Painting roads green doesn’t make cyclists safer
Remember crop circles? Those mysterious patterns in farmers’ fields that appeared without explanation and lent themselves to bizarre theories of alien landing zones or other outlandish possibilities.
You don’t hear much about crop circles these days. And here’s my theory on that — whoever was responsible has picked up stakes and moved to downtown Kitchener. Now, instead of flattening corn fields, they’re amusing themselves by painting equally mysterious patterns on city streets.
The presence of sharrows — a green outline of a bike and several chevrons — painted on Kitchener streets is supposed to convince cyclists to “take the lane” and compete with cars and trucks by riding down in the middle of the road whenever they feel the urge.
They’re meant to make downtown Kitchener safer and more welcoming for bike traffic. There’s good reason to believe their ultimate impact will be the exact opposite.
In my experience, the majority of motorists are puzzled by all the green paint. And puzzled motorists are bad for cyclists. As for bikers, the overwhelming majority want nothing to do with “taking the lane.”
A survey last year by Bike-Kitchener found a mere 14 per cent of cyclists felt safe using sharrows. This is an abysmally low figure, especially considering the same survey found 98 per cent of bikers felt safe using the region’s many bike trails that are entirely separate from the road system.
A logical person would interpret these results as evidence people prefer traffic-separated bike lanes and trails over sharrows, and invest their efforts accordingly.
But logic and evidence rarely intrude when the bike lobby is involved. Which is why next week Kitchener’s infrastructure services committee will hear a pitch from its active transportation planning group demanding the city double-down on its unloved sharrows network by lowering the speed limit on such roads to 40 km/h. This is a stupid idea, for two reasons. First, lowering speed limits on city streets is often presented as a costless way to encourage greater cycling. But doing so ignores the massive, hidden cost to society in time wasted caused by forcing cars to travel the same speed as bikes.
Second, there is plenty of evidence beyond the BikeKitchener survey showing sharrows simply don’t work.
The city staff report is noteworthy for a familiar tendency to cherry-pick favourable tidbits of research and anecdotes in building its case that sharrows are on the verge of success, requiring only a lowering of the speed limit to fully blossom.
In doing so, however, the authors completely ignore a lot of important information relevant to the issue. In particular: “Relative (In)Effectiveness of Bicycle Sharrows on Ridership and Safety Outcomes,” a paper presented at the U.S. Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting in 2015 by two civil engineers from the University of Colorado, Denver.
Using a large data set of commuting patterns in Chicago, the two academics studied the impact of adding sharrows versus separated bike lanes to an existing road network.
Between 2000 and 2010, the application of bike lanes appeared to double average bike ridership on relevant Chicago blocks. Adding sharrows increased ridership by just 27 per cent. By comparison, roads that had no improvements saw a 43 per cent increase over this time. Doing nothing thus appears to be a more successful strategy than adding sharrows, suggesting riders deliberately avoid them.
The same thing occurred with safety. New bike lanes reduced cyclist injuries by 42 per cent. Adding sharrows led to a drop of 19 per cent, while unimproved roads showed a 36 per cent drop in injuries. (Statistically speaking, there was no difference between bare roads and sharrows.)
The damning conclusion: “Sharrows do not provide designated space for bicyclists and do not enhance the overall bicycle network … It is time that sharrows are exposed for what they really are, a cheap alternative that not only fails to solve a pressing safety issue, but actually makes the issue worse.”
Since the concept of sharrows is relatively new, there is a scarcity of good academic evidence available on their usefulness. To completely overlook the above results in a staff report is to misrepresent the state of knowledge on sharrows.
Like a lot of bicycle advocacy, the argument behind lowering the speed limit on sharrows is premised on the belief that making life more onerous for car drivers — lowering speed limits, creating new laws etc. — will result in better cyclist safety.
But this disregards the preponderance of evidence that bikers are largely responsible for their own fates.
The 2012 report by the Chief Coroner of Ontario into cycling fatalities found 71 per cent of all biking deaths involved contributory actions on the part of the cyclists. The two biggest causes: inattention and failure to yield. A quarter of those who died biking were impaired; 15 per cent were wearing to headphones.
The coroner’s report recommends separated bike lanes or trails as the best way to enhance cyclist safety. Sharrows are never once mentioned.
Given all this, why would anyone think bike safety can be improved by forcing bikes and cars into greater proximity via sharrows?
The only real solution to bike safety is to keep bikes and cars as far away from each other as possible. And that means less mysterious green paint on our roads.