One Less Car

Choice quotes from this lecture by John Pucher:

For every hour that you spend cycling, you are adding more than one hour to your expected healthy lifespan, while for every hour they sit in their cars, they are subtracting from their expected healthy lifespan.

[...]

The average Canadian works for two months financing their car. Two months, you are enslaved to your car. But not me. I’m car free.

(Now just think about that. Cars are much cheaper in Canada than in Singapore. How much extra time does the average car-owning Singaporean work per year to finance his/her car?)

There’s lots, lots more in that video. But if you are one of those car addicts who thinks driving a private car is a sacred “Singaporean Dream“, then you’re just not going to accept that the healthier, more socially responsible, and cheaper option is the better one. One of the points Pucher emphasises throughout is that a successful pro-cycling policy requires traffic calming measures. Now just try to imagine the outcry from supporters of the above “Singaporean Dream” at any mention of narrowing roads or deliberately putting islands in the middle of roads to slow motorists down. We worked so hard to buy a car, and now you’re telling us we can’t race through the streets? That’s it, we’re voting for the opposition!

You know, I still haven’t come across a single plausible explanation for why our enlightened urban planners think that Singapore can turn out to be the only city in the world where cycling is both a major mode of transport and mainly done on sidewalks. Because, as I have remarked before, the global pattern is that the most bike-friendly cities are the ones where there are the most cyclists on the roads, not on or rubbing shoulders with sidewalks. And no wonder, too: sidewalks have higher accident rates for cyclists. Note further that this is without taking into account the fact that accidents on sidewalks are already underreported relative to accidents on roads.

Ah, yes. The one more step. Sembawang and Woodlands are going the way of Tampines. The justification for it is shitty:

Surveys have indicated that both cyclists and pedestrians there seemed generally in favour of the idea of sharing the footpaths in order to get cyclists off the busy roads.

The initiative in Sembawang and Woodlands was the result of feedback from residents, who wanted to minimise accidents and conflict between cyclists and pedestrians.

Sorry to be an elitist, but most casual cyclists and pedestrians don’t know shit about transportation and urban planning research. The mistaken perceptions these residents have are worthless in the light of the myriad studies showing a higher risk of accidents on off-road paths (if the studies in my sidewalk cycling post are not enough for you, check out this long list of references).

I have a sneaking feeling (and I’m not the only one who thinks this) that this is part of a creeping phenomenon of driving cyclists off the roads. After all, even if they do not officially ban cyclists from the roads, how many more drivers in Sembawang and Woodlands are going to look at the new ‘cycling paths’ and think, when they next see a cyclist on the road, that that cyclist is not supposed to be there? Plenty of drivers already think that way. The last thing we need is official encouragement for the idea that cyclists do not belong on the roads. The large number of triathletes in Singapore may mean that cyclists won’t be outright banned from the roads, but you just need an increase in driver misbehavior to drive more of us off the road. And it’s hardly implausible that drivers will tend to get more tetchy when they perceive something that does not ‘belong’ on the road as obstructing their movements.

In today’s Today:

How can Singaporeans be encouraged to cycle more if they’re not safe on roads?

Tuesday • June 17, 2008

Letter from SHARON LIM

LAST Friday night, I was on a Tibs bus service 61 (TIBS777A) travelling from Holland Village towards the Bukit Batok bus interchange.

As the bus neared Maju Road, just before the Singapore Institute of Management, the bus came up behind two male cyclists. They were wearing helmets and bright clothes and had rear lights installed on their bicycles.

Instead of slowing down or trying to overtake the cyclist, the bus driver began blasting his horn at them continuously. He tailgated the two cyclists that at times, it seemed as if the bus was breathing down their necks.

When the bus stopped at Ngee Ann Polytechnic to allow passengers to board, the two cyclists caught up and started shouting vulgarities at the driver. The bus driver got out and a minor scuffle broke out before some passengers separated them.

If the authorities are serious about encouraging Singaporeans to cycle to work or school, shouldn’t they also ensure that cyclists are treated as rightful road users?

