Interesting developments in biking

And rather than put this on the end of an already long entry, here are some interesting things I've come across lately.

1. In Seattle, Sound Transit has launched a campaign to increase bicycle trips to transit stations.  See "Sound Transit cranks out new bicycle promos" from the Seattle Times.  While WMATA in the DC region doesn't have a similar kind of promotional campaign in place, they have been significantly expanding bicycle facilities since the creation of the Metrorail Station Access & Capacity Study (2008). Here's the link to the Sound Transit campaign. 

2. At the National Bike Summit, I had a conversation with someone who used to be a traffic accident analyst for the City of Austin Police Department, and she made the point that prosecution of accidents resulting in injury or death for bicyclists and/or pedestrians needs to be taken much more seriously than they are--when there is a prosecution, usually the driver was impaired.

But one way to take accidents more seriously is to provide running data on accidents.  The data is out there--police departments collect the data and send it to State Highway Safety Offices, and this is funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration division of the US Department of Transportation.  But it's not normally made widely available.

In the past I did some blog entries on how the Toronto Star had compiled this information for biking and pedestrian accidents.  In Massachusetts, GateHouse Media through its Brockton Enterprise newspaper, has compiled and now provides data on bike crashes throughout the state.  This should be done everywhere.

-- Interactive map: Explore data on bike crashes in Massachusetts (pictured above)

3. In response to Bike Month and in association with WGBH, GateHouse Media is running  "Right of Way," a set of stories on the rise of biking in Eastern Massachusetts.

4.  And one of the stories they have reported on is the release of the City of Boston's study on cycling accidents and the city's response.