Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ryan on September 30, 2011 at 6:15am

Kinzie happened because you've got two major bike corridors (Milwaukee and Elston) feeding into a narrow and difficult spot just before downtown.  Kinzie is a way to convince people who might be comfortable riding on Milwaukee that they really can ride their bikes to work downtown.  And while there happens to be a Sun-Times columnist who used Kinzie, there just weren't that many cars on it, so the audience for his complaints is limited.  You can put a couple blocks of protected space on Kinzie and make a lot of people a lot more likely to ride on Milwaukee and on Elston.  If you were going to put a protected lane on Milwaukee, which 2 blocks would matter that much?  It's not realistic to think the city is going to roll out a 6-mile protected lane down the whole length of Milwaukee as it's first foray into separate lanes.  In that way, I think Kinzie is a really good choice.

 

The other thing is that instead of looking at a map of accidents, you'd need to think about the ratio of accidents per cyclist.  The Milwaukee corridor has more accidents mostly because there are way more cyclists on Milwaukee.  I don't think it's more dangerous than Elston.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Mulcky on September 30, 2011 at 6:20am

Why would we need to look at a ratio? Protected bike lane have a static cost per foot so they should be installed wherever they will do the most good.

Ryan said:

 

The other thing is that instead of looking at a map of accidents, you'd need to think about the ratio of accidents per cyclist.  The Milwaukee corridor has more accidents mostly because there are way more cyclists on Milwaukee.  I don't think it's more dangerous than Elston.

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Permalink Reply by Justin B Newman on September 30, 2011 at 6:35am

Ratio vs. "raw accidents" is almost a philosophical question, as demonstrated by this hypothetical:

 

Intersection #1 has 1000 riders per day. Each day 2 riders are in an accident.

Intersection #2 has 50 riders per day. Each day 1 rider is in an accident.

 

Intersection #1 "injures more cyclists."

Intersection #2 "is more dangerous."

 

To really try to assess in this manner, one would also have to determine if the proposed solution would reduce the number of accidents more in one location than another. Perhaps the accidents at intersection #2 will be solved through fixing the four foot deep pothole in the bicycle lane!

 

-jbn

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Mulcky on September 30, 2011 at 6:47am

I like that reponse Justin. I see what you're saying. Maybe the solution isn't always a protected bike lane? I think the Ogden/MKE/Chicago intersection could be improved with a few different solutions.

 

I was thinking more like Milwaukee has twice the bike traffic and auto traffic as Elston, both increase the likelihood of a collision and the necessity for some sort of intervention. 

 

I think if Elston is being established under the theory that it'll be a bike highway (wouldn't that be grand!) then we'll need plenty of East/West arteries to tempt riders off Clybourn and Milwaukee and  feed onto Elston.

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