Copenhagen Report says cycle facilities less safe

Essential reading for cycle campaigners is this report, the full version being in Danish but there is an executive summary in English posted at http://www.trafitec.dk/publikauk.htm.

The meta-summary is that cycle facilities encourage more people to cycle, and make cyclists *feel* safer. However in reality they actually reduce cyclists’ safety – improvements in cyclists’ safety between junctions are more than outweighed by increased risk at or near junctions (and, from other data sources, we know that this is where around three-quarters of cyclists’ collisions occur).

From this, it is reasonable to conclude that well-designed cycle facilities do have their place – after all, the health benefits of the extra cycling will far outweigh the increased injury risk (which, in the wider scheme of things, is still pretty low). However, nobody should assume that it is necessarily safer for cyclists to use them – if anything, this research rather suggests the opposite, and this from a city where the cycle facilities are acknowledged to be among the best in the world.

Roger Geffen, campaign manager at the CTC says " If only this report had come out 6 months earlier, we might have been able to get a better outcome from the Highway Code campaign!"

==posted by Simon==