[email protected] writes:
> On Aug 3, 3:01 pm, donquijote1954 <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> > The street smart poor know that the best place to ride a bike in
> > safety is... the sidewalk.
>
> That statement is wrong. There have been several studies that
> conclusively showed sidewalk cycling to be many times more dangerous
> than cycling in the roadway. I know of no studies that show the
> opposite.
<http://www.bicyclinglife.com/Library/Accident-Study.pdf> shows that
sidewalk cycling *in the same direction as traffic* has nearly the
same risk as riding on the roadway. See Table 5. For all bicyclists
in the study, the risk riding with traffic on the sidewalk divided by
the risk of riding on the roadway is 0.9 When you break it up by age,
however, you find that both the 17 and under and the 18 and over
catagories have a slightly increased risk when using the sidewalk and
when riding in the same direction as vehicular traffic. The reason is
that the 17 and under group has a significantly lower risk of an
accident than the 18 and over group no matter where they rode, but the
17 and under group was more likely to use a sidwalk.
The reduced risk for the 17 and under group is a bit counterintuitive,
given that by appearances they would seem be less careful than the 18
and older group. In a discussion with one of the authors, I suggested
a hypothesis that would explain the difference of about a factor of 2
(but it would take quite a bit of work to test it): the under 17 group
consists of mostly children who ride back from school before the
evening commute, but are in the morning commute, whereas the 18 and
over group (with a large contingent of Stanford students) has to ride
in both the morning and evening commutes. It is during commute hours
that the risk of a collision with a motor vehicle is highest, primarly
due to the larger number of vehicles on the road at that time. We can
also add a tendency not to use lights at night. That accounts for the
factor of two difference (and the large number of college students in
the area biases the "18 and over" catagory towards people in the late
teens and early 20s).
Where the real risk of sidewalk cycling appears is when riding against
the flow of traffic, and riding against the flow of traffic is far
more prevalent on sidewalks than on the adjacent road. That's where
you get an enhanced risk several times the risk of riding in the
correct direction on the road.
The bottom line is that riding on a sidewalk is not particularly risky
if you go at a speed appropriate for the conditions and if you ride in
the same direction as traffic. Obviously you need to be especially
careful about entering intersections, but the data seems to suggest
that most people who use sidewalks are doing that (the increased risk
is nearly all due to going the wrong way).
> "Donquijote," don't you think you should research some of these points
> before you make more mistaken posts?
Well, obviously Krygowski doesn't read the literature either as
comprehensively as he'd like to pretend.
--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB
