Nearly a third of all serious bicycle crashes in downtown Toronto are caused by streetcar tracks, a new study has found.
The study by researchers at Ryerson University and the University of British Columbia was based on interviews with 276 people who were injured while cycling and attended one of three participating emergency departments in downtown Toronto between May, 2008 and November, 2009.
Researchers found that 32 per cent of those interviewed (87) were injured in crashes that involved streetcar tracks with the vast majority of those crashes (85 per cent) resulting from the cyclists’ tires getting stuck in the tracks. The other 15 per cent of crashes resulted from a cyclists’ tires skidding across the tracks.
According to the study, many of the crashes involving streetcar tracks occurred after the cyclist made a “sudden maneuver” to avoid a collision, either with a vehicle, another cyclist or a pedestrian. The study also found that a higher proportion of inexperience cyclists were injured in crashes involving streetcar tracks than crashes with other causes.
“Our results provide some support for the idea that increased knowledge or maneuvering skill may help, given that certain demographic groups were over-represented in track-involved crashes, however a number of factors suggest education may not make a great difference,” the study states. “Many of the crashes resulted from sudden maneuvers to avoid collisions with motor vehicles, other cyclists and pedestrians, situations that did not allow prior knowledge to be used as planned. Finally, information about how to ride near tracks is long-standing and common in Toronto, yet the injury toll is very high. These caveats underscore the need for other approaches.”
Bike lanes appear to reduce risk of crashes involving tracks
In addition to examining the cause of bike crashes, the study also looked at the type of roads and intersections that bike crashes tend to occur on.
It found that 56 per cent of collisions involving streetcar tracks happened on major streets with parked cars and no bike infrastructure compared to 29 per cent on major streets with no parked cars and no bike infrastructure. Only 8 per cent of crashes occurred on streets with painted bike lanes, which is about half of the number of crashes with other causes (15 per cent) that occurred on streets with painted bike lanes.
“The best protection we can offer is physical separation, either by having streetcar tracks on their own right-of-way or physical separation of cyclist traffic from motor vehicle traffic,” study co-author Dr. Anne Harris told CP24 on Wednesday.
The study was published in BMC Public Health on Tuesday.
