Re: [BicycleDriving] Digest for bicycledriving@googlegroups.com - 1 update in 1 topic

[Bob Boyce]

Thank you, John Forester,for your useful explanation. I have a different question which so far as I know, no one has studied on a large scale. [Here I must confess that I have not read the Cross study.]

   My question is what is the breakdown on car/bicycle collisions  according to whether the cyclist was riding on the street or on a sidewalk or bike trail immediately  before the collision?

    I offer here my statistics, based on a small sample of collisions--Lincoln, Nebraska. My count of street

 riders vs. sidewalk cyclists in a six-week period ,August to mid-September, in three successive years, was 50/50. Half of all cyclists rode in the street,half rode on the sidewalk.

   The street riders were involved in 20% of the collisions...Sidewalk cyclists were involved in 80% of the collisions. And yes, those sidewalk cyclists were hit at intersections and at driveways. 

   I find this to be a very strong argument for riding in the street. And yes, if one rides in the street, one should  of course obey the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles--not ride at the edge.

Bob Boyce

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 5:14 PM <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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• Statistics Announced - 1 Update

Statistics Announced

John Forester <fore...@johnforester.com>: Nov 16 04:08PM -0800 The cycling community has been deluged recently by government statistics about fatal car-bike collisions sorted by inside or outside an intersection. And some sorted by age group. The advocates of bikeways and cyclist-inferiority cycling have jumped on these as providing justification for their position. That is not justified.   The Cross statistics show that fatalities are only 2% of car-bike collisions and are distributed very differently from the rest of car-bike collisions. Fatalities cannot be used as the measure of cyclist safety. Furthermore, this classification of inside or outside an intersection is not helpful and leads to the unjustified conclusion that car-bike collisions outside an intersection must be prevented by sidepaths. This assumption ignores the multitude of car-bike collision situations made more hazardous by installing sidepaths. Also, this assumption ignores the car-bike collisions that are associated with intersections but which occur outside intersections, such as cyclist positioning both before and after an intersection. The fatal defect of this analysis is that it never shows how any car-bike collision has occurred. Without that knowledge, no program of cyclist safety can be valid. The Cross statistics are constructed from detailed analysis and study of each of about 1000 car-bike collisions, showing the factors that contributed to each collision. The Cross statistics (not Cross's report on them), as presented in my book /Bicycle Transportation/, are a far more accurate presentation of the significant facts about car-bike collisions.   The presentation of the fatality statistics for cyclist age groups for years since 1980 is illuminating. There is a general decline in total numbers from 1980 to today. In each year, the number for each age group are stacked above each other in order of increasing cyclist age. But, to my mind, the most significant point is that the greatest part of the decline over the years is the decline for cyclists in the pre-driving years. By eyeball examination of the chart, the numbers of fatalities in the driving age groups do not appear to decline by much. This probably does not mean that the young are cycling more safely; much more likely it means that there are many fewer young cyclists on the road. This confirms other observations. This destroys the force behind Motordom's argument that cyclists are not capable of obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles (RRDV). The great majority of cyclists on the road are of driving age and therefore must be presumed to be capable of obeying the RRDV. It would therefore be proper to insist that cyclists on the roadways obey the RRDV and to take steps to teach them how to do it while cycling.   -- John Forester, MS, PE Bicycle Transportation Engineer 7585 Church St, Lemon Grove, CA 91945 619-644-5481, fore...@johnforester.com

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