But if cyclists cannot ride on the pavement and are in danger of being knocked down by inconsiderate road users, how are they going to use their bicycles as a means of transport?

I promised a long time ago to post on the findings of studies on the risks of sidewalk versus on-road bicycling. From a 1994 paper by Wachtel and Lewiston studying bicycle-motor vehicle collisions in Palo Alto:

The average cyclist in this study incurs a risk on the sidewalk 1.8 times as great as on the roadway, and the result is statistically significant (p<0.01)…. Altogether the sidewalk risk is higher for 24 of the 27 categories [of cyclists], and for six of tehse the difference is statistically significant; for many groups the number of accidents expected is too small to attain significance.

The greatest risk found in this study is for bicyclists over 18 traveling against traffic on the sidewalk. Each of these characteristics is hazardous in itself; combined, they present 5.3 times the average risk.

Table 5 demonstrates that sidewalks or paths adjacent to a roadway are usually not, as non-cyclists expect, safer than the road, but much less safe. This conclusion is already well established in existing standards for bikeway design, although in our experience it is not widely known or observed.

[...]

Table 4 shows that wrong-way sidewalk travel is 4.5 times as dangerous as right-way sidewalk travel. Moreover, both Table 4 and Table 5 show that sidewalk bicycling promotes wrong-way travel: 315 of 971 sidewalk bicyclists (32 percent) rode against the direction of traffic, compared to only 108 of 2005 roadway bicyclists (5 percent).

Even right-way sidewalk bicyclists can cross driveways and enter intersections at high speed, and they may enter from an unexpected position and direction — for instance, on the right side of overtaking right-turning traffic. Sidewalk bicyclists are more likely than roadway bicyclists to be obscured at intersections by parked cars, buildings, fences, and shrubbery; their stopping distance is much greater than a pedestrian’s, and they have less maneuverability.

There is some nuance in the statistics. In reality, looking at all groups of bicyclists together, the rate of accidents (what the authors call ‘risk’) is higher for roadway bicyclists than for sidewalk bicyclists. But when cyclists are separated demographically by age, sex, and by whether they were cycling with or against traffic, for most such categories, it was riskier to cycle on the sidewalk than on the road. The reason for this apparent paradox is that higher risk is correlated with age, and age is correlated with cycling on the roadway. This meant that the large number of older cyclists on the roadways skewed the risk factor for roadway cycling higher than it actually was. If you compare cyclists in the same demographic category, though, roadway cycling was almost always less or equally dangerous.

(I would post the tables of data of all these studies if it wouldn’t run the risk of violating copyright laws. Nevertheless, those who want to see them may email me personally.)

Another study of cyclists in the Ottawa-Carleton region found a similar higher risk for sidewalk cycling:

Overall, travel on roads has the lowest injury and fall rates, followed by off-road paths/trails and then sidewalks. Collision rates are not different on the three types of facilities. The rate of injury might be considered most important by planners and cyclists from a safety perspective while the individual collision and fall rates might be considered important from the perspective of promoting bicycling if one wants to ensure positive travel experiences even when no injuries occur.

The relative rate of injury on the sidewalk versus the road is very high (4.0). Similarly, the relative
injury rate on sidewalk versus off-road paths/trails is quite high (2.5). While the relative rate of injury between paths/trails versus roads is lower ( 1.6) it is still significant and only seems small because of its magnitude compared to the other relative fall rates.consider the non-confounding and confounding variables.

Like the previous study, this one tried to eliminate the influence of confounding factors other than kind of path used. Instead of comparing risks category-by-category, though, they used other parts of their data to weight the risks they calculated accordingly.

Finally, a third study in Toronto finds that:

Overall, travel on roads has the lowest injury and fall rates, followed by off-road paths and then sidewalks. Collision rates are lower on sidewalks than on paths. But collision rates are higher on paths and sidewalks compared to roads. The relative rate of injuries and major injuries on the sidewalk versus both roads and paths is very high. While the relative rate of injury between paths versus roads is lower it is still significant for all injuries.

I should note that I did not cherry-pick these studies. I searched for studies that compared accident rates on the road versus accident rates on sidewalks, and did not find any that found a higher accident rate for road cyclists. You can try it yourself on Google Scholar.

