Safety of cyclists gets priority
VIEW FROM GERMANY: Highway research official shares perspective at international conference
Like Metro Vancouver, Germany wants to increase the number of people using bicycles to get around.
And as in Vancouver, safety is seen as a way to promote biking in Germany and was part of a presentation given Monday by Benjamin Schreck of that country’s Federal Highway Research Institute as part of the fifth International Symposium on Highway Geometric Design.
In an interview before his speech, Schreck said Germany wants to increase the “modal” share or number of trips taken by bicycle from the current 10 per cent to 15 per cent by 2020.
“In urban areas bikes are a very fast mode of transport,” said Schreck, who said that speed applies to trips of less than three kilometres. “We have more bikes (67 million) than passenger cars (44 million).”
Safety is a huge consideration when all those bikes and cars are competing for space.
“We want to make the safety higher,” said Schreck, pointing to the disparity between accident rates in cars and bikes.
Since 1992, German collision rates for cars have gone down by 26 per cent, but the rate for bikes has declined by only 10 per cent. “That’s not good,” Schreck said. More chilling is the number of cyclist deaths. In 2013, the last year for which figures are available, about 2,000 cyclists were killed in accidents with vehicles in the European Union nations. The total in Germany was 350. “It’s maybe (the equivalent of) a small village that died every year,” Schreck said.
He suggested several paths to increasing safety, such as improving infrastructure by making cycle paths separate from roads.
Also helpful is better engineering, such as active warning systems in vehicles that can detect cyclists. But Schreck also said there must be education to change the behaviour of both drivers and cyclists.
While many of the same approaches could be taken in Vancouver, Schreck added there are significant differences in the way this city and his nation approach cycling.
Most of Germany’s cycle paths are one-directional to avoid the pedestrian-bike-car confusion of Vancouver’s two-way bike lanes. Some German bike lanes share the road with vehicles, while others have only a painted line to separate them from traffic — but dedicated lanes are much wider at 2- to 2.5 metres than Vancouver’s controversial separated bike lanes.