Systematic review of biking infrastructure safety effects

General
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Alex alerted me (and DCC planners) to a recently published systematic review of biking infrastructure safety effects. She notes:

There are no new findings from previous reviews, despite lots of new research.

​Rather, it reconfirms the existing knowledge that:

  1. Physically separated lanes have a large and consistent safety benefit - on actual crashes and near misses
  2. There is good evidence that painted lanes increase risk in many contexts, including where there is high traffic volume, or parked cars on the inside
  3. There is good evidence that sharrows are completely ineffectual
  4. Intersections and “transition zones” where cyclists are moving from provision of infrastructure into traffic are where most crashes happen (one study found a third of crashes happened within 100m of a bike lane ending) - this makes full networks, advance bike boxes at intersections critical - including with protected lanes or other means for cyclists to get to those advance bike boxes

This study didn’t include sense of safety, which is more important than actual safety for encouraging people to bike - and the worst outcomes happen when infrastructure improves sense of safety but not actual safety (which is partly how painted lanes increase crashes).

This should put the North Rd cycleway at the top of the agenda for urgent action - the council now has pretty solid evidence that its intervention has likely increased injury risk along there, which I think should come with some accountability if someone dies or is seriously injured. This accountability came up for Auckland Council during the coronial review of a nurse dying along Tamaki Drive when she was doored by a car and crushed by a truck - many people over time had told the council that spot was very dangerous and something needed to be done, but they did nothing until the time of the coronial inquiry, when they rapidly made the changes they should have. Let’s not wait until that happens. there’s a similar situation here, where cyclists have been telling the council the North Rd cycle lane is unsafe repeatedly and consistently.

Even swapping the bike lane and the parked cars around would make a huge difference there at very low cost.

This is important evidence… we should keep the pressure on to the DCC to move beyond painted cycle lanes.

Chen 2026 Infrastructure matters_cycling infrastructure safety effects (2.9 MB)

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I’m all for significant improvements for cyclists on North Road. However, I’m not sure that swapping the parked cars and the cycle lane is a good idea, as that would obscure cyclists from the vision of drivers who are then likely to turn into cyclists when they try to drive into side streets and driveways. If we had Dutch drivers, I wouldn’t be worried, but we don’t.

On a somewhat related note, I was showing a couple of friends my concept for an improved Gardens intersection last night, only to be yelled at and called less polite form of mother-lover by a pedestrian with a walking stick when I mentioned that my plan would remove two car parks. Didn’t help that one ‘friend’ told the guy I worked for Council and was planning on removing lots more car parks! In return, I reminded the bloke that he was, in fact, a pedestrian. Didn’t seem to sink in though.