CRASHES DOWN

Raised crossings and separate cycle lanes make it safer for everyone.

HAS THE BUILDING OF BIKE infrastructure made cycling safer? A recent peer-reviewed paper in the New Zealand Medical Journal tentatively concludes that it has, noting that while cycling numbers have increased, cycling crash injuries have stayed stable, suggesting “that the infrastructure spending by local councils and the transport agencies to build dedicated cycle lanes separated from cars and other vehicles may be successful in reducing cycling injuries”.

A paper published last year in the Journal of Transport Safety pointed to other factors, especially for walking. Pedestrian deaths and injuries in Auckland increased by an alarming 70% from 2014-17, prompting AT to commission an urgent review and then, in 2019, introduce its own version of Vision Zero, a strategy to eliminate traffic fatalities that began in Sweden.

One in five such crashes were taking place at standard pedestrian crossings, so AT launched a project to build raised crossings. The authors compared data from standard crossings with 37 new raised crossings and found “the crashes at the improved sites have reduced from 20.8 to 5.6 crashes per year”. The authors highlighted a reduction in speed at the raised crossings.

Such safety treatments have been criticised by firefighters. But there’s no clear data to say that traffic calming is a major factor in fire crews missing response targets. It bears noting that after Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo converted the Rue de Rivoli, the main east-west artery on the Right Bank, to a walk-andcycle space with a lane each for taxis and buses – against the objections of Paris’s firefighters union – fire response times fell below seven minutes for the first time in a decade. Perhaps the real problem is too many cars.

Paris’s Rue de Rivoli: Its conversion to give cyclists and walkers priority led to faster response times by fire crews.