Originally Posted by
Bekologist
robert, comparing crash rates to usage is sound methodology, albeit basic. you don't like accepted crash reporting methods or the manner in which cities and the US Census Bureau's American Community Surveys estimate ridership, sure, your position is apparent.
How about taking a step back from your numerology and take a look at on the ground reality.
Think about this:
The widely observed and even planned for traffic dynamic of "awareness in numbers" becomes self evident when applied on a grander scale in pedestrian squares, woonerf'd home zones and the like in cities across Europe. This is indisputable. A more elaborate explanation is not necessary. Dig into European traffic planning all you want, awareness in numbers is a genuine traffic dynamic.
New York City's reworking of public road space into public plazas and complete streets is also having a widely measurable, in your face and obvious positive effect on more equitable use of the public commons, ridership, overall safety and crash rates for all road users.
I have no idea why you continue to try and argue against this reality of the commons. I still can't tell if you're pretending that it doesn't exist, or if you really just don't get it. Oh, right, the Jacobson statistics don't exhibit enough rigor for you, American Community Survey data is so far off the mark its value in estimating american demographics is, what was it again, 'fundamentally bogus?'
The awareness in numbers phenomenon is bona fide.
Your overreaching smears of a hypothesis that is being proven in city after city, whose effects are being exhibited on the nascent rebirth of north america's equitable streetscapes, turns your criticism into curmudgeon.
(my apologies if i've embedded any sentence fragments that might sully any part time epistemology being applied to this thread topic. its 4 am and i'm up to take the GF to the airport.)
I think you're thinking about this in a fundamentally incorrect way. "Safety in numbers", even if it's a real thing, is a STATISTICAL phenomenon, not an explanation. It's an observation, not a mechanism. I'll grant you, for the sake of argument, that there is likely a correlation, as I said. But it's speculation to try to explain WHY that correlation might exist. It's speculation to claim that it comes from greater "awareness", etc.
As I said, my guess is that what happens is that as the number of bicyclists rise in an area, a whole range of changes take place. It is these concrete changes that cause the change in safety. The discussion has gone over many of these possible explanations in this thread. But constantly talking about the "safety in numbers" thing is just like saying "as Americans get older, they get fatter; therefore, aging causes obesity". It's overly reductive, because it's not a mechanism.