Why It's Safer to Walk and Bike Where More People Walk and Bike

Just in time for a warm-weather holiday weekend, we’re reminded (via the Transportationist’s David Levinson) that, statistically speaking, it’s a lot safer to walk and ride a bike where lots of other people walk and ride bikes. The “safety in numbers” concept feels obvious today, but strong evidence in its favor didn’t emerge until a 2003 study. Let’s take a closer look at this classic.

Health consultant Peter Lyndon Jacobsen gathered two main sets of data: how much people walk and bike, and how often walkers and bike riders collide with drivers. Unlike past analyses, which had compared such trends at the level of individual intersections, Jacobsen analyzed them on a much larger scale. He looked at 68 California cities, 47 towns in Denmark, and 14 countries in Europe.