Bikes and Transit Safety, Slow Implementation.

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Going back to the past weeks related to safety, I want to discuss bike safety. I am a cyclist and victim of a railway track incident (it wasn’t that bad). I wanted to know how serious of a problem this is and what or if there are any ongoing planning methods associated with fixing or mitigating this problem in places where bikes and rail tracks meet often. This has been sitting in my mind since the day that I crashed and fractured my wrist. I was talking to the Doctor and he mentioned that he sees at least one cyclist rail track victim come through every day. One a day seemed like a lot but after some thought I realized it made a lot of sense for a place like Portland, which has a larger b icyclist population and a downtown rail system that frequently meets bikes on the road.

In a study (done by Ziwen L., Christospher C., & Nerbesh D. 2017), a video monitor was used to record the number of crashes at a spot where a train track crossed through a bike path.  Using this footage, they recorded the types on environmental factors influencing the bicyclists who crashed. Some highlights of the study were that crash rates were reduced when crossing at an angle, the crash rate was higher for women, road bikes (thin tires), while braking, in groups, and wet conditions. They concluded that for this particular intersection you could realign the bike pathway so the tracks are crossing the path at a diagonal.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140516303450


The other paper I read was a study (done by John P. & Ralph B. 2007) aboutthe Netherlands, Denmark and Germany where there is bicycling infrastructure that prevents these accidents altogether because bikes have their own separate space along busy roads where they are completely cut off from traffic. John and Ralph  Discusses how because these countries are large bicycling supportersthat their priorities in regards to bike infrastructure revolve around safe implementation into the whole public transit system.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01441640701806612


Because Portland and other US cities are not quite at the European level of transportation integrations, we still have a lot of work in regards to how pedestrians interact with traffic. I have witnessed that it’s mostly up to the individual to teach themselves about how to stay safe while dodging traffic as a cyclist or pedestrian. An integrated system where bikes are on sidewalks would dramatically reduce rail and car related bike incidents, but would it affect pedestrian traffic? I think all city planners are struggling to figure out the most effective way to integrate safety measures for Pedestrians and Bikes. But, in a car loving country it seems like safety could never be efficient when we focus on only a few transportation methods. Efficient safety should mean a decrease in any transit related incidents, right? 

Thank you to my Editor: Lisa Wheeler

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 29, 2018 at 9:07 AM

    Thank you for looking into the extent of the problem and possible solutions! I, too, fell victim to a track attack on one of my first attempts to cycle downtown. Fortunately all I suffered were some bruises and loss of dignity.

    As an alternative to channeling bikes into safer routes, what about choosing different designs for future rail lines? For example: If the street is/could be wide enough to have the light rail or streetcar running down the middle of the street, with stations at islands, you don't interact with cyclists over on the right side. That has obvious negatives (e.g. street width), but the scale might still be tipped in favor of center-street rails if these cyclist v. track incidents were taken seriously.

    There might also be an argument here against building frivolous rail lines. :cough: Portland Streetcar. :cough:

    (BTW, I found Berlin's color-coded bike paths to be pretty safe. They run alongside the sidewalk, but as long as a pedestrian knows what red brick means and is moderately aware of her surroundings, there shouldn't be any collisions. I was an oblivious teenager but I think I only wandered into the bike path once, soon after moving there. The shared paths on the Tilikum and Hawthorne bridges, where these modes are barely separated, feel a lot riskier.)

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