Carless in Chicago » statistics

Watch Out, Portland and Boston…

Jason — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:33:56 +0000

Just in time for today’s World Car Free Day, Forbes magazine culled some statistics about the top 10 “cleanest commutes” in the U.S based on three criteria: mass transit use, carpooling, and driving alone.

Chicago makes the list, but not by much, sitting