This week the Sightline Institute released its annual Cascadia Scorecard, a status report for the Northwest that ranks states, counties and cities by key indicators of health, economy, population, energy, sprawl, wildlife, and pollution. This year’s report includes a special section on Sprawl & Health, and comes to a – perhaps – surprising conclusion:
“…It is in the densest urban places of Cascadia—the very places associated in the public mind with the worst congestion—that residents face the lowest risk of dying in a traffic accident. Residents of Vancouver [BC]’s city center, for example, face a fatal crash risk one-third as high as the provincewide average. King County—the most urbanized county in Washington—and the home of Seattle, Bellevue, and other urban centers—has the lowest overall crash risk of any county in the state. Multnomah and Washington counties—the most urban parts of metropolitan Portland—lead the way in Oregon.
“Metropolitan areas across the United States show a similar pattern: the risk of dying in a transportation accident—combining deaths among pedestrians, transit riders, bicyclists, and occupants of cars and trucks—is consistently lower in compact metropolitan areas than in sprawling ones. Even pedestrians were safer in more densely populated places; walkers find safety in numbers, since drivers apparently adjust to sharing the road as the numbers of pedestrians and bicyclists rise.”
I teach Bike Commuting Workshops around the Portland area, and one of the most common questions I get from new and experienced bicyclists alike is “Do you REALLY bike around downtown? That must be so scary!” Yet downtown, I’m one of many cyclists, traffic lights are timed at slower speeds, and most car drivers are accustomed to seeing bicyclists on the road. It is one of the places I feel most comfortable on my bike.
