A new study looks at why bike share is so much safer than regular biking

Here's a striking fact: Not a single person has died using bike share in the United States.

Bike sharing has seen explosive growth since 2007, with systems in at least 94 citiesand more than 35 million trips taken. There have been some serious injuries, yes. But — knock on wood — we've seen zero US deaths from bike sharing so far.* Contrast this with the overall estimated cycling fatality rate of 21 deaths per 100 million trips.

And that's not necessarily a fluke: researchers have found that bike-share riders tend to get into far fewer crashes than other cyclists. A new report from the Mineta Transportation Institute sifts through data from bike-share systems in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. They found that bike-share bikes had lower collision and injury rates than personal bikes in all three cities. In DC, the collision rate for bike share was 35 percent lower.

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