This is an excellent article not just about dooring accidents, but about bike lane design standards, how bicycle accidents are counted and how the system continues to implement design standards that are sub-standard.
National and state databases only include crashes involving motor vehicles in transport. Since a parked car is not in transport, and a bicycle is not a motor vehicle, crashes where a bicyclist hits a parked car door are excluded.
Dooring accounts for 12 to 27 percent of urban car-bike collisions, making it one of the most common crash types.
Finally, researchers have asked the question and found that cyclists with iPods or earbuds on listening to music can actually hear more than drivers and passengers inside automobiles with the windows up listening to nothing.
“We quickly established that cars are remarkably soundproof. We measured the average peak of ambient traffic noise inside the car (with the motor running) to be 54dB, which is 26dB quieter than outside the car. We rang a bike bell right outside an open car window and measured it from in the car at 105dB. With the window closed, the same bell registered just 57dB.”
Ride On magazine of Australia
Here’s an article about this study which links to the original article. Oz mag set out to find out if “iPod wearing zombies” heard more or less than motorists with their windows up or music playing.
Bad news for sharrows. Study out of U of Colorado shows that in Chicago, they provided negligible ridership increase and less of a safety benefit than nothing at all. https://t.co/Vme1HL8USC
But far from giving cyclists a safer ride, or even doing nothing at all, sharrows might actually be doing some harm by tugging bikes into moving traffic. Some research has found they do reduce dooring (when the door of a parked car hits a cyclist). But only one study to date looked at whether or not sharrows had any impact on overall car-bike collisions—and that study found they could be increasing the risk of injury.
If that bicyclist whizzing by seems a little happier than the average gridlock-bound car commuter, you’re not imagining it: A recent study found that two-wheeled commuters were happier than their gas pedal-stomping, car-caged peers.
Becoming a bike commuter might seem daunting, but the benefits can be worth it: exercising regularly, saving money, decreasing your carbon footprint, absolving yourself of guilt over that break-room doughnut.
It is not just for adults – kids also benefit from walking or biking to school. For added safety, folks create walking busses or bike trains. October 10, 2018 was the national #WalkToSchoolDay but why not try to make that everyday?
Getting Doored for a cyclist is a very serious, even potentially deadly accident.
Bike Lanes are often placed too near parked cars, or as cyclists say, in the door zone. Cyclists are often boxed in a very narrow line of safety next to a busy lane of traffic while riding on the far outside of a bike lane to stay out of door zones.
Drivers, you can help. Start the “Dutch Reach” and teach your passengers to do the same.
Teach your friends and kids that bicycle to be aware of the danger of door zones too.
The Dutch Reach is a simple change in behavior, but it automatically puts your body in a position to be looking before opening your car door.
Fatal bike crashes are on the rise in the United States; in 2016 the highest number of cyclist deaths since 1991 was recorded. The research doesn’t say how many of those deaths are from doorings specifically, or how effective the Dutch Reach method is in preventing crashes, but a study done in 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia, found that the car-to-cyclist crash type with the most injuries was doorings, said Kay Teschke, professor emeritus at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Many bike lanes are just squeezed in on roads and in the gutter or door zones of parked vehicles.
Often, this only makes it more challenging to ride a bike because car drivers get incensed that the ungrateful bicycle riders are riding in a lane and not using the space designated to them.
Like Sharrows, not all bike lanes are improvements to roads for bicycle rider safety.
The intersection pictured above is a road on the border between Del Mar and Solana Beach and it made a recent list of the 50 worst roads in San Diego County. It seems to be even worse than reported as accidents are reported at this intersection for both Del Mar and Solana Beach, but not combined. The intersection is Highway 101 and Via De La Valle – when going South from Solana Beach. If one is traveling North from Del Mar, the intersection is Camino Del Mar and Via De La Valle. It is no wonder that this made the list of most dangerous roads in San Diego County, and we wonder if this intersection is even more dangerous than the data suggests.
This intersection in Solana Beach made a list of the 50 most dangerous roads for bicyclists in San Diego County. It might even be worse if the exact location of accidents was better known as we identified the same intersection reported both from Del Mar and from Solana Beach.
Where I agree with Vehicular Cyclists: Some bicyclist “infrastructure” puts riders in unsafe situations.
The patented Kostelec Substandard Bike Lane Barometer™️ illustrates.
It’s about time that bicycle helmets got more rigorously tested, say, like motorcycle helmets have for years.
Bike helmets in the U.S. are required by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to pass a series of tests in which helmets are struck against an anvil at a set speed. The only requirement is that the helmets prevent head impact accelerations over 300 g, a level associated with skull fracture or severe brain injury. There is no requirement for helmets to limit concussion-level forces, which are more common among bicyclists in crashes.
A few take aways: more expensive isn’t better, more coverage isn’t better.
The researchers found that bicycle helmets offered different types of protection. Not all bicycle helmets protected well against concussion. Bicycle helmets also may not protect adequately for the way cyclists often hit the ground at an angle. With cyclist fatalities up 20% in the last ten years, improving and formally testing bicycle helmets is a huge step forward.
Urban-style helmets — which have nearly solid covers with few vents — and those that haven’t adopted the latest anti-concussion technology were more than twice as likely to result in injuries, researchers from Virginia Tech and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found in a study released Tuesday.
Want to know more about traffic incidents in your area? This week we launched the #VisionZero portal, where you can find info on traffic incidents throughout the City and learn about our solutions to make #SanDiego streets safe for all. Visit https://t.co/rONpl0rqZqpic.twitter.com/Xk7dMG4JpT
**Update July 9, 2018
While it is really great we finally have our own Vision Zero San Diego website and portal, unfortunately the data posted on launch was very misleading and greatly understated the actual fatalities in 2016 which were actually about twice as many. Mistakes like this won’t help use data to identify the main dangerous streets and improve our roads with a priority of focusing on where most people are getting hurt and killed.
Another section of the webpage includes three public service announcement videos produced by the city, each one stating there had been 37 traffic deaths in 2017.
To add emphasis to how dangerous our roads are, and why we need the Vision Zero data to prioritize fixing our streets, another KPBS story published June 23, 2017, “In San Diego, Cars Are Deadlier Than Guns”
In pure numbers, more people die from car crashes in San Diego than are murdered. The city’s police department counted 260 traffic deaths on city streets from 2012 to 2016, and 206 murders over the same time period. Adding in the number of people who die on San Diego freeways, which are governed by Caltrans, there were more than twice as many traffic deaths as there were murders.
The latest traffic crash data is being crunched and the trends are not good. Hit and Run incidents are steadily increasing, bicyclists and pedestrians are especially vulnerable to this problem. The IIHS has recently released another study as reported in the Washington Post, Pedestrian deaths soar 46 percent, insurance group finds.
Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2016, up 46 percent from 2009, when such deaths were at a low point, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) said in a report issued Tuesday. That’s the most pedestrian deaths since 1990, and at a much faster rate than for overall traffic fatalities, which rose 11 percent over the same period.
San Diego has an ambitious Vision Zero plan to reduce all traffic related fatalities by improving design infrastructure for all users.
