alhedges

Curb cuts mean more cars turning, crossing lanes, and stopping suddenly when they realize that their turn has just come up. It also means more cars entering traffic from parking lots and stores...sometimes making a wide left turn across traffic.

Here's a link to a comprehensive bike accident study done this year for my state: http://www.policyinstitute.iu.edu/Pu...ril%202012.pdf

It's the most comprehensive study that I've personally seen, although there are still a lot of holes that need to be filled. One of the things that reading it will point out, though, is how safe biking is in an absolute sense. In a state with a 6.5 million population, bicycle fatalities ranged between 7 and 19. For the entire state, in one year.

Figures 5 and 6 have very interesting statistics for suburban, exurban, urban, and rural accidents. According to Figure 5, you are 4 times more likely to be involved in a collision in an urban area than in a suburban or exurban area. However, if you look at fatalities, these percentages flip - you are 4 times more likely to die in a suburban or exurban collision than in an urban collision. Rural collisions are roughly half as dangerous as suburan/exurban, and still twice as dangerous as urban collisions. This almost certainly is in large part due to the speed differential on county roads vs. local/urban roads.