Are women on bicycles more likely than men to experience close calls from passing vehicles?
That was one of the questions considered by University of Minnesota research summarized in The Gender Policy Report last week.
Researchers at the university used handlebar-mounted radars to measure the passing distances of vehicles in roughly 3,000 instances, in a variety of cycling infrastructure situations. Anything closer than the 36 inches (0.9 metres) of separation required by Minnesota law between passing motorists and cyclists was termed an "encroachment." In Ontario, the one-metre passing law makes that separation slightly larger, at 39 inches.
Not surprisingly, there were few encroachments in segregated bicycle lanes or clearly marked cycling infrastructure, which provides more data for those planners and cycling advocates pressing for more segregated cycling infrastructure. Passing distances ranged from roughly 60-90 inches (1.5 metres to 2.3 metres).
Researchers were interested to find that the average passing distance for men was 71 inches (1.8 metres) while for women, it was 68 inches (1.7 metres). That gender difference in the average might seem somewhat slight, but when the instances of actual encroachments were examined — so those are instances when cars passed cyclists with less than a 36-inch separation — 24 of the 33 instances involved female cyclists.
Women are almost four times likely to have a close encounter of the worst kind, than are men.
And you wonder why there seem to be more men on bicycles than women?
Comments