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August 29, 2009

Who causes car vs. bike accidents

The BlueEyedGirl and I ride our bikes to campus pretty much every day. We follow a longer but low traffic rout to have a nice sage ride. I've ridden the other way a few times. Though I've never been cursed at or thought like I've been mistreated by motorists, the high speed cars felt unsafe and I was well aware that a small mistake for them would cause huge suffering for me.

It is through this lens that I saw the following post on Freakonomics:

More than 52,000 bicyclists have been killed in bicycle traffic accidents in the U.S. over the 80 years the federal government has been keeping records. When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault — a result of reckless or aggressive riding. But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes. Among the leading causes: running a stop sign or traffic light, turning into a cyclist’s path, or opening a door on a biker. This shouldn’t come as too big a surprise: motorists cause roughly 75 percent of motorcycle crashes too.

One comment that I didn't see in either of the two posts or any of the comments on the relative quantities of drivers and cars. There are easily a hundred of times as many cars as bikes on the roads. If there was no difference in the probability of drivers and bicyclists causing a serious accident, then bicyclists would be at fault in only 1% of car vs. bike accidents. So in that sense, the 90% number is actually unfavorable for bicyclists.

Here is the summary of the study linked to in the article:
What are the Dangers in Terms of Cycling Safety?

It notes two facts which at first seem convincing:
# Accident rates per kilometer are 26 to 48 times higher for bikes than for automobiles.
# U.S. cyclists are three times more likely to be killed than German cyclists and six times more than Dutch cyclists, whether compared per-trip or per-distance traveled .

But say it isn't as bikers claim that drivers don't care about them. Say instead that American bicyclists are more dangerous. That would cause the statistics to fall the same way!

Maybe we need more bike lanes and maybe drivers should pay more attention to pedestrians and bicyclists. However, this article doesn't clearly support such a claim.

Posted by OneEyedMan at August 29, 2009 12:45 PM

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