Keep in mind, though, that even if road cycling has a lower risk of accident, a collision with a car is more likely to be fatal or result in serious injury than a fall on the sidewalk.

References:

Aultman-Hall, L. and F. L. Hall (1998, January). Ottawa-carleton commuter cyclist on- and off-road incident rates. Accident analysis and prevention 30 (1), 29-43.

Aultman-Hall, L. and G. M. Kaltenecker (1999, November). Toronto bicycle commuter safety rates. Accident Analysis & Prevention 31 (6), 675-686.

Wachtel, A. & Lewiston, D. Risk factors for bicycle-motor vehicle collisions at intersections. Journal of Safety Research 195.

Paul Barter of Cycling in Singapore points out that despite the positive-sounding announcements about allowing folding bikes on buses and trains, what’s effectively been done is to put restrictions on how/when/where folding bikes can be brought on buses and trains:

Sadly, now that the details are out, this looks like a trial of RESTRICTING folding bikes on MRT and buses. The guidelines are much tighter than they were before this. In practice, MRT and buses (when not packed) had been allowing foldables without problems for some time. This long list of restrictions seems like overkill. They are also rather inflexible. For example, trains traveling in the reverse peak direction are often quite empty even during peak hours. But with these rules, foldables are not allowed on these spacious trains either. I don’t see a need for so many complicated rules! If the intention here is to make it easier to bring folders onto public transport then this is a very strange way to go about it.

On a related note, I just did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: send a letter to the ST forum suggesting that we install external bike racks on buses:

With foldable bikes now allowed on public buses and MRT carriages during certain hours, I wonder if the our public transport companies would consider installing low-cost external bike racks on public buses. America is not known as a cycling-friendly country, yet the American Public Transportation Association reports that in 2007, 62.7% of public buses in America have external bike racks. These are usually mounted in front of the bus and take up no passenger space. They have a simple mechanism that allows the cyclist to mount the bike securely in a few seconds. Certainly, it would cost less to install one such bike rack than to install one TV. Yet, many buses in Singapore have TVs, and none have bike racks. I hope our bus companies will consider this simple action that would provide a significant incentive for people to make part of their commute healthy and environmentally friendly.

My latest spiel in response to another of those fatalists, whom I spotted on a Cycling in Singapore post. As is sadly too common here, the fatalist in question insists that cycling to work will never be a widespread habit in Singapore due to the weather, the prevailing culture, current traffic conditions, etc. Now, the weather I can’t change, but I think it’s still a darn sight better than the weather in the American Midwest. Try cycling in sub-zero weather with 40km/h winds. Go observe the number of people cycle-commuting in places like Chicago and Ann Arbor. Then come back and tell me that you can’t create a significant bike commuting population in Singapore. Furthermore, people who bring up the weather fail to realise that the factor at issue is people’s willingness to tolerate the weather, not the weather itself. And people’s level of tolerance certainly can be changed.

As for other factors like traffic conditions and culture, it’s all too obvious that those can be changed too. But I will leave my case for those to be made by the comment I posted at Cycling in Singapore:

I strongly object to KY’s fatalistic view about promoting cycling to work. Of course, *right now* there are few people who cycle to work (as opposed to simply around their neighborhood), and *right now* it’s rather dangerous to cycle on many roads. But a major reason that few people cycle to work is that it’s dangerous. So we are in a chicken-and-egg situation, where the authorities refuse to build certain facilities because they claim there is no demand for it, yet there is no demand for them because the lack of facilities creates a prevailing situation where the product offered (bike commuting) is perceived as inferior. The economic concept of induced demand is relevant here — it’s basically the same mechanism that explains why adding lanes to expressways doesn’t relieve congestion (the initially faster traffic induces more people to use the expressway, eventually bringing traffic back to pre-expansion congestion levels).

