Biking is Great, It’s Healthy, But Please Do It Safely

February 4, 2018 — Millions of Americans are getting on their bicycles in retirement. Bicycling gets you outside, provides cheap transportation, and is great exercise. Your editor loves it and bikes almost every day. Unfortunately there is a dark side to biking; it can be dangerous. This article will talk about how can you can be safer while riding your bike, and what you can do to encourage your town or city to make biking safer for everyone. Most of these tips also apply to walkers as well.

Where it’s safe, and not so much

Lists published on the towns and cities which have the most bike accidents abound, but they differ. The first and second most dangerous biking cities as reported by Your Local Security, a blog for home security company ADT, wouldn’t shock anyone – New York City and Los Angeles. But the remaining 23 “worst” places would surprise you – almost all of them are in states like Iowa, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, places not known as biking centers. The safest cities were in states like California and Oregon (Davis, CA, was the safest city). BillBoneBikeLaw.com reports a very different most dangerous cities list, and most of those are in Florida. Orlando/Kissimmee, Tampa/St.Pete, and Jacksonville head up that list. One big reason why these lists are so different – they don’t seem to take into account the number of miles biked. Places like New York have tens of thousands of bikes on the road every day, so of course there are going to be a lot of accidents.