Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Bike Safety Could Be Mastered in Cambridge

Bicycling in Cambridge, Mass., is a big success pretty much no matter how you slice it. According to a report from the city, the number of people on bikes in the leafy city on the Charles River tripled between 2002 and 2012. That makes Cambridge a leader in bike commuting nationally: 7.1 percent of Cambridge residents biked to work in 2012, putting it ahead of all but four other American cities.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sheer number of crashes involving bicycles has gone up along with the number of people on bikes. According to an article in the Boston Globe, there was a 136 percent rise in bike crashes between 2004 and 2012, from 91 to 215.
The rate of crashes, however, has gone down by nearly 30 percent — from 19.6 crashes per million bicycle miles traveled in 2004 to 13.8 in 2012, the city’s analysis shows(only 5 percent of Cambridge crash injuries were reported as “incapacitating,” and in 18 percent the rider reported no injury). That decline in rate of crashes is one more manifestation of the “safety in numbers” phenomenonthat has been observed by many researchers looking at bicycle safety. Broadly speaking, the more people on bikes, the lower the crash rate.

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