Biking in the 21st century

Since 2007, New York City has added 31 miles of protected bike lanes — that is, lanes protected by a physical barrier, such as a row of parked cars or a curb.

The new report, spotted by Eric Jaffe at CityLab, found that on Columbus and 8th avenues, the time it took a car to traverse a specific distance dropped significantly after the installation of the lanes, while on 1st Avenue, it increased only slightly. At the same time, rates of bicyclist injuries declined steeply on all three streets, along with Broadway, 8th, and 9th avenues.

The growth of bike share programs is gaining momentum in the US.

But this growth is absolutely dwarfed by the explosion of bike share programs in China over the last couple of years.

But as it turns out, Citi Bike — along with other bike-share programs in bustling cities like Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco — have been shockingly safe. There’s no central data source for all programs, but Reuters independently confirmed with several experts that we still haven’t seen a single death so far. This includes some 10.3 million rides taken in New York since Citi Bike launched in May 2013, which have led to just 40 injuries that needed medical attention.

This isn’t the first big positive safety news to come out of bike share. In June, researchers found that in five major bike share cities, both total injuries and head injuries that result from biking decreased after the programs were introduced — despite the total number of miles biked increasing significantly.

It’s not uncommon to spot cyclists in a city riding around with earbuds crammed firmly into each ear.

To many people, this seems insane: city riding is dangerous to begin with, and eliminating one of your senses can only make it more perilous.

If you live in a city and sometimes find yourself wondering about the fastest way to get somewhere — by bike, on foot, in a car, or using public transportation — you’re in luck.

A new set of interactive maps by You Are Here, a mapping project by the MIT Media Lab, lets you click on any particular spot in your city and shows you the fastest way to get anywhere else. Depending on your starting point, parts of the maps turn green (to show where walking would be fastest), yellow (for biking), blue (for transit), and red (for driving). Driving times include how long it’ll generally take to find parking in each area.

But that claim was wrong.

The first finding is more important — but it was largely ignored in the initial round of coverage. Even though bikeshare programs encourage more people to bike without a helmet, the overall number of head injuries by bicyclists declined. That’s especially notable given that the number of miles biked went up in bikeshare cities.

A new report details the where, how, and why of the hundreds of bicycle deaths that occur across the United States.

While the government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration collects annual data, it’s not very detailed — it details the number of cyclist fatalities over time, but not a whole lot else.

Today is Bike to Work Day — an event that’s all about trying to get more people to ride bicycles more regularly.

And here’s some advice that might help with that goal: Stop forcing people to wear bike helmets.

New American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau shows that the number of people who say they bike to work as their normal mode of commuting has surged over the past decade, making it the fastest growing form of transportation:

But despite the rapid increase in cycling’s popularity and its high profile in the media, it remains very much a niche pursuit in the United States:

If you’ve looked around a city lately, you might’ve noticed that many cyclists don’t obey some traffic laws. They roll through stop signs, instead of coming to a complete stop, and brazenly ride through red lights if there aren’t any cars coming.

Cyclists reading this might be nodding guiltily in recognition of their own behavior. Drivers might be angrily remembering the last biker they saw flout the law, wondering when traffic police will finally crack down and assign some tickets.

Red lines show especially highly-used routes, followed by dark blue lines, then light blue. The map is remarkably detailed, allowing you to zoom in to an individual street and see which lane bikers traveled in most often. It shows which paths and streets are clogged with users and which are curiously overlooked.

Strava is mainly used by competitive exercisers looking to improve their times and beat others’, so this isn’t a picture of bicycle commuting or casual walking. But as a whole, it’s the most comprehensive picture of recreational biking and running we have.

About 16% of people who die in traffic crashes in the US are bikers or pedestrians. According to the Department of Transportation, 4,743 pedestrians and 726 bikers were killed in 2012 (the most recent year it has data). Here, in four charts, is an exploration of where the riskiest roads are for someone traveling under human power.

Update: The raw data for the above two graphs is from the DOT and Census Bureau, as provided to me by the Alliance for Biking & Walking, a coalition of biking and walking advocacy organizations. The analysis itself is mine.

There are many difficulties when trying to account for variations in the amount of biking and walking going on in these cities. For example, there’s no consistent data set across cities of miles biked or walked, which would likely be the ideal way to calculate risk.