Transportation
Head Injuries Didn't Rise in Bike-Share Cities. They Actually Fell
In fact, head injuries declined about 14 percent after cities started bike-sharing programs.
Late last week, several media outlets ran stories on a study published in the American Journal of Public Health that allegedly showed head injuries increasing in cities with bike-share programs. Kay Teschke, who studies city cycling at the University of British Columbia, read the news with great interest. Then she read the actual journal publication, and her interest changed to alarm.
"When I actually looked at the data, I thought, oh my goodness, the injuries actually went down," she says. "In the bike-share cities, the total number of injuries went down, and the number of head injuries went down."