7 million trips on Capital Bikeshare and a safety update

Capital Bikeshare passed the 7 million trip mark this week.

According to the City Paper, there have been no fatalities on CaBi bikes over the past (almost) four years that CaBi has been up and running.

There have been 95 reported crashes (and perhaps some unreported crashes). 31 of those crashes required a trip to the hospital. For 16 other crashes, there is no indication whether a hospital trip was required or not.

So only 1 in every 226,000 CaBi trips has resulted in a crash requiring a hospital trip. Even if you count the 16 trips with no report, that’s one in every 149,000 trips.

As many have noted, most CaBi riders do not wear helmets. Many are absolute beginners on bikes. Many are unfamiliar with the D.C. area, especially all of the tourists who sign up for daily memberships. Even with all these factors in play, people simply aren’t crashing and getting hurt that often on CaBi bikes.

CitiBike in NYC has totaled 8.75 million bike trips with no fatalities and 25 trips to the ER. London and Boston have not had any bikeshare fatalities either. (The only large bikeshare system with fatalities has been Paris, for some reason. Perhaps because it was the first large Western bikeshare system. Paris also had far more bike trips than any other Western system, 27.5 million trips in the first year. Overall traffic deaths in Paris have fallen, bikeshare-related or not, so the system seems to be making the roads safer in general.)

Surprisingly, I haven’t seen any response from the outlandish critics who claimed that bikeshare systems would result in the wholesale slaughter of both cyclists and pedestrians on U.S. streets. In addition, they haven’t said anything about their claims that no one would ever use bikeshare.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2014/06/03/there-have-been-95-reported-crashes-on-capital-bikeshare-since-its-launch-2/

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon0530ng.html