People tend to naively think that bike-friendly cities in the West arose because the transport authorities spotted a significant existing demand for bikes and hence built bike-friendly infrastructure. In fact, the real situation is more complicated. Typically, it’s the efforts of a minority of cycling enthusiasts that push the authorities into bike-friendly measures. One bike lane at a time. But with each bike lane laid down, the mass of cyclists grows, as cycling becomes a more attractive option. As they grow, it gets progressively easier to make their case for more bike-friendly infrastructure. And so on. But at the start, there will be a ‘bootstrapping’ stage where a minority has to make the case for facilities for which the demand hasn’t ‘matured’. It’s a pretty commonsense notion really. Build the lanes, and the cyclists will appear.

Finally, I think it is incredibly short-sighted to claim that only low-income workers and crazy Westerners or Western-influenced Singaporeans will cycle to work. I think it’s pretty evident to everyone that oil prices, and hence the price of motorized transport, are going to increase steadily. It’s also notable that even in a society as car-crazy as America, bike commuting has been steadily increasing. This is not some kind of one-off cultural phenomenon. It is a signal of deep, albeit long-term, economic forces at work. If we choose to ignore it and plan only for short-term accommodation rather than long-term structural change, we will pay the price eventually.

It’s funny that KY rants about how people would not cycle to work if they were paid to. Well I think at some point in the not too distant future cyclists will effectively be paid to cycle to work — simply by virtue of the price differential between cycling and other transport options. And making cycling to work safer and more comfortable is also a way of ‘paying’ cyclists to do so, just not in monetary terms.

There is an insidious, self-defeating assumption here that Singaporean culture and Singaporeans’ attitudes towards cycling will never change — that women will always view it as the equivalent of menial labour fit only for construction workers, etc. Well of course if you go around saying that all the time and using that as an excuse for not pushing hard for cycling as a major mode of transport, then of course your predictions will come true. No change is going to happen when people go around saying that change is impossible. This comes back to the point that cycling-friendly cities (in the States especially) did not arise because there were already a bike-loving populations slavering for bike lanes. Rather, such cities became bike friendly because the starting minority of bike enthusiasts managed to get their ideas out and change the mindsets of people around them. The pre-existing culture was and is being changed in those places. To assume from the start that S’porean mindsets cannot be similarly changed is to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only people who believe things can change can change things.

*I was sorely tempted to title this post ‘Yes we can‘, but decided it would be too cheesy. For all that I distrust politicians, I think there is something in the Obama campaign’s line.

Here.

Not as good as the previous one, but I think it’s notable that they even bother making pro-cycling TV ads.

Ambrose and I recently had a lively discussion of this issue over at his blog. I’m pretty firmly against allowing sidewalk cycling, not just for reasons of pedestrian safety, but also because I see sidewalk cycling as propagating the attitude that cyclists do not belong on the road, which in turn fuels bad behaviour towards road cyclists from motorists.

I have also been looking up a few studies on the dangers of sidewalk cycling versus road cycling, and will post my findings soon.

Arson and Arsenic reports that motorbike driving instructors tell their students that it’s illegal for cyclists to be on the roads.

Today was my first time attempting to cycle to work at 9am. I think whatever health benefits I gathered from the exercise were probably cancelled out by the pollution. Furthermore, it was a bitch trying to filter right. Two big filters that I have problems with are along Thomson Road (to turn into Chancery Lane) and Holland Road (to turn into North Buona Vista Road). When I stick to my usual starting time of 6am, I have no problems making those turns. Today at around 9.30am the traffic along Thomson Road was heavy and slow. Bloody taxi honked at me when I tried to filter right, even though there was a huge gap between it and the car in front, and I was travelling about as fast as the rest of the traffic on the road. And even after I’d successfully filtered, I had to wait a bloody long time before there was a gap in the traffic in the opposite direction that allowed me to turn into Chancery Lane. I should have just taken Lornie Road, hills and all. At Holland Road I had to take two pedestrian crossings to turn right.

The Illinois legislature recently passed a law requiring motorists to pass bicyclists with at least three feet to spare. (I think we might have to wait till the next century for something like this to be passed in Singapore.) Willow Naeco, a.k.a. Chicago Cycling Chick, has come up with a 3-foot-long “foam claw buffer” to put on her bike, so that any motorists that hit it will have broken the law: