Perceived Sense of Safety
I’ve gone on about this before, as have many others, but an article in the Long Beach (LA) Post about their new (somewhat flawed) cycletrack actually talked about perceived safety vs. actual safety — I don’t ever recall seeing it in a mainstream news piece before:
People are more likely to use bicycles as a primary mode of transportation when cycle tracks are available because they offer cyclists both a perceived and real sense of safety, researchers said. The study found that the chief obstacle to bicycling, especially for women, children and seniors, is the perceived danger of vehicular traffic, which the study suggests is a real threat based on corroboration by bike riders surveyed by the study’s research team.
Most of the time I’ve talked about that here, I’ve used the term ‘subjective safety’ — used by David Hembrow. And I feel like it’s a fact that we advocate-types can use to be reminded of every so often — like, maybe once a day. It’s THE NUMBER ONE REASON that people don’t bike. It’s already safe to bike, statistically speaking (except for Orange County, maybe, which seems to be on some type of mass murder spree against cyclists at the moment) — but it doesn’t feel safe to bike — we’ve gotta change that.
We just got done talking about rechanneled roads and how, even though they may make that first step towards offering a very little bit of perceived safety, they often don’t go nearly far enough. This is why I prefer to use the terminology ‘allowing‘ people to bike instead of ‘luring’ or ‘cajoling’ or ‘enticing’ people to bike — none of those are really necessary — instead, we just have to offer a very basic sense of safety — once we do that, it is likely that actual safety will begin getting better on its own, if only through safety in numbers.
Bravo to the author of the article for linking to the actual Harvard study, by Anne Lusk. I’ve seen too many occurrences (even recently) of studies that have been twisted out of sorts, unintentionally or otherwise, by reporters, so I like to be able to go to the primary sources. Anne Lusk answered a couple of my questions back in the day, so bravo to her, too. Anne is an adviser to the Bicycle City project/idea — not to be confused with the film, Bicycle City.
Presumably this new Long Beach cycletrack is the work, at least in part, of Charlie Gandy — the guy who helped deliver us the innovative (though, less-effective-than-I’d-hoped) green-sharrowed lane in Belmont Shores (Long Beach). Here’s Gandy in a Streetfilm:
I’ll be heading down to Long Beach in a few days to take in some Frosted cupcakes, along that 2nd Street corridor in Belmont Shores, and I’ll be stopping by to check out this new cycletrack, too. And since the shop co-owner of that Utopia restaurant gave cyclists props, and is gonna roll out Long Beach’s first bike corral, I’m gonna roll in there, too. And I’ll stop by Sipology, too. Hoping to see some bikes while out at the LA Times Festival of Books, too. Busy schedule!
And, who knows — maybe I’ll even run into Octavio.
Incidentally, the green sharrows along 2nd Street are good-ish and interesting and possibly nice, but they’re not enough — we need a full-on cycletrack. There are a number of ways to do it, and we’re severely constrained by the presence of one of the most disastrous anti-patterns known to urban design — the raised median. So we can either 1) scrap the car parking along 2nd, or 2) convert one of the general purpose travel lanes into a cycletrack (flipping it with the parking lane for that extra perceived safety), or 3) tear out the median and rechannel the road to provide for cycletracks. I say option 2) is the best, most direct, quickest, least expensive, least disruptive to residents and businesses and commuters, and the median, which is at least planted with various types of greenery, can stay.
