Author: ArizonaBikeLaw

My notations from the book: City Cycling edited by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler.

John Pucher is arguably the foremost American proponent of separate bicycling infrastructure; often called “Dutch-style”. He is an academic (planner-type; he’s not a traffic engineer) who has many published articles on the subject. And while he is a vociferous advocate for infra, if you read his work fully, he does at least mention there are other factors at play; and furthermore he considers these other factors as necessary to achieve high levels of safety and mode share a la Netherlands or Copenhagen. Among those other factors are, for example, the extremely high costs associated with motoring in those places with high bicycling mode share (duh). In the book, he covers these in the chapter Promoting Cycling for Daily Travel (see below). Here’s a brief excerpt where Pucher explains:

In short, such pro-bike ‘carrot’ policies [e.g. cycle tracks, bike parking] are indeed possible even in a car oriented country like the USA. By comparison, there is almost no political support in the USA for adopting and implementing the sorts of car-restrictive ‘stick’ policies listed in Table 3 [e.g. expensive fuel, high taxes, expensive vehicle parking, restrictive land-use policies] that indirectly encourage cycling in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

Chapter: International Overview

Pucher has the same or similar table comparing fatalities/injuries for NL, DK, GER, UK,  USA (fig 2.6); i’m sort of confused by the injury rate calculations as I explained here in reference to another Pucher paper Making Cycling Irresistible: Lessons from The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany that was citing the same or similar data.

He also shows trends for a bunch of countries in fig 2.7 — it would be worth it to put that into Evan’s perspective of looking at the broader traffic safety picture internationally: Traffic fatality reductions: United States compared with 25 other countries in which Evans shows how badly the US is lagging in overall traffic safety compared to virtually the entire rest of the developed world. Continue reading “City Cycling”