Making It Safer To Bike Gets More People To Ride Bikes, Shocking Study Shows

If you listened to drivers, you’d think all bicycle infrastructure was a giant waste of money because everywhere that isn’t a single-family house rightfully belongs to cars. Also, even if you did build a bunch of protected bike lanes, no one would use them because no one actually rides their bike anywhere. If you believe in this so-called “science” thing, though, a new study published in Nature just came to a shocking, impossible-to-believe conclusion. Apparently, if you make it safe for people to ride their bikes by building protected bike lanes, a lot more people in that area start riding their bikes. 

You’re probably going to want to sit down before you read any further, but as it turns out, people don’t like riding their bikes on the same roads as a bunch of drivers who refuse to look up from their phones while piloting 6,000-pound metal bricks. Additionally, the number of people willing to use bikes as transportation is not fixed, so if you add separate infrastructure, it incentivizes more people to get out there on two wheels. As the study found, areas “that installed protected bicycle lanes experienced bicycle commuter increases 1.8 times larger than standard bicycle lane block groups, 1.6 times larger than shared-lane marking block groups and 4.3 times larger than block groups that did not install bicycle facilities.”

Additionally, researchers found that on a per-mile basis, adding protected bike lanes “was significantly associated with bicycle commuter increases 52.5% stronger than standard bicycle lane mileage and 281.2% stronger than shared-lane marking mileage.” Huh. Who could have possibly guessed that might be the case? Thankfully, you can rest assured that your local government will still ignore their findings, since it isn’t like promoting exercise would be good for adults or anything. Plus, you wouldn’t want to inconvenience the people driving their Suburbans and Ram 2500s to Publix.

In all seriousness, though, while you have to be completely incapable of critical thinking to not already understand that making it safer to bike places would get more people to choose to do exactly that, studies like this one are still important because they provide evidence that advocates can point to when trying to convince local governments to build bike infrastructure. Painted lines and signs that ask drivers not to run over cyclists are arguably better than nothing, but protected bike lanes are still the gold standard, both for rider safety and getting more people to start riding. 

The study also builds on more than a dozen previous studies that also show people typically make the decision of whether or not to bike somewhere based on how safe they perceive it to be. As Field of Dreams put it, if you build it, they will come. As safety advocate David Zipper put it in Bloomberg, “Estimating the demand for an unbuilt [protected] bike lane by counting the riders on dangerous roadways is like planning a bridge by estimating the people swimming across a river.” 

Then again, the cranks who are most fiercely opposed to protected bike lanes don’t actually care about the evidence. They want bikes and bike lanes to be illegal because they think everything should be optimized for their own, personal convenience, and they want to drive from strip mall to strip mall as fast as possible. Meanwhile, building everything for cars has led to a sedentary, disconnected, unhealthy population, and making it safe to use bikes as an alternative form of transportation could go a long way toward changing that. Especially as U.S. roads are uniquely dangerous among developed countries. 

Of course, since Republicans are currently in charge, don’t expect any federal support for bike infrastructure, but you can definitely make sure everyone on your city council sees the latest study. You never know who it might convince.