Why so safe?
To figure out why bike-share users have stayed safer than cyclists manning personal bikes on American roads, the MTI researchers consulted industry experts and held focus groups in the regions studied. They emerged with two explanations.
The first credits the design of bike-share bicycles. These behemoths were built for durability—they’re stocky, heavy, and decidedly biased against speed. “I don’t think these bikes were designed for safety,” says Elliot Martin, an assistant research engineer at UC Berkeley who helped author the report. And yet, it looks like safety is a “side effect,” he says. Limiting the speed of these shareable babies makes it harder for their riders to get into wrecks. Additionally, many bike-share cycles are brightly-colored, and come equipped with lights, all of which make them easier to see (and avoid) at night. The lesson, particularly for new bike-share systems, may be pretty simple: don’t fix what ain’t broke.
Another reason may go back to the new users that have glommed onto bike-share. This explanation is somewhat counterintuitive. It might seem that riders who have newly adopteda cycling commute might be, well, pretty awful at it, liable to careen into poles or other bikers. But the MTI researchers suspect it’s the opposite. New riders may be extra-cautious while aboard their borrowed bicycles, which could lead to fewer crashes.
There are other factors, too: Bike-share systems often pop up in dense, urban areas with at least a modicum of bicycle infrastructure, like protected lanes. Additionally, bike-share bikers are often maneuvering around slower-moving urban traffic, which decreases the risk of injury. (According to the experts consulted for the report, the ideal speed limit on a roadway with adjacent bike lanes should be between 20 and 30 mph.)
It should be noted that the researchers did find fatalities in other North American systems: Two people have died using bike-share in Canada, and one person died in Mexico. Additionally, the U.S. data doesn’t mean that bike-share is risk-free. “Some people can and do get very injured using bike-share,” Martin says.
The helmet conundrum
The report also adds to the mounting evidence against the efficacy of
mandatory helmet laws. Previous studies have found that mandatory laws
are not associated with lower rates bike-related hospitalization rates. And as the researchers write here:
[Bike-share safety] is definitely not due to increased helmet use, which is widely documented to be lower among bike-sharing users. For all their well-documented safety benefits, helmets, like seatbelts in cars, mitigate the severity of injuries when a collision does occur, but they do not prevent the collision from occurring.
The science of bicycle helmet laws is, to put it bluntly, pretty weird. As the MTI researchers point out, helmets are good—they
do reduce the incidence of head injuries among riders. But when examining bicycling populations on the whole, researchers have found that mandatory laws disincentivize bike trips, especially those spur-of-the-moment ones. As Eric Jaffe wrote
on CityLab, “In places where [bicycling is] unsafe, the laws may make riding a little safer, but are also likely to distract attention from initiatives, such as infrastructure upgrades, that would be even more effective.” In other words: if it’s a zero-sum game, let’s focus our energies on creating excellent bike infrastructure.
“Nevertheless,” the MTI researchers write, “the widespread use of helmets in this environment would unequivocally improve bike-sharing safety.”
