A study presented last week to the Transportation Research Board shows that the quality of the bike infrastructure has a significant effect for commuting rates and safety.
Angie Schmitt shares news of a study by researchers from the University of Colorado Denver, who "examined safety outcomes for areas in Chicago that received bike lanes, sharrows, and no bicycling street treatments at all."
According to Schmitt's explanation of the study's findings, "the rate of cyclist injuries per bike commuter improved the most where bike lanes were striped, decreasing 42 percent. Areas that got sharrows saw the same metric fall about 20 percent –worse than areas where streets didn’t change (36 percent), although the difference was not great enough to be statistically significant."
The study and the article also dig into bike commuting rates on those same streets, finding similar trends relative to the types of infrastructure examined.
Nick Ferenchak and Wesley Marshall, the authors of the study, presented their findings last week at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Ferenchak also spoke with Streetsblog about the implications of the study.
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Heyer Gruel & Associates PA
JM Goldson LLC
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Transportation Research & Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University
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