Study: Interaction between Bicyclists and Streetcars Find Deadly Results

Lloyd Alter writes in TreeHugger about the intersection of two popular modes of transportation in his city—bicycles and streetcars, or trams as they are called in Canada. The resulting mix is a decidedly dangerous one:

Toronto has lots of streetcar tracks, and more and more cities in the US are installing them. Those cities should consider this recent study, Bicycling crashes on streetcar (tram) or train tracks: mixed methods to identify prevention that looked at how cyclists and streetcar tracks interact, and it isn't pretty. It was prepared by a team led by Kay Teschke of the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia.

Another passage from the article:

The number of cyclists having track-related crashes is significant, roughly a third of reported crashes in the study period. They looked at physical factors like the design of the tracks or the width of tires and found that narrow tires were involved in more accidents than wider, hybrid tires, but that except for fat bikes, all of the normal tires could get caught in the flange.