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The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) has just released a new report about cyclists and pedestrians across the city of Los Angeles, CA. L.A. Bike Count: Every Cyclist Counts is an in depth assessment of the use of the city’s public streets by bikers and walkers on a typical day for commuting and recreational purposes.

To produce this report, LACBC brought together and trained over 100 community volunteers who contributed hundreds of hours and counted over 14,000 cyclists and 60,000 pedestrians at over 50 strategic locations citywide. The count also included gender, helmet use, sidewalk riding, and riding on the wrong side of the street. All this information can be found in the report and is key in influencing and guiding future decision making about where to focus engineering, education, enforcement, and other improvements to increase bicycling and walking in LA.

Key findings, as mentioned in LACBC’s press release, include:

• Overall, women riders were in the minority, accounting for just 15% of all riders observed across the three time periods studied. This translates to a male-to-female ratio of 6:1. These findings speak to the need for safer streets to encourage women, children, and other risk-adverse groups to feel welcome on our public roads.
• Helmet use was highest during the weekday morning period (7:00 - 9:30 AM) when 49% of riders wore helmets. These baseline data may be useful for targeting educational campaigns promoting bike safety.
• Overall, 4% of bicyclists were observed riding on the wrong side of the street in any given intersection. However, only 2% of riders in intersections with bike infrastructure rode on the wrong side.
• Where bike paths and bike lanes are present, 17% of riders were seen riding on sidewalks, compared to 52% where there is no bike infrastructure.

To view the full report and description of LACBC’s efforts, visit http://la-bike.org/index.html

Transportation Alternatives (T.A.)has published two extensive reports on traffic safety and enforcement, quantitatively tallying the level of lawless driving and documenting the failure to create deterrence from dangerous driving on New York City streets.  Executive Order:  A Mayoral Strategy for Traffic Safety examines the broken system of enforcement of traffic crimes, describing the deadly consequences of dangerous driving, the lack of moving violation enforcement, and the loopholes in traffic crime prosecution. Using sampling data and yearly totals of NYPD summonsing activity, Executive Order presents staggering statistics that reveal how often dangerous drivers evade enforcement and delay justice.  The report was released to wide acclaim, with coverage by every major New York City news organization and both Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly commenting on its findings.  A follow-up study, From Chaos to Compliance:  How the NYPD Can Grasp New York City’s Traffic Safety Problem develops the methodology for measuring the state of New York streets, and employs these techniques to prove the pervasiveness of traffic law violations. 

T.A. has also launched an advocacy campaign, based on the comprehensive recommendations of over 30 experts in Traffic Safety and Law Enforcement, to change government policy towards street safety and create true deterrents to dangerous driving in New York City. In the coming months, T.A. will push the NYPD to adopt these methods to understand how best to approach the problems of dangerous driving. These reports and efforts were made possible in part by an Alliance for Biking & Walking Advocacy Advance Grant.

Download the reports:

Executive Order: A Mayoral Strategy for Traffic Safety

and

From Chaos to Compliance: How the NYPD Can Grasp New York City’s Traffic Safety Problem