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Old May 31st 19, 12:35 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Frank Krygowski[_4_]
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Default More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"

On 5/30/2019 7:07 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Thu, 30 May 2019 16:00:46 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 5/30/2019 11:48 AM, sms wrote:
Well actually it's from the U.S., reported in the UK.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bike-lane-cycling-road-safety-driver-deaths-fatalities-a8934841.html


"With added bike lanes, fatal crash rates dropped in Seattle (by 61 per
cent), San Francisco (by 49 per cent), Denver (by 40 per cent) and
Chicago (by 38 per cent)."

Cue the "Danger Danger" people to dispute the study. Maybe it wasn't the
bike lanes at all, maybe it was more people wearing helmets--wait that
couldn't be. Maybe it was more disc brakes. Maybe it was risk
compensation. Did gardening injuries go up or down?


Right, we're not allowed to dispute the study, because it conforms to
Scharf's prejudices.

Scharf saw the British propaganda ad for the study. I saw the one
published in America. I'd read the paper, but the advertisement seems to
be premature; the article's not available yet.

But the American promotion publicity for the paper makes it clear that
Ferenchak and Marshall remain masters of propaganda by implication. They
said "Researchers looked through 13 years of data from 12 large U.S.
cities with high-bicycling mode shares, including Denver, Dallas,
Portland, Ore., and Kansas City, Mo. During those [unspecified] years,
the United States saw a 51% increase in bicycling to work and the number
of protected bike lanes double each year starting in 2009. In a
longitudinal study, the researchers investigated over 17,000 fatalities
and 77,000 severe injuries."

But if there was such an increase - which is debatable - "protected bike
lanes doubling each year" had approximately zero relation. Why? Because
there are still only about 300 miles of "protected" bike lanes in the
entire nation, out of 400 million miles of roads. "Protecting" a block
here and a block there - which is what's usually done - seems very
unlikely to have a national effect.

Also, there's the inconvenient fact that "protected" bike lanes continue
to be built ("Faster than ever!" proponents would say) yet bike
commuting actually dropped in recent years. See
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ms/2319972002/
which points out that the national bike mode share has dropped, and in
certain cities, dropped precipitously despite the building of new
facilities. The League of American Bicyclists' rah-rah publication
https://bikeleague.org/sites/default..._2017_KM_0.pdf
(with no mention of the national drop, and with numbers massaged to be
as perky as possible) mentions Pittsburgh's 45.2% _drop_ from 2016 to
2017, a time when I know firsthand that the city has been furiously
installing bike accommodation of all kinds. Similarly, Portland keeps
adding new gizmos, but sees no parallel increase. (Just a 1% increase
from 2011 to 2017, and a 0.1% increase from 2016 to 2017.)

In other words: The "dose response" is absent. Bike lanes, included
"protected" ones, are more common each year, but bike commuting is not
increasing in parallel. That shoots down facility count as a driver for
bike mode share. And U.S. bike mode share remains less than 1% overall,
meaning we're talking about low counts and rare events that are subject
to outsized random variation.

Ferenchak and Marshall seem to have settled on a career path of
massaging numbers any way possible to promote bike segregation. I'm sure
they're welcomed and coached by others with that same objective. But
they're not doing actual cyclists any good.


Note that the study, that I reference in some detail in another post,
talks about bike lanes in conjunction with many other factors and
closed by saying,

"While the policy implications of this work point to protected and
separated bike infrastructure as part of the solution, we need to keep
in mind that these approaches are complementary and should not be
considered in isolation. Moreover, our results - particularly the
safety disparities associated with gentrification - suggest equity
issues and the need for future research."

see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...488?via%3Dihub


Our academic library still doesn't have it. I'll keep checking back.


--
- Frank Krygowski
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