The more bikes on the road, the safer it gets to ride them. At least that’s what a study in Philadelphia hints at. An academic treatise published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at crash records in Philadelphia County, PA between 2010 and 2018.
“In the long term, programs that increase the number of bicycles on the road, such as bikeshare, may reduce rates of motor vehicle crashes involving a bicycle,” the authors suggest.Though the presence of bikeshare presumably meant more people were riding, the rate of reported crashes with motor vehicles declined an average of 13 percent per annum after bikeshare was introduced, whereas it had been declining only one percent a year before then, says Motor Vehicle Crashes Involving a Bicycle Before and After Introduction of a Bike Share Program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2010–2018 (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305613).
