Daily Score Blog

My youngest son had a bike wreck this summer: a driver cut him off on a steep downhill. Peter managed to avoid the car by tumbling over the curb, but the fall inflicted some nasty road rash. It also inspired me to dig into the question of bicycle safety more rigorously than before: Is it safe for Peter to be biking so much?

Here’s what I learned: Biking is safer than it used to be. It’s safer than you might think. It does incur the risk of collision, but its other health benefits massively outweigh these risks. And it can be made much safer. What’s more, making streets truly safe for cyclists may be the best way to reverse Bicycle Neglect: it may be among communities’ best options for countering obesity, climate disruption, rising economic inequality, and oil addiction.

The alternative—inaction—perpetuates these ills. It also ensures the continued victimization of cyclists and pedestrians. It means the proliferation of GhostBikes. (Pictured here, photo by Paul Takamoto.) GhostBikes are guerilla memorials to car-on-bike crashes that artists place at the scenes of injuries and deaths in, for example, Seattle, Portland, and New York. (View striking GhostBike photos from Portland and the whole world on flickr (choose “view slide show”).)

Let’s take these lessons in turn.

Hm.  Just days after my post on the global warming impacts of highway widening, BC premier Gordon Campbell comes along to prove why this issue is so ripe.  From a Vancouver Sun article on the premier's otherwise quite nifty global warming policy:

Campbell...continued to defend the Gateway project, which will twin the Port Mann bridge, saying that it will reduce emissions and make room for rapid-bus services along the highway.

There's that disturbing meme again:  widen a highway, and GHG emissions will fall.  Grrrr.

Like most urban legends, the "lane building is good" meme owes some of its stickiness to the fact that it's unexpected.  Like a man-bites-dog story, it's memorable because it seems counterintuitive, even crazy. And somehow, the fact that it sounds wrong on its face may actually make the idea more plausible, not less.  (Or if not plausible, at least interesting enough for people to file away, and repeat as if it were a known fact.)

The problem:  the reason that that the "more lanes is good" meme sounds crazy is that, well, it is crazy.  We cranked through the numbers and found that widening a congested highway will almost certainly increase GHG emissions over the long haul.  So in this case, there's a reason that the idea is counterintuitive:  it's simply false!

We've had high praise for Campbell's aggressive global warming stance for a while.  But on this point, it looks like he's been suckered by an urban legend.