Street typology and bicyclist safety : a systems approach

Cycling is an attractive transportation mode but has not attained a large mode share in the United States, in part because it is correctly perceived as dangerous. Much literature on cyclist safety and the built environment has focused on bicycle facilities such as bike lanes, while fewer studies have addressed route choice, specifically side streets versus arterials. The cities of Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA have pursued opposite strategies, Berkeley creating “bicycle boulevards” out of residential side streets while Cambridge has added bike lanes to major arterial roads. I hypothesize that side streets are safer than arterials regardless of which street has been treated for cyclists, both in terms of collision rate and fraction of collisions that are severe. For each city, I use cyclist count data with police-reported bicycle-motor vehicle collision data to compute relative collision rates for pairs of parallel streets that are alternate routes to reach the same destinations. In a detailed analysis of Berkeley I find that bicycle boulevards have categorically lower collision rates than arterials, with no difference in severity. I demonstrate, with very limited data, how to apply the same methodology to Cambridge and find results somewhat suggestive that side streets have lower collision rates than arterials. I highlight shortcomings in current data collection practices that make this research difficult.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Minikel, Eric Vallabh

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joseph Ferreira.

• Urban Studies and Planning.
• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61511

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61511