I found this article to be really enlightening, which is no surprise since the highlight of my summer was getting a new bike. Most of my vacations are spent biking around my neighborhood and nearby Brooklyn. These places are full of avid bikers, so sometimes I forget that it isn’t like this everywhere.We see tons of bikers in the city every day so it was crazy to read that only 0.5% of Americans bike to work. Why is it so low? The article proposes that it is because of the lack of good facilities and I am inclined to agree. They gave us the Netherlands and Montreal as examples of working cycle tracks which are backed by extensive rules and guidelines that the citizens there have grew up with – it’s natural to them unlike in the US which seems to shun a lot of the things that are good for us, health-wise.
The study picked a good variety of tracks ranging from warm to moderate to cold which gives us a well rounded number of the people who choose to bike and I actually didn’t think the percentage of crashes was too bad. Of course highly congested cities like NYC have more accidents, but I feel like that has more to do with how useless bike lanes are. I once hit a bus and that had less to do with my bad biking and more to do with traffic problems. Personally, I’d prefer cycling tracks over being on the road in the city, but I don’t mind too much in small neighborhoods. It’d be better for our health and the environment if we had more.
