Transportation
Why Bike-Share Is Really Very Safe
Safer than personal bikes, even, according to new research.
The history of bike-share in the U.S. is pretty short. One of the first American programs on record, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, isn’t quite a decade old, while larger programs in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Washington, D.C. have been running since 2010. Bay Area Bike Share (BABS) has been around since 2013. But the systems have already amassed a loyal following: Minneapolis’s Nice Ride has seen nearly 800,000 trips since 2011, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare has seen 5.9 million, and BABS almost 350,000.
Remarkably, though, none of these trips have concluded in fatal accidents on the road, says a new analysis from the Mineta Transportation Institute.