Copenhagen:

The morning and afternoon commute in Copenhagen is a spectacle involving tens of thousands of cyclists roaring down dedicated lanes in tight packs, past cars moving at half the speed, if at all…

Traffic lights that were once co-ordinated for car speeds were adjusted to cater to the pace of the average cyclist, allowing them to travel long distances without ever getting a red light. To increase safety, stop lines for cars are five metres behind those for bikes. Cyclists get a green light up to 12 seconds ahead of cars to help increase their visibility.

In the winter months, bike ridership drops off 20 per cent. Still, an armada of plows is ready to clear bike lanes when snow flies. They get priority over routes for cars.

How do other cities get there from here? Slowly. You don’t do everything at once, but instead just add things incrementally, until you reach the point at which cyclists outnumber car drivers. Lots of attitudes need to be changed, including those of today’s cyclists, who, in car-centered cities, tend to be highly aggressive. And attitudes change slowly. But it can — and should — be done.

(Via Florida)

In the UK, men account for 72% of bike journeys, 84% of fatalities, and 81% of recorded injuries. That makes a certain amount of sense: men tend to be more aggressive cyclists, and that means their chances of having an accident rise.

But there’s a twist when it comes to truck-cyclist collisions in particular:

This year, seven of the eight people killed by lorries in London have been women…

There are no national figures but there’s little reason to think it is any different.

In this particular case, it seems, aggression helps, and timidity can be fatal:

In 2007, an internal report for Transport for London concluded women cyclists are far more likely to be killed by lorries because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver’s blind spot.

This means that if the lorry turns left, the driver cannot see the cyclist as the vehicle cuts across the bike’s path.

The report said that male cyclists are generally quicker getting away from a red light - or, indeed, jump red lights - and so get out of the danger area…

Marian Louise Noonan, 32, from south London, is a confessed kerb-hugger, and that leaves her feeling quite vulnerable on the roads, unlike her husband.

“He cycles much more aggressively and is aware of all the traffic around him. He cycles as if someone is going to hit him and makes sure he is in a safe position,” she says.

“I’m much more nervous of my cycling ability, I’m frightened people might hit me, which means I don’t cycle in a positive manner.”

The main problem is the attitude of other drivers, she says, as they make her feel like she does not belong on the road.

She also feels reluctant to put herself at the front of the traffic at red lights, which is the safest place for cyclists to be.

My experience from cycling in New York is that men are more likely than women to run red lights, much more likely to run red lights by weaving through flowing traffic, and much more likely to “bike salmon” up the street against traffic. All of these things are, needless to say, dangerous. On the other hand, women are less likely than men to wear helmets, and they’re also more likely than men to be riding significantly slower than traffic. Those traits I think make them more likely to get hit by a truck, and more likely to be killed if that happens.

The optimal combination for bikers — which I see in the UK much more than in NYC — is to be both law-abiding and aggressive. Don’t be shy about riding in the middle of the road if it’s not safe to ride on the edges, and certainly don’t be shy about driving faster than traffic, because that’s safer than having traffic drive faster than you. But obey red lights, stop behind the line and not halfway into the street, and be conscious about not getting in the way of pedestrians. Maybe, in some utopian future, they might eventually start being conscious of not getting in the way of cyclists, especially in dedicated bike lanes.

These tables come from a study organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and they’re sobering: they show that hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are in some times twice as likely to be involved in pedestrian and bicyclist crashes as their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts.

The first table shows 1.2% of hybrids being involved in low-speed crashes with pedestrians, twice the rate of old-fashioned cars; the second table shows 0.6% of hybrids crashing with bicyclists, again twice the rate of noisier cars.

The reason, of course, is that the hybrids are so quiet: bikers and pedestrians use car noises to help them work out which cars are moving and which aren’t. That’s why hybrid manufacturers are now talking about adding vroomtones. Sounds like a good idea!

(HT: Voiland, via Weisenthal)

If Robin Goldstein went to the trouble of collecting 700 datapoints off Craigslist for a single blog entry, I thought the least I could do was turn it into a pretty scatterchart for him:

What we’re looking at here is the average price of a used car in each metro area, on the x-axis, against the average price of a used bike, on the y-axis. As Goldstein says:

Not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

The really weird thing is that the cities with the most bikes, like Portland, also have the most expensive bikes:

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35 and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well…

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend…

He had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think. It was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

I’m with Robin: this makes no sense. You can buy a really nice new bike for less than that — and new bikes cost the same no matter where in the country you buy them. They also have brand-new components, and component technology has been improving a lot of late. The only real problem with a new bike is that it’s a bit more attractive to thieves.

Still, the second-hand bike dealers are clearly on to a good thing, and there does seem to be an implicit understanding among them that they’re not going to compete on price. So this state of affairs might well last indefinitely.

The good news is that the bikes-in-buildings law passed yesterday, by 46 votes to 1, and will come into effect in 120 days’ time: Ben Fried calls this “the biggest legislative victory ever achieved by bicycle advocates in New York City”.

But does this mean my battle is won? Not necessarily. Before the building needs to open up its freight elevator to my bike, my employer — Thomson Reuters — needs to file with the landlord a formal “request for bicycle access”:

The tenant or subtenant of a building to which this article is applicable may request in writing, on a form provided by the department of transportation, that the owner, lessee, manager or other person who controls such building complete a bicycle access plan in accordance with section 28-504.3. Such request shall be sent to the owner, lessee, manager or other person who controls such building by certified mail, return receipt requested, and a copy of the request shall be filed with the department of transportation.

