Cycling in Gainesville is Safe, Statistics Wrong
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: Why It is Very Safe To Ride a Bike In Gainesville, FL
By James Thompson
Advocacy Director, Gainesville Cycling Club
If you Google any combination of “bicycle,” “safety,” “fatality,” “Alachua,” or “Gainesville” you won’t like the results. As the most egregious and local example, read the Gainesville Sun back on March 5th (“Can Bike-Car Wrecks Be Eliminated?” Also read my unpublished response: Bikes Can be Safe Vehicles. My main point in that letter is that when taking into account bicycle safety on the road, the incidents-per-mile is not considered. Considering the incidents per 100,000 population, as the Florida Dept. of Transportation does, is misleading and can keep people from cycling. It certainly allows certain local politicians and false “safety advocates” to claim “it is dangerous to ride a bike in our County.”
Let’s take a closer look at the worst example--the FDOT statistics for Alachua County.
The FDOT District 2 includes 18 “traffic” counties, with bike, pedestrian, motorcycle, and automobile date. These are Alachua, Baker, Bradford, Clay, Columbia, Dixie, Duval, Gilchrist, Hamilton, Lafayette, Levy, Madison, Nassau, Putnam, St. Johns, Suwannee, Taylor, and Union counties. 2011 bicycle data puts the death/injury rate/100,000 people at 7.68 for bicycles in Alachua County. By comparison, the death/injury rate is 680.45 for motorcycles and mopeds, and 7.28 for walkers (let’s call them that--”pedestrian” sounds so, well, pedestrian). The worst County for bikes is Dixie (12.20), for motorcycles Columbia (1038.72), and for walkers Lafeyette (22.73). At a glance, Alachua looks fair to middlin’ vs. the other 18 counties, even with the “bad” data I am about to correct. We look even better if you exclude outlier rural counties like Gilchrist, Union, Taylor, and Madison.
Duval, and St. Johns (at 191,000, 864,000, and 192,000 population) and Alachua (at 247,000 population) also are comparable across the lines on total injuries on bicycles, at 19, 25, and 13 respectively. Wait, you say, we have 19, and Clay has only 25, and yet they have almost three times the population? That makes it sound like Duval is safer than Alachua, which is really like saying that Jacksonvlle is safer than Gainesville, to ride a bike. Well, there is the rub. These numbers tell a lie.
The problem is this. Yes we may have 2 deaths, 17 serious injuries, and 19 total injuries per year in Alachua County, vs. the three-times-as-big Duval at 5, 20, and 25. But in Gainesville, 6.76% of the population (U. S. Census) uses bikes (excluding students, by the way!) for transit to school, work, play, or church. That is 6 times the national average, 7 times the Florida average. I don’t have Jacksonville statistics (help), but I know they are near the bottom. It’s part of what got Gainesville a Silver Star from the League of American Cyclists, one of the only ones in the Southern U. S. until cities like Miami and others have actually become more forward thinking (It took a fist and hammer to overturn the exit of federal money for the Archer Braid Trail here this year).
What that means is we are likely travelling at least seven times the mileage of these other counties, maybe more. If you correct for this, Alachua is at just over 1.2 fatalities per 100,000, putting us in the “awesome” category, down with the smaller counties where it is likely you see few bicycles (rural cycling percentages are much smaller in all the census data). And I’m not even correcting the other way for Duval or the other metro areas (none of which comes close to the U. S. Census data for Gainesville as far as percentage of folks who ride).
Another problem is using County data. In fact, the U. S. Census and various insurance organizations cite Jacksonville as one of the most dangerous places to get hurt and die on a bicycle. But with its 2.89 deaths per 100,000, it would rank with small, non-transit oriented counties like Suwanee, or even better than Madison in the FDOT data.
What this confirms is a global phenomenon I will call “safety through saturation.” Others call it Safety in Numbers, but “saturation” captures the relative measure of all transit types. That means when motorists and cyclists and pedestrians expect to interfere, compete, and co-exist with one another, they tend to practice defensive driving and lower fatalities and injuries.
The extreme examples of this are Holland, where bicycle-motorist interactions are radically high (despite the stereotype of segregated lanes being truly segregated) and the United States, where cycling is only about 1% of traveled miles. In the former country, there are virtually no fatalities among the largely helmet-free population. In the latter, there are hundreds a year.
Another factor is bike-ped infrastructure. Ours was awesome ten years ago, but relatively speaking we are slowly getting behind the curve. Read _Pedaling Revolutions: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities_ and you will find that Gainesville is no longer some “Austin-type” town. Simply adding bike lanes is no longer the answer. Ciclovias (temporarily shutting down sections of bike-ped high use areas to cars), alternative paths (segregated multi-use), and even sharrows (signage and roadbuilding that yells out “Hey, bikes are here!”) has found its way into the most unlikely places (L.A., Chicago, New York).
That said, our bike-ped is way better than Jacksonville, or Dallas, two of the worst cycling cities. And real statistics should reflect what we have built here.
In other words, it is safe to bicycle in Gainesville because lots of people bicycle in Gainesville, and because the relative measure of bikes to cars is higher than in the statistically corrected other counties. Nevermind the massive global statistics ( ), check out our own backyard. From 1991 to the present, the more cyclists used a particular bridge in Portland, OR, the fewer wrecks there were (See the Study Here).
Numbers don’t lie, but people do misinterpret them. It is time to start getting wise about how the press, our politicians, and our cycling advocates mis-use “fear” data to get things done (or un-done in the case of the anti-bike crowd).
Where the numbers don’t lie, and it really is dangerous to ride your bike, well, that is a question of education for cyclists and motorists, auto-bike equal enforcement by police, and auto-bike equity in sentencing for offenders.
