April 18--Oh, those Divvy riders -- some of them look like organ donations waiting to happen.
No helmets. Riding like spawning salmon against the flow of traffic. Consulting tourist guides on busy streets, or riding in sightseeing pairs, oblivious to the aggravated commuters behind them.
As bike-sharing programs have proliferated to over 32,000 bikes in 96 U.S. cities over the past nine years, some critics have wondered whether they would increase crashes and fatalities. The former "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart joked that he could start a "street brain removal service."
But something surprising has happened -- there have been zero fatalities in the United States since the first bike-share program started in Tulsa, Okla., in 2007, compared with the overall U.S. fatality rate of 21 per 100 million bicycle trips, according to a study funded and released last month by the Mineta Transportation Institute. The study also found that the rates of collision and injury among bike-sharing participants were lower than rates among regular bicyclists.
"That the fatality rate for bike sharing in the U.S. has been zero for years is remarkable," said the study's lead researcher, Elliot Martin, a research engineer at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley
In Chicago, there have been 37 Divvy crashes in 14.1 million miles traveled since the program started June 28, 2013, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.
It's tough to do a statistical comparison -- since there is no way to know how many miles were traveled by non-Divvy bikes during the same period. But the raw Divvy crash numbers are dramatically lower. Between June 28, 2013, through the end of 2014 -- the most recent period for which a comparison was available -- there were 18 Divvy crashes out of 2,803 bike crashes in Chicago, or less than 1 percent of the total. Bike fatalities in Chicago average five to eight per year.
The Mineta study found that the vehicle-bike collision rate for the Washington, D.C., bike-share program, which had the highest crash rate of three programs studied, was 65 percent of the known U.S. rate overall.
Why the better record? Martin and others who have studied the issue point to the shared bike's bulky, heavy design which cuts speed, discourages risky maneuvers and increases visibility. A typical bike-share bicycle weighs about 43 pounds, has built-in lighting, wide, reflective tires, and a handlebar that requires upright riding rather than the headfirst, aerodynamic style favored by the Tour de France wannabes on the Lakefron Trail.
The gearing on shared bikes does not allow users to go any faster than 11-12 mph -- even downhill, said Paul DeMaio, principal of MetroBike, a bike-share consulting business.
"We don't want people to go too fast," said DeMaio. "They're designed to get people from point A to point B."
Another factor could be that bike-share participants are often less experienced cyclists -- and therefore more cautious on an unfamiliar vehicle.
Gender may play a role -- research on Washington's program found that more women use the bikes, and women are more risk-averse, said Ralph Buehler, associate professor in urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. Regular D.C. riders with their own bikes tend to be young and middle-aged men, Buehler said.
