Improving Biking Is as Much About Slowing Cars as Building Better Bike Lanes

By Michael Andersen, PlacesForBikes, via Streets Blog

Since its founding 50 years ago, the top U.S. agency for investigating transportation injuries had been surprisingly quiet about a phenomenon that’s behind 30 percent of U.S. traffic fatalities.

Like much of the country’s transportation safety establishment, the National Transportation Safety Board had frequently avoided the subject of the speed of private cars. It did so even though the issue has been coming up since the very first collision the agency investigated, in Joliet, Illinois, in 1967.

Avoided the subject until this summer, that is.

In its groundbreaking report released in full last week, the federal agency laid the foundations for a major rethinking of transportation safety practices. The big idea in short, as Kathleen Ferrier puts it: “speed kills.”
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“I’ve been a bike/ped advocate for years and we’ve talked more about safe design than about speed,” Ferrier said.

One of the most important parts of bike infrastructure is invisible
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http://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/08/28/improving-biking-is-as-much-about-slowing-cars-as-building-better-bike-lanes/