I would submit that another likely cause for a rise in bike injuries is lack of attention to and compliance with rules of the road by bicyclists.  Who among has not noticed bicyclists running red lights, not stopping for stop lights, weaving through traffic, not using hand signals, etc?
Marc Brenman

---

From: "Rajiv Bhatia" <Rajiv.Bhatia@sfdph.org>
To: "TRB Health and Transportation" <h+t--friends@chrispy.net>
Cc: meganwier@gmail.com, "Rochelle Dicker" <DickerR@sfghsurg.ucsf.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 8:42:20 AM
Subject: [H+T--Friends] bike injuries

Ed:

In SF, we have also observed a very high proportion of bike injuries going
unreported.  Rochelle Dicker, cc'd above and head of the SFGHMC trauma
unit, has done some thinking and analysis on this issue using hospital
records.

As you know, SF has had a fairly agressive bike infrastructure program with
strong political support.  Bicycling behavior has increased substantially
over the past decade as evidenced by serial bike counts.  Unfortunately,
reported bike collision injury frequency almost doubled over the past 5 or
6 years despite the investments in bike facilities. Potential culprits here
could be the co-location of bike facilities on arterials, newer riders, and
the lack of reduction in vehicle traffic.  The confluence of new
infrastructure, growth in riders, growth in injuries suggest that SF may be
a good place to study the safety effects of new bike infrastructure in an
existing urban context.

Locally, we are also very interested in redesigning our traffic injury
surveillence system to integrate hospital, police, and ambulence records
and add public health / environmental surveillence components.  There are
some good models in other countries.  We have political committment and
data sharing agreements but lack $$ -- I am told that local transportation
$$ coming to cities cannot be used for such purposes.

rb



Rajiv Bhatia, MD, MPH
Director, Environmental Health, Department of Public Health
1390 Market Street, Suite 822
San Francisco, CA 94102
(e) rajiv.bhatia@sfdph.org
(t) 415 2523931
(w) www.sfenvironmentalhealth.org; www.sfphes.org



From:       Ed Christopher <edc@berwyned.com>
To:         TRB Health and Transportation <h+t--friends@chrispy.net>
Date:       01/17/2013 02:11 PM
Subject:    [H+T--Friends] A Data Question
Sent by:    h+t--friends-bounces@chrispy.net



It was nice to see everyone at TRB.  While there I was in a discussion
about the probably that bike crashes that result in injuries might be under
represented in our crash data. Especially when you consider that a high
percentage of the crashes do not involve a motor vehicle and never make it
to police records. If i were trying to get a handle on this at a regional
or state level are there any "non-traditional" sources of data like
hospital records that can be used.  Anyone doing any work in this area?
This is becoming ever so important as we see more and mode shifting going
on.
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