Bike Path Phobia: Selling Skeptics On Urban Greenway Bike Path Safety

Parks & Recreation, August, 2000 by Tod Schneider

Do bike paths cause crime? While enthusiasts may laugh at the suggestion, others fear dire consequences if underdeveloped areas become public trails. Urban greenway supporters may cross swords with adamant opponents in vitriolic public meetings or expensive court cases. One community fought this battle on both fronts for years.

Do greenway bike paths kill? Some people think so. 1999 marked the end of a protracted dispute over completion of a world-class urban trail in Eugene, Oregon. The bruising and expensive battle pitted a pro-bicycle faction against hostile private property owners. The city was accused of callous disregard for the safety of school children. The private property owners were labeled elitist obstructionists. Lawyers on both sides made out like bandits. The rest of us picked up the tab.

The bike path follows the Willamette River on both banks, with four pedestrian bridges linking the two sides. Although most of the path has been in place and widely used for years, there remains an unbuilt segment. A short stretch of the latter, unfortunately, runs along the riverbank behind a private high school, which has greatly enjoyed its solitude. The school fought the bike path zealously and on any fronts possible. One premise, attending to the public's fear of school-related homicides, asserted that the path would somehow generate violent crime, putting their school at great risk.

Other communities may run into similar arguments. It's not unusual for citizens to conclude that bike paths are inherently unsafe based on a flurry of path-specific incidents enhanced by alarmist media coverage. Perhaps your community can benefit from knowing in advance the cogent arguments and recommendations we wish we had presented earlier and more effectively:

1. Our greenway trail area covers 222 acres. That's the equivalent of a 7.7 by 7.7 square-block area. If you compare statistics for crime reported on the bike paths to crime reported in other areas of comparable size, it's clear that crime is generally lower on the bike path when examined based on raw geography.

2. However, crime rates are generally based on the rate of crime per 100,000 people, not on geographic area. How does this apply to a bike path? If you can orchestrate an accurate traffic count on a bike path you may be able to generate a crime rate figure, although this gets a little tricky. Crime statistics are often based on a residential population, such as the number of people who live in a city based on census data, a far more stable number than is likely to be found in non-residential settings where nobody stays more than a few minutes. Bike path "population" is different. It might be more comparable to another high-mobility area based on similar tabulations, such as by counting pedestrians and bicyclists. For example, if we can determine that 10,000 people walk past city hall, 2,000 people pass a major bike path intersection, and 6,000 people pass alongside an inner-city park monthly, these might present opportunities to develop comparable statistics: the number of violent crimes reported within a 400 foot radius, adjusted per 100,000 people. Police departments can often help generate some or all of this data to help determine crime rates.

Paradoxically, if ten people use the path, and a serious crime occurs there, the crime rate will be very high. If, on the other hand, one thousand people use the same exact path and the same crime occurs there, the crime rate will be one hundred fold lower. In other words, the more users and less crime the better the statistics. This goes beyond skewed data--if there is a constant legitimate presence, meaning that there are good people on the path at all times, then criminals will often find this an uncomfortable location for illegitimate activity. They'll look elsewhere for victims--specifically where individuals are more isolated.

An important statistic to look at is the number of injury vehicle accidents in your community. Bicycles and pedestrians on paths that are separated from car traffic are unlikely to be hit by cars. When the injury rate on such paths is compared to the number of people in your community who are injured or killed by cars at other locations, it should be clear that many lives would have been saved if people had an alternative to motorized transportation or to sharing the road with motor vehicles. Traffic fatalities, accounting for 41,967 deaths nationwide in 1997, are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-32, and are the leading explanation for deaths on-the-job. Out of that 1997 total, 5,307 victims were pedestrians and 813 were bicyclists--all of whom had encounters with motor vehicles and all of whom presumably would be alive today if they had been separated from vehicle traffic.

Medical miracles skew the picture, saving the lives of thousands who never would have recovered from similar injuries a few decades ago. Many people survive horrendous accidents but must contend with permanently debilitating injuries: 3,399,000 people were injured in traffic accidents in 1997.