigating accidents that did happen) is the much more effective public health intervention. And it has the added effect that it will also increase cycling numbers. Increasing cycling numbers has positive effects on population health in many ways, ranging from increasing overall exercise levels, to reducing pollution and very importantly reducing overall accident rates (which is probably an important mechanism at play in the bike share comparative study). In fact if you compare cycling safety among countries you see that it’s the cycling mode share that correlates strongly with safety, not helmet wearing rate. Helmet wearing rate actually anti correlates (probably because it anti correlates with cycling mode share, there are a number of studies looking at how helmet legislation reduces cycling rates).
So while the “doctor’s perspective” suggests individuals to wear a helmet, the “population health perspective” suggests governments to leave helmet usage up to the individual and focus on infrastructure.
Does the Teschke paper linked by Jeff is peer reviewed? Indeed, it is!
so we must happily accept, as our friends, that “Men who cycled at least 25 km per week had less than half the risk of non–fatal and fatal coronary heart disease of those who were not physically active” as reads the paper. It can’t be wrong since it has been reviewed!
Just in case of, let see what say the cited reference [15] on the topic:
(1)…it is not 25km…but 25 miles : unit measure errors don’t speak well of scientific rigor…but I guess when we like a study conclusion, we are willing to lower our standard!
notice that if 90% of commuter cyclist ride >25km a week, only ~50% ride >40km…
(2) furthermore [15] reads
“It seems that those men taking vigorous aerobic exercise [Note: that include the sample cycling more than 25 miles a week ] were at advantage in terms of coronary risk. For example, men [cycling 25 miles+/week] were less likely to have a family history…”
or “.But as only 7% of the men cycled numbers are too few for proper analysis.”
Lot of caution words in the original paper! It was may be a time when ethic was held in higher standard than nowadays!
(3) Worse: [15] examines the coronary risk on a study carried out in 1976-186.
since that time, the general risk of coronary attack has been halved by 2 (and death risk divided by 3).
You don’t need to have been to the Medicine faculty to figure out that when the conditions have changed so much…the previously drawn conclusions on coronary risk and cycling don’t stand anymore!
In clear: the assertion that “Men who cycled at least 25 km per week had less than half the risk of non–fatal and fatal coronary heart disease of those who were not physically active” is unsubstantiated and most likely wrong.
We have just evaluated one reference among 62 cited by the peer reviewed Teschke’s paper, on which gonna be build a full thesis to explain why taxpaper should spend tons of money on bike infrastructure…
One could say, it is a peer reviewed article…but for a student journal,…Fact is that peer review can be as much sloppy for any other publications:
here is what the former editor of th British Medical Journal has to say on it.
Apply critical thinking, even when you don’t like the result is also called honesty.
Interesting point. As Mr. Price has pointed out with the Fraser Institute, statistics can always be manipulated to get the conclusion you want.
@Voony #19
“Hey, here we respect peer reviewed papers…and unquestionably believe their conclusion whether we like them or not…or do we?”
I don’t question the math in that study, just the assumptions used as inputs, and the lack of consideration of what we have collectively learned in the past ten years.
If that paper was the sole basis for implementing their helmet law, repealing it sounds like the right solution.
The discussion above is about the health benefits of cycling. The study you linked did not consider any of those benefits.
Jeff:
“I don’t question the math in that study, just the assumptions used as inputs…
Exactly the point I do!
It is what we call a Gigo pipe: Garbage In, Gospel out (since peer reviewed, or data processed by an elaborated model noone understand!…but more importantly draw conclusion we like).
Voony, I am applying the critical thinking that you are asking for. Nobody is saying that the peer review process is perfect, but I submit that it has some value. The studies you are contrasting are asking different questions.
To cut to the chase, are you suggesting that cycling has a net negative health effect on society? If so, I would like to read the studies supporting that position.
I am just saying that the study claiming $24 return for $1 investment in bike lane doesn’t deserve anymore credit that the Israeli study claiming a bike helmet legislation ROI of 3:1…
In both case those “studies are full of (faulty) assumptions” (to take the Jens word).
the difference with the Israeli study and the New Zealand one, is that the Israeli study is 10 years old, so now “reality collides” with it, but you could have barely find a peer review article critical of bike helmet legislation 10 years ago. (it was even a daunting task for the cycling community to dare to criticize all those prestigious professor publishing in medical journal all the good they were thinking of bike helmet).
And no, I am not suggesting cycling has a negative health effect on society, far from it…