Ride Your Bicycle and Make the World a Safer Place
The more people ride their bicycles, the safer we all are on our bicycles. Ezra Klein, a very thoughtful Washington Post economy blogger and opinionista, cobbled together information from Felix Salmon (Reuters) and StreetsWiki to present a compelling argument that, essentially, there is “safety in numbers.” I.e., the more bikes and pedestrians there are out and about on streets and crosswalks, motorists become accustomed to watching out for them and everyone is safer. The following graph illustrates the point:
As to the safety of a bicyclist in New York City, Felix Salmon takes it to a bit of an extreme: “By my calculations, these numbers mean that you’d need to ride your bike in NYC for 7,300 days, on average, before getting injured. At 200 days a year, that’s over 35 years.”
I am more of a mountain rider and don’t ride the streets much but I do run the streets often. For the most part people seem to be pretty aware of me on the street. I have found a large number of people running in the wrong direction and riding bikes on sidewalks, however. There appears a need for people on both sides of this issue to improve their safety awareness.
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