August 26, 2012 was a great day for a bike ride in St. Albert. The sun was shining, the skies were clear and I felt great. And then I got hit by a car.
August 26, 2012 was a great day for a bike ride in St. Albert. The sun was shining, the skies were clear and I felt great.
And then I got hit by a car.
I was crossing the street at Boudreau and Sir Winston with the walk light in a marked crosswalk when the driver of a white Dodge Caravan decided to turn left through me.
There was a loud bang, followed by brief sensation of lightness. Trees and the horizon whirled by. I hit the ground hip-first, skidded across the asphalt, and stopped.
After a few moments, I thought, “I should probably start screaming now.”
So I did.
I had cuts, bruises, road-rash, a broken wrist and a knee that was (in the words of the doctor) “blown apart.” I needed hours of surgery, a week in the hospital, two-and-a-half months on crutches and eight months of physiotherapy to recover.
That’s why I was glad to hear that the city is working on a new bike safety strategy to make St. Albert safe for cyclists.
St. Albert has a lot of bike trails but they’re not great for commuting, says Kalen Pilkington, the city’s environmental co-ordinator and head of the bike strategy.
“We want people to feel safe riding on the roads,” she says.
The city wants to get more people riding bikes to promote fitness and tourism and to reduce traffic and pollution, Pilkington says.
“It’s healthier for both people and the environment.”
It’s early days, but Pilkington says the city plans to start with a public education campaign to promote bike safety and might eventually look into bike lanes.
Is this the best path to take?
David Suggitt has a different idea. The Erin Ridge resident has ridden his bike for years in St. Albert, and refuses to ride on the street.
“It’s like running a gauntlet,” he says.
He also refuses to wear a bike helmet despite St. Albert’s all-ages helmet bylaw, and has been ticketed twice as a result.
“It diminishes the pleasure,” he says of the helmet, and his research suggests that it’s actually safer not to wear one. He’s even put up posters around town that say, “Bike Helmets Kill” to get his point across.
If the city wants to improve bike safety, he argues, it should repeal its helmet bylaw.
“Statistics show that helmets are an abysmal failure, and I don’t know why we don’t listen to that.”
Is he right?
What works and what doesn't
Cycling is the third riskiest method of travel when compared to driving, walking, busing and motorcycling, says Kay Teschke, a public health professor at the University of British Colombia who has done extensive research on bike safety. (The bus is the most safe, and the motorcycle the least.)
While bike-car collisions are rare – St. Albert averages five a year, the RCMP reports – they are costly. Cycling injuries and deaths cost the U.S. about $5.4 billion a year, estimates the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Centre, a federally funded think-tank based in North Carolina.
Governments have three tools they can use to improve safety, says Don Voaklander, director of the Alberta Centre for Injury Control and Research: education, engineering and enforcement. Of these, education is always the least effective, as it doesn’t always reach its target.
“A lot of drivers don’t want to hear that they have to share the road,” Voaklander says.
Just as a lot of them don’t want to be told not to drink and drive.
“We’ve been trying to educate farmers on farm safety for 50 years and we haven’t made any gains at all,” he says.
Legal measures, such as mandatory helmet laws, are more effective, says Brian Rowe, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Alberta who has researched bike safety since 1991.
“The evidence would suggest that there’s an over 80 per cent reduction in major head injuries and facial injuries associated with wearing a helmet when you’re cycling,” he says, citing a long list of studies, including a massive 1999 review by the Cochrane Collaboration.
Research also shows that mandatory helmet laws substantially increase helmet use, he continues. Mohammad Karkhaneh, a U of A research student under Rowe, found that 92 per cent of St. Albert cyclists wore a helmet after the city brought in its helmet law, compared to just 45 per cent before.
So if helmets prevent injuries, and laws raise helmet use, helmet laws should reduce injuries, right?
Maybe. While Karkhaneh’s study found that head-injury hospitalization rates for Alberta cyclists fell after the province brought in its helmet law, other reviews, such as those by Ryan Zarychanski, a clinician scientist at the University of Manitoba, found no link between helmet laws and reduced head injury rates.
While helmets definitely reduce your risk of injury, Zarychanski says, his research suggests that head injuries have fallen nationwide since the mid-1990s – regardless of whether or not helmet laws were in place.
Anne Lusk, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health who has researched bike infrastructure for about 30 years, is one of a number of academics who say helmet laws do more harm than good.
“Helmet laws, I would say, are not good overall for population health,” she says.
While helmets are protective, she and critics like Suggitt say helmet laws discourage people from cycling. Since cycling carries so many health benefits, any drop in cycling more than offsets the benefits of increased helmet use.
Again, Zarychanski says, the evidence isn’t clear. His research of cycling rates across Canada found that they rose and fell regardless of whether or not a province brought in a helmet law.
“They don’t discourage people from using their bike,” he says.
The issue is complicated, he says.
“We don’t know for certain that helmet legislation makes a lot of difference, but we do know it’s one tool.”
A limited one, Teschke says.
“Helmets don’t protect you from having a crash in the first place,” she says, and they don’t motivate people to cycle.
“If you want to change people’s views as to how safe cycling is, you need to do change to infrastructure.”
The path to safety
The research and experts I consulted say bike lanes are the best way to make cycling safe.
Teschke recently studied 690 people in Vancouver and Toronto who were injured while on a bike and noted where their injuries occurred.
She found that cyclists were 90 per cent less likely to be injured while riding on a protected bike lane (one where riders have a physical barrier between them and cars) than in the street, and about 50 per cent less when they were in a painted bike lane.
She also found that cycling on the sidewalk or on a multi-use trail was only slightly less dangerous than riding on the street. Trails are scenic, she explains, but also have poor lighting, blind corners, obstacles (benches, posts and people) and other hazards that diminish their protective value.
Riding in the street requires constant vigilance, Lusk says.
“It’s not only dangerous, but it’s exhausting,” she says, a fact that deters casual riders.
You might know the rules of the road, but that won’t always protect you from drunk, inattentive or angry drivers, she says.
“The safest bicycling environment is … a protected bike lane,” she says.
Her research on protected bike lanes in Montreal found that they reduced injury rates by 28 per cent compared to regular roads and had 2.5 times more cyclists on them.
When offered the choice of where to ride, Teschke’s research says that cyclists show the strongest preference for the safest routes: protected bike lanes, local streets and bike-only paths.
Surveys by the City of Edmonton also show that riders are far more likely (82 per cent) to be comfortable riding on a bike lane than on a normal street (12 per cent).
Protected bike lanes are the best way to get more people on their bikes, Teschke says.
“It motivates people to cycle more, and it’s also much, much safer, and safety is one of the biggest concerns people have about biking.”
Edmonton has already seen a jump in ridership by putting in bike lanes. Cycling jumped 32 per cent on 106 Street after crews put in a painted bike lane there, the city found.
If we want to make streets safe for cycling, Lusk and others say, we need to build them that way. Cities should build the infrastructure they need to make streets so safe that helmets and helmet laws are unnecessary.
But that can be tough, as recent resistance to bike lane construction in Edmonton suggests. Until you have extensive cycling infrastructure, you should have a helmet law for its safety benefits, Rowe says.
I’ll be back on my bike later this spring, but I still plan to stay off the street when I can. If the city wants to keep us cyclists safe on the road, it’ll have to build us a lane of our own.