You can guess what happens after that — suffice to say that it’s a very bureaucratic process. But in any case I now need to work out who at Thomson Reuters is even authorized to file such a request. And then I need to work out how to get them to file it. And then I need to whom to talk to about finding an out-of-the-way corner of the 18th floor which I could use to store my bike during the day. My guess is that a best-case scenario has me happily wheeling my bike in to my office at roughly the same time that New York temperatures drop well below freezing. Ah well.

Laura Conaway asks why pedestrians walk in bike lanes, and reprints the photo above, which might well have been taken on Broadway, just south of 42nd Street. I know that stretch well — I bike down it on my way from work — and in general I stick to the road-for-cars, rather than risking life and limb on the bike-path-for-bikes.

This is a badly designed bike path, because of the location of the pedestrian zone you can see on the left hand side of the photo. There’s the sidewalk, and then the green bike path, and then the brown pedestrian zone, and then the black car lanes. When Broadway is bustling with foot traffic, it’s only natural for pedestrians to move back and forth between their two zones, especially during times when bike traffic is light.

But more generally I think it’s just that pedestrians were taught the rules of walking on streets by recourse to fear: look both ways, lest you get run over by a car. The natural corollary to such thinking is that if there’s no danger of getting run over by a car, there’s no need to look out for traffic. (If and when pedestrians do see me biking down the lane, they’re generally good enough to stay out of my way; the much bigger problem is the oblivious pedestrians, often listening to their iPods, who have no idea I’m there, and never stop to look.)

There’s also the natural impatience and pushiness of New Yorkers, who have a natural tendency to use bike lanes as a staging point in their rush to cross the street. No one in New York waits patiently on the sidewalk for the lights to change; instead, they inch forward on the road as far as they can without walking straight into the path of cars. They don’t worry about getting into the path of bikes, though, and if they see a bike coming, they generally stay put, since they couldn’t possibly step backwards. And if they’re crossing mid-block, which they often do, they generally take one step out from between parked cars before looking for traffic, since they know any car driving down the road won’t drive that close to the parked cars. (Bikes, again, they just don’t think about.)

Bicyclists, I have to say, are just as bad, if not worse: at intersections they never stop where they’re meant to, and instead stop either (a) right in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk, or (b) right in the middle of the cross-street’s bike lane. (And don’t even get me started on the “bike salmon” who ride the wrong way down the block and seem to think that all bike lanes are two-way streets.) Although bikers get very mad at motorists, the fact is that car drivers are much more law-abiding than either bicyclists or pedestrians, and tend not to feel that the rules don’t apply to them. I’ve even noticed an increasing number of car drivers who seem to know the difference between a bike lane and a left-turn lane.

In northern Europe, everybody tends to be much better behaved. I think that’s learned: as the number of cyclists in a city rises, two things happen. Firstly drivers and pedestrians become more conscious of the fact that a cyclist is likely to be on the road. And secondly there’s an increasing number of what you might call non-brave cyclists, who don’t consider biking to be some kind of urban warfare and who are more likely, at the margin, to simply follow the rules of the road which they know so well from driving cars. Eventually their good behavior rubs off onto the more reckless.

Ultimately I think it all comes down to a combination of visibility and civility. As bikes and bikers become more visible, everybody else will be more conscious of them. And as they feel more noticed and less victimized, they will start to behave more responsibly to other road users, on foot and in cars. Who will then start to reciprocate even more. The problem is this takes years; it doesn’t happen overnight. And in the meantime there will be nasty bike-pedestrian collisions, some of them unspeakably tragic. My friend Josh Phillips died in 2006 after hitting a pedestrian on his bike. The pedestrian wasn’t malicious, just oblivious. But that’s no solace to Josh’s family and friends.

Update: Walking back from lunch, I noticed this scene on 41st and Broadway. You can shout as loud as you like, this obstacle won’t get out of the way. And as a result you can see two bicyclists having to detour into the pedestrian zone.

Although I’m generally a fan of credit unions, and I’m certainly a fan of bicycling, I’m not at all a fan of this new bike-loan product:

* Rates as low as 7.50% APR*
* 12-month term
* Borrow up to $2,500
* 100% financing of bike plus accessories

One of the best things about bikes is that they’re cheap. Yes, it’s easy to spend $2,500 on a bike if you put your mind to it — or much more even than that. But the only people buying $2,500 bikes should be people who can easily afford to pay cash for them: no one should be taking out a loan for that kind of luxury.

With any luck Eric Matthies will weigh in on this question on his blog — he knows much more about biking than I do. But my gut feeling is that the price-quality correlation when it comes to bicycles is pretty low, and that much of the time it’s actually negative. (What you gain in terms of lower weight — which is generally what you’re paying the big bucks for — you often more than lose on the functionality front.) If Portland credit unions want to encourage daily bicycling, I don’t think that a $2,500 racing bike is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I’ve spent the past day in San Diego (that’s why blogging’s been light) and my mode of transport while I was here was a rented Bianchi Cortina — a very nice bike which retails at $429. My feeling is that $400 is pretty much the maximum sensible price for a new bike for anybody who needs to borrow money to buy one. Maybe make it $500 with the accessories (helmet, lock, lights) included. But $2,500 is just silly.

Update: Eric Dewey from the credit union offering the loan pops up in the comments to say that the high limit was put in place as a sign of support for Portland’s custom bike builders. Which is nice. But I still like to think that we’re moving towards a world where people only buy a custom bike after they have the money to do so.