Originally Posted by
Daniel4
When that Bloor Survey came out I had downloaded it right away. Now I can't find it online. So the city must have removed it. Lucky I still have my own copies of it in my laptop and my smartphone.
Greatly appreciated; saved for my own records too.
Originally Posted by
Daniel4
I once had a discussion with a guy, or should I say, I had let him rant about why we should be wasting money on bike lanes for only the 5% of the people on the road.
That 5% could be broken down in many ways. These surveys show that the cyclists that guy was seeing on the road are those people who have the confidence riding on all sorts of roads
Whereas there's a hidden 95% that are would-be riders who would go out when they feel safe. Those 95% are what separated bike lanes are for.
In his particular case, I'd wager the 5% figure cited was pulled from where the sun doesn't shine, not any actual study. Granted, based on the Toronto study, it might be closer to 15%, given how many riders were neutral about the Bloor Street reconfiguration.
Indeed, the demand is masked by the lack of safe infrastructure. Case in point, the
Uni of Denver + New Mexico study from 2019 - which primarily focused on the crash rate before and after the presence of PBLs - also found that ridership went up significantly after cities installed PBLs.
Quite a few use the corollary that "
it's hard to justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river." Wise words indeed.
-Kurt