Re: [BicycleDriving] Digest for bicycledriving@googlegroups.com - 2 updates in 1 topic

[John Schubert]

Hi all,

I dimly remember that a study by Mr. Moritz in the 1990s showed a fairly insignificant difference between "streets with bike lanes" and "streets without bike lanes." 

Three decades later, the bikelane industrial complex has gotten far bolder at designing facilities with manufactured conflicts and manufactured hazards, and at blaming everything but the facility when injuries and deaths occur.  It's always the driver's fault.  Or, "you should have seen that bollard.  That's on you."  (That was the defense in Schwartz v King County, which was settled out of court for $10 million.  One of the "you should have seen it" expert witnesses was the owner of Toole Design, Bill Schultheiss.)

Point is, the way individual crashes get munged together at data-gathering time can hide the actual crash causes.  The Montreal study was a particularly cynical version of that.  And a newer study  in Columbus, Ohio, did the same thing.  No intersections were counted in the bikelane "sample."  When Patricia Kovacs asked the study authors about that, they told Patricia, "That wasn't in the study parameters."  That's like counting all airplane fatalities that occur above 10,000 feet.

Going off of memory here, I recall reading that someone measured lateral passing clearance and saw that it was less for streets with bike lanes.  That makes perfect sense.  "You stay in your lane, I stay in mine."  

Sorry that I don't have anything more exact to tell Frank.

John Schubert

On Sunday, February 1, 2026 at 11:26:35 AM EST, bicycle...@googlegroups.com <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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• Best estimate data on bike lanes? - 2 Updates

Best estimate data on bike lanes?

Frank Krygowski <frkr...@gmail.com>: Jan 31 08:04PM -0500 Like many or most here, I'm convinced that properly done, bicycling is a very safe activity. I'm convinced in part by my long history of mining data on the issue. I dislike any effort to portray cycling as unusually dangerous, or requiring unusual measures to be acceptably safe.   I'm also skeptical of either the need for, or the safety benefits of, most segregated bike infrastructure. Sure, I can enjoy a nice linear park (AKA rail trail), especially if it's empty of other users. But I know about the many traffic complexities introduced by on-road or parallel bike infrastructure.   But here's my question: What's the honest consensus here on relative risk for riders on a street with a bike lane vs. one without? What's the best data that we have? I'd love actual data, especially on a per-mile-traveled basis - ideally, data comparing streets with facilities to streets without. And in addition to risk ratios, which seem to be the default reports ("20 percent more dangerous!!") I'd love to see actual values, since 20% (or whatever) of a minuscule value is still minuscule.   I'm aware of efforts to exaggerate benefits, e.g. the Lusk paper that purported to find significant benefits to cycletracks in Montreal. That was disputed by others who noted that the "case" vs. "control" streets were very, very different. I'm also aware of papers from Denmark that compared crash data before and after installation of bike lanes and/or cycletracks. Those papers found increased crashes with facilities.   Can anyone point to the best date now available?

Jim Baross <jimb...@gmail.com>: Jan 31 05:17PM -0800 Please share the results and sources found.   Jim Baross CABO President

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[Alan Forkosh]

The study is attached.

Note that it is based on a mail survey of League of American Bicyclists members in the 1990’s.

Alan Forkosh                    Oakland, CA
afor...@mac.com

https://al4kosh.com