Slate Article: Can America Embrace Biking the Way Denmark has

[KLizotte]

Very interesting article. These stats surprised me:

Ninety percent of Copenhageners own a bike. Only 29 percent of Copenhagen households own a car.* Fifty-eight percent of Copenhageners use a bike on a daily basis for at least small trips, and 37 percent make their daily commute on bikes. (The city’s target is 50 percent by 2015.)

Bicycles have displaced more than one-third of all transportation fossil fuel use in Copenhagen and, in the process, eliminated 90,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Another perk for bicyclists is the “pre-green” signalization in which bicycle traffic lights turn green a few seconds before car traffic lights do, giving cyclists time to avoid traffic while in intersections. There is also bright blue paint where bicycle lanes cross intersections, giving a clear sense of where bikes should be in the most dangerous areas. Further, car waiting lines have been pulled back 5 meters behind bike waiting lines in 120 intersections to give cyclists a head start. In the winter, bike lanes get priority in terms of snow clearance and salting.

Every year 2 to 3 percent of parking spaces are removed to gradually wean residents from auto-dependency.

Copenhagen, which is near the same latitude as Moscow, manages to keep 80 percent of the biking population during its long and difficult winters (even during snowstorms, that level only drops to 50 percent, thanks in part to the active plowing of bike lanes).

Topic

[PotomacCyclist]

More numbers, from 2012:

While there aren’t more bikes than cars, there are more non-car commuter trips than car commuter trips in D.C. already. When you include transit, walking and cycling, non-car commuting makes up about 55% of all commuter trips.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/10/us-cities-where-fewest-commuters-get-work-car/7390/

You can also see that bike commuting in D.C. rose from just over 1% of all trips in 2000 to 4% in 2012.

In NYC, two-thirds of commutes are done without a car. Their bike commute percentage is much lower than in D.C., but I suspect that the percentage has risen since Citi Bike started up.

Midwestern and Southeastern cities have much lower rates of non-car commuting, partly because many smaller cities do not have extensive mass transit systems or bike infrastructure.

But that is changing gradually. Even some smaller cities have started bikeshare systems over the past 12 months. Chattanooga is one. Columbus, OH is another.

http://www.bikechattanooga.com/
http://www.cogobikeshare.com/

Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Monica are discussing a possible regional bikeshare system for Southern California, although they have been running into some issues as they try to surf the bikeshare wave.

[PotomacCyclist]

@jabberwocky 68151 wrote:

Gun deaths have been somewhere around 10k per year (homicides), 600-800 per year (accidents) and 15k per year (suicides).

From what I’ve seen, the drop in car deaths over the past 20 years has largely been due to better safety technology (since the vast majority of motor vehicle deaths are due to accidents). People are just as likely (if not more likely) to get into accidents these days, they are just a lot more likely to survive due to better safety engineering in the cars.

In 2010, 2.24 million were injured in U.S. motor vehicle crashes.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811552.pdf

I can’t find stats on serious injuries right now. I’ve seen some numbers in the past. Something like 100,000 annually, I believe. Or maybe higher. I do remember that it is much higher than the number of fatalities, but much lower than the total injury numbers.

[Author]

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