From Close Calls to Crashes: Infrastructure Priorities to Improve Safety for People on Bikes

The ability to move around a city and carry out daily activities safely is a basic prerequisite to participating in civic life. However, traffic and street safety concerns often limit the ability of urban residents to move freely, especially those who rely on walking, biking or public transit. This is a concern in the Houston region where all categories of vehicle-related crashes have been increasing.

Building on previous work by the Kinder Institute that captured the near-miss experiences of pedestrians and bicyclists, this report focuses on how information about daily trips can be used to improve transportation safety for some of the most vulnerable road users. For this report, we focus on safety concerns tied to people on bikes and will address those for pedestrians in later reports. Using the combination of travel diaries, self-reported near-miss data, the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) bicycle-involved crash data and bike trip information from Love To Ride, this report examines bicyclists’ vulnerability on Houston-area roadways.