By Laura Bejder | February 4, 2023 | Github
Every day, more than 40,000 cyclists cross Queen Louise’s Bridge in central Copenhagen. The bridge, overlooking the city's lakes, has become a key junction in Copenhagen's bicycle infrastructure, and almost half its width is reserved for two-wheeled commuters. Only one lane in each direction is kept open for the buses to cross.
Copenhagen is a biking city. The city has more bikes than citizens and in 2021, 35 percent of the inhabitants used the bike as their primary mode of commute.
When I moved to New York in August last year, one of the first things I missed was the biking accessibility and safety of my hometown. And rightly so. New York has 123 bike deaths per 1 billion bike trips, compared to only 19 fatalities per billion trips in Copenhagen, according to the International Transport Forum. The chance of getting killed in an accident while biking is thus more than six times higher in New York.
Most bike accidents in New York happen in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Broadway is the street with the highest number of total accidents but there are clusters of bike accidents on streets like 4th Avenue in Brooklyn and Delancey Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
But why do all these accidents happen in the first place?
The two most common reasons for reported bike accidents are distracted or inattentive drivers and drivers that field to yield right-of-way. By law, drivers going into an intersection should stay back and let other traffic pass before they take their right turn. When they don't it sometimes result in traffic accidents. From 2012 to 2022, almost 15,000 bike accidents happened as a result.
In comparison distracted or inattentive bikers only caused 2,352 accidents in the same period, while pedestrian errors resulted in 2,356 accidents.
New York has taken measures to improve the safety of its bikers. In 2021 alone, the city installed 1,456 miles of bike lanes. Of them, 590 miles were protected bike lanes. Unlike normal bike lanes, protected bike lanes are – as the name indicates – physically separated from motorized vehicles by a parking lane or barrier, protecting bikers from traffic outside road intersections.
This differentiation between types of bike lanes is important. In 2019, a study found separate and protected bike lanes to be the strongest indicator of lower fatality rates and fewer injuries among bike riders.
New York has more protected bike lanes than ever before, but they are largely located in Manhattan or in parks, where the bikers naturally are shielded from traffic, while large areas of Brooklyn and Queens barely have any.
Overall, bike safety in New York City has improved over the past years. From 2016 to 2021, the number of injuries per 1 million bike rides dropped from 29.6 to 24.7. But many fatal accidents still happen in areas where there are no protected bike lanes.
This indicates that there is still plenty of room for improvement in the city's bike infrastructure. Expanding the protected bike lane network to the uncovered areas could hopefully help prevent future fatal accidents.