Public bikesharing systems have recently proliferated across cities within the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The result has been an augmentation of the mobility options available to residents of cities both large and small. People within these cities are bicycling more, often in substitution of other modes such as walking, bus, rail, and automobile. While the impacts of bikesharing on modal shift are a subject of active study, it is clear that bikesharing is increasing the presence of bicycles on the urban streets of North America. Many of the bicycles deployed in bikesharing systems are equipped with lights and are brightly marked, increasing their visibility at night. The presence of bikesharing– and its resulting expansion of bicycle travel–may have impacts on the broader safety of urban bicycling. The safety of this new form of bicycling is also important for planning considerations. The increased presence of bicycles and the prominence that comes with public bikesharing should bring an elevated visibility and awareness of bicyclists on the street. At the same time, bikesharing also increases bicyclist exposure to motor vehicles, often without protective equipment. This study explores the topic of bikesharing safety using qualitative and quantitative approaches. The study conducted four focus groups with bikesharing and non-bikesharing members in the San Francisco Bay Area and completed eleven expert interviews with stakeholders. It also engaged in concurrent multi-year data analysis of bikesharing and bicycle collision data within three US metropolitan areas. The focus groups were designed to explore the perspectives and perceptions of bikesharing safety among members of a local bikesharing system, called Bay Area Bike Share (BABS), as well as among persons that were primarily car drivers within the BABS operating region. The focus groups found that people generally considered bicycling with bikesharing bikes to be safer than with regular bikes. The bicycle design was one of the primary reasons bikesharing was thought to be safer. Bikesharing bicycles are bigger, slower, and sturdier than many personal bicycles and thus are not ridden as aggressively. Members of the focus groups noted that people riding bikesharing bicycles appeared to do so more cautiously. This was noted in conjunction with the widely observed fact that helmet usage is clearly lower for bikesharing bicycles. Eleven expert interviews were conducted with a diverse array of practitioners in the field, including government officials, industry representatives, and emergency responders. The array of experts considered bikesharing to have a number of plausible safety benefits. The reasons the experts considered bikesharing safer than personal bicycling were very similar to those observed in the focus groups. Many cited the bicycle design as one of the key reasons that bikesharing appears to have a good safety record despite the acknowledged lack of helmet use. Overall, the experts interviewed considered bikesharing to be relatively safe, and they collectively considered infrastructure improvements and promotion of helmet use as key strategies for improving bicycle safety in the region. This study conducted an analysis of bicycle safety using data quantifying urban bicycle activity, overall bicycle collisions, bikesharing activity, and bikesharing collisions. The analysis established that within bikesharing regions, bicycle collisions were generally rising, but that this rise was very likely due to rising urban bicycle activity overall. The correlation between growth in bicycle collisions and the estimated population commuting by bicycle was found to be rather high in the studied regions. The analysis proceeded to use bikesharing activity data and collision data to compute key safety metrics to a high degree of precision. The results found that the bikesharing systems evaluated in this study appeared to have a lower nonfatal injury rate than prevailing US and Canadian benchmark estimates. This result may indicate that certain factors, such as the bicycle design or bikesharing user behavior, could be reducing the likelihood of a collision event. The processing of origin-destination information within bikesharing activity data permitted an informed estimation of distances traveled by bikesharing bicycles. Estimating distances traveled is very difficult to do for the general bicycling population, since information on the number of bicycling trips and miles traveled is generally not available to great precision or at regular time intervals. These computations, coupled with bikesharing collision data, provide new metrics for bicycle safety that can be tracked over time. The authors present initial calculations of these metrics within this report and compare them with metrics for the broader bicycle population of a metropolitan region. Overall, the results of the study suggest that bikesharing safety is at levels similar to or better than bicycling safety of the general population. It is important to acknowledge that bikesharing users have suffered injuries, some very serious and incapacitating. But at present no fatalities have occurred in the United States. Three fatalities have occurred in North America–two in Canada and one in Mexico. The authors explored whether bikesharing may add to overall bicycle safety through a safety-in-numbers effect, but the empirical evidence of this impact was not convincingly evident in the population and activity data evaluated in this study. Future study of bikesharing and bikesharing safety should focus on bicycle design, better promotion of helmet use, and improvements of infrastructure that can enhance the safety environment for bikesharing and bicycling more broadly. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting