Last hebdomad , theinternet was aflutterwith news program of a studyshowing how head injury rise in cities with motorcycle share — at least consort to the media . But it turns out that most of us were making a major error in interpreting the data , asCityLabexplains today . In fact , head harm actually went down overall .
So how did so many wires get interbreed ? Here ’s what happened : The study bring out in the American Journal of Public Health looked at injury data in Montreal , Washington , D.C. , Minneapolis , Boston , and Miami Beach , all metropolis with unexampled bicycle part programs , both before and after the bicycle portion began . Then they did the same thing for five cities without bike shares .
What they found was that as a proportion of entire injuries , read/write head injuries go up in cycle parcel cities . While that certainly is n’t undecomposed , it ’s also not the whole story . While the proportion of head teacher injuries might be on the rise , the injuries themselves are going down , asEric Jaffe explains :
When Teschke reassess the core data point — found in Table 2 of the AJPH report — she empty the injuries themselves had fallen in wheel - share cities . Total injuries per year in these places decreased about 28 percentage , and total head hurt lessen about 14 percentage , she explicate in a tweet last week .
So though the researcher ’s pith argument — that helmet should be part of bike share programs — is definitely supported by their determination that head teacher combat injury increase in proportion to trauma overall , the emergence of how bikes affect injury numbers is way more complicated than that .
After all , since injuries proceed down , you could make a counter - argument that as bikes on the route increment , drivers and cyclists get smarter and more experienced with each other — and fortuity fall . Or even that motorcycle share bikes are actually dependable than average cycle , since they ’re on a regular basis maintained and lean not to reach high f number .
In other words , plenty of interrogation about how bike shares affect our city rest unanswered . And as we learned through this lilliputian misunderstanding , it ’s all too easy to misread information when we ’re in a hurry to prove a full point . [ CityLab ]
Image : Bikeworldtravel .
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