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Transportation Mon Aug 30 2010
Creating Bike Lanes Makes Cities Safer for Pedestrians
A study by the New York City Department of Transportation has found that increasing the amount of dedicated bike lanes--and enforcing the laws around them--actually increases protection for pedestrians; roads with bike lanes saw 40% fewer pedestrian incidences with autos.
Perhaps this can help add light to the current hulabaloo going on in the comments on a post over at our sports blog, Tailgate, about the monthly Critical Mass "Happy Friday" bike rides.
Dennis Fritz / August 30, 2010 8:17 PM
This is an interesting finding, but I think it misses a few points:
1) Those most endangered by dedicated bike lanes are not pedestrians, but cyclists. It is people on bikes who always seem to be getting hit by cars.
2) As a pedestrian, I find I can be confident on any given day that a car coming towards me will heed stop trafiic signs 99% of the time. However, in my experience, the odds a cyclist will do so is only about 50/50.
3) As much as some people are loathe to admit it, Chicago is just not an ideal city for mass bike transit. It is too dense, too compact. This wasn't even an issue when I was growing up here. It only became an issue after gentrification brought hordes of bike-riding, former suburbanities into town. They hoped keep riding here, just they did in the low-density suburban areas where they grew up. That's understandable. But it becomes less and less viable the more and people decide to try it. The real key to improved transit in Chicago is to reduce vehicular traffic and replace it with improved mass transit. It is not to put loose more and more cyclists onto streets dominated by cars. That is just going to get more people hurt.