have had some very fun excursions on rail trails , disused railways turned into pedestrian/bike paths. The trails typically go through very beautiful areas and rarely do you have to concern yourself with motorized traffic of any kind. Reader Will appears to be interested in rails as well, but he wants to ride on them - literally. Check it out - Will included the following text - A rail-bike is a bicycle that has been modified to be able to ride on the rails of a railroad. The front wheel has a device attached to it so that the bike won’t steer off the rail while an outrigger is used to support the bike using the other rail. I used conduit, cut up “razor” scooters parts, one bike fork two bits of steel and numerous nuts, bolts, washers and retaining pins. Nothing is welded. The hardest part is getting the spacing right so that friction and play are minimized. A lot of person hours certainly went in to this working model and the details are pretty amazing. [Keep re
Time for the scientist to weigh in. Firstly, always read the original paper if possible, journalists regularly misreport or over-sensationallize.
ReplyDeletehttp://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2011/02/02/ip.2010.028696.full.pdf?sid=a2ed422a-9dbe-409a-b762-40e0ffbcedc6
In this case, The Daily says streets are 28 times more dangerous that separate paths, which is totally incorrect. When six paths were compared with eight street segments in the same area of Montreal, five had higher risk on the street and three had higher risk on the paths. Only three of the comparisons were statistically significant. When averaged together, the paths were 28% safer (not times as the Daily article says, percent).
But its more complicated than that. They did not use the streets the paths run along for the comparison, but other refrence streets. They looked at car crash rates to determine how dangerous the reference streets are to the streets the bike paths are on. On average, they came out the same but the average hides the real story. Two of the reference streets were much more dangerous than the bike path streets - one 10x more dangerous and one 5x more dangerous. Those two streets are two of the three values were the bike path tested safer and showed the highest difference between path and street. Eliminate those two outliers and the whole study falls apart. There would be no difference in safety or it might actually tilt the other way.
The only thing they really succeeded in proving is that streets that are more dangerous for cars are also more dangerous for bikes, so it might be best to stay off them. Whether you take a light traffic street or path makes no difference.