You claim it’s because of some “statistical knowledge” you lack that keeps you from understanding what I’m explaining. Did you look at that spreadsheet? It’s pretty simple. My belief is that, if you’re intelligent enough to understand the graphs that you posted (and I am certain that you are), then you’re also intelligent enough to understand that the spreadsheet that uses garbage data will produce the same conclusion as your graphs indicate.

So — the graphs are worthless, we must agree. The noise is just too loud to hear the song.

Now you have a different argument: that we must have bike lanes to get more cyclists, because more cyclists produce less motor traffic and a whole bunch of other goodies.

Unfortunately, that relationship between bike lanes and goodies has not been true in any industrialized country I’m familiar with. Any country that has had the opportunity to motorize has done so. India and China are the latest countries to have substantial modal shifts from bicycles to motor vehicles, but their conversion followed a pattern that was first seen in the USA after 1900.

It’s true that some European countries have created modal shifts back towards bicycling. But facilities are only a small part of what these nations use to put their citizens back onto their bicycles. The primary way that European countries have gained cyclists is by making other transportation choices prohibitively expensive, or too infrequent or too dangerous to use.

Denmark, for example, charges a 200% sales tax on new cars. A friend of mine, who bought a Mazda 6 for $19,500 in Massachusetts, found the same car on sale in Denmark for $60,000 (its equivalent in euro). When I was in Ireland last year, gasoline was pushing $8 per gallon, and a new Ford Focus, that might run you $16,000 in the USA went for euro 24K — that’s about $39,000! (Even so, Ireland has largely dumped the bike for the car since the 1980s, even as facilities and lanes are popping up everywhere.)

Insurance requirements are also significantly higher in Europe, and city center traffic jams are amazing, by American standards. You haven’t seen a real traffic jam until you’ve seen one in an old, narrow-road European city!

These factors, more than bicycle riding facilities, have influenced people in some European countries to shift to bicycling for certain kinds of trips. People vote with their time and with their pocketbooks, and when a trip by car can’t be made conveniently and at reasonable cost, people will seek other ways of going. If the bicycle is practical by these standards, then many people will choose to bike.

If America is going to make a real modal shift towards bicycling, it’s going to need a lot more than stripes in the gutter lane. And sure, cycling is great exercise, but the person who drives her SUV to the Fitness Now health club gets just as healthy as the cyclist who rides to work. Compare the numbers of people who frequent health clubs each day, year round, and you’ll discover that a lot more people get fit there than by riding their bicycles. It’s going to take more than stripes to change their minds.

Barring a total shift in America’s transportation priorities (a shift that I don’t see anywhere on the horizon, yet has been promised since the 1970s), cyclists are not going to be particularly influential in reducing pollution, limiting climate change, and so on.

Cyclists’ health will be better than sedentary, it’s true, but you don’t need to ride a bike to be fit.

So bike lanes can’t be held up as safety tools, any more than a treadmill can. They also don’t increase traffic safety, and the only data that’s been introduced to support them has been shown to be invalid.

It is a wonder their promoters work so hard to defend them. (But they do!)

Even given that there is no safety benefit to having more cyclists on the road, there are still social ones. More bikes on the road means less cars on the road. This means healthier citizens, less pollution, less global warming, and less mortality from things like asthma, heart attacks, and climate change related weather events. Which would seem to me to make everyone safer. I stick to my guns, more bikes = more safety. If you are right it might not be safety in the form of bike crashes, but it does make us safer and healthier.

Plus it’s a lot of fun.

First it was claimed that bike facilities created safety. Research didn’t bear this out, however. The legitimate bicycle studies — as opposed to advocacy research that assumes the correctness of its conclusion a priori — found no significant safety benefits from most bicycle riding facilities.

Now the facilities wonks have another argument: if you build it, they will come — and when they do we will all be safer!

Unfortunately, none of the problems identified with bicycle riding facilities, and in particular, bike lanes and sidepaths are refuted by the FW’s new argument. Instead, they tell us that if we get more cyclists, the numbers show that we also get fewer bike crashes.

I’ve created a Microsoft Excel 2000 spreadsheet that you can download at http://drop.io/JacobsenFallacy . (The name has to do with a researcher who claims that a true correlation exists. He’s wrong.) This spreadsheet creates 100 different, random values for each of these fields: the population of a given area; the number of cyclists in that population; the number of bicycle crashes in that population; and, the average distance ridden by each cyclist each day.

The random data are plotted on a graph that’s similar to the ones shown in this blog page. Bike crashes are on the Y axis, and cyclist miles on the X. In every case, **the same declining power curve appears**, that shows that for high Y-axis values, there will be low X-axis values, and vice versa.

In other words, the same purported decline in crashes per 100,000 Km of cycling (or whatever base distance measure is used) **appears when purely random data are supplied**.

Because random data produce the same declining curve, no correlation between any data producing this curve can be assumed. Please, download this spreadsheet and refresh the data. You’ll see the same declining curve appear again and again.

This non-correlation shouldn’t be so surprising. If real safety can be achieved by increasing the population size, then we should improve airline safety by launching more planes; we can improve traffic safety by driving more cars; and so on.

Well, it doesn’t work that way for planes or cars, and there’s nothing in these numbers that suggest it works that way for bicycling, either.