As bike commuting soars, so do injuries, medical costs

Bikes have transformed urban landscapes throughout America, from pavement markings on streets to our workday gear, and most of us agree it’s a good thing. They’ve reduced the pollution we send into the ozone layer, helped us conserve gas and oil and kept us fitter than we might otherwise have been.

But there’s also been a downside to all that cycling: more injuries. And those injuries are costing billions of dollars a year.

A study published in the journal Injury Prevention estimates that from 1997 to 2013 injuries, the medical costs for nonfatal crashes involving adults increased by an average of $789 million each year.

In 2013 alone, total costs were $24.4 billion — about double the amount for all occupational illnesses, the researchers wrote.

The numbers cover emergency transport, hospital charges, rehabilitation, nursing home stays and the cost of lost work and quality of life, among other things.

The rising costs can be partially explained by how bike crashes have changed in recent years, said Thomas W. Gaither, a University of California at San Francisco medical student who was one of the study’s authors. In the past, there were many “non-street” incidents, but these days most involving adults are crashes with motor vehicles.

In 1997, 46 percent of injuries occurred on a street while in 2014 nearly 67 percent did.

This increases “the velocity of the crash impact and, as a result, the severity of the injury,” Gaither explained. He and the other researchers also suggested that “streets might also predispose to more injuries due to the coexisting environment with urban areas, increased population density or the presence of more unyielding street furniture” (meaning things like telephone polls, fire hydrants, parking meters and the like).