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Abstract
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Dedicated bike lanes reduce crashes and injuries, but not all bike infrastructure is created equal, and cyclists need to learn how to share space, say experts who have studied cycling safety.
Evidence is mounting that bike lanes reduce overall injuries and deaths, though the lanes pose various degrees of risk. Safer lanes are those physically segregated from motor vehicles, while other bike lanes or multi-use paths have no physical barriers for protection, and pose different risks cyclists may not be aware of, says Dr. Meghan Winters. Winters is the lead author of a recent Canadian Journal of Public Health study on risk perceptions of bike infrastructure (CJPH 2012;103:S42-7). Her research concludes that risk perceptions surrounding cycling are sometimes at odds with observed risk.
Winters and her colleagues surveyed 690 cyclists who went to emergency departments in Toronto, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia. They calculated the observed risk of certain bike infrastructure using a case-crossover study design that compared the characteristics of a site where a cycling injury occurred to control sites along the route. The researchers calculated perceived risk of different infrastructure types based on the injured cyclists’ response to the question: “How safe do you think this site was for cyclists on that trip?”
The researchers found general agreement between the cyclists’ perception of risk and the risk they observed at the injury sites, with some discrepancies. Cyclists perceived multi-use paths where cyclists share space with walkers and other cyclists to be lower-risk than the researchers observed them to be, while the cyclists perceived that segregated bike lanes were higher risk than observation assessed them to be ...
Language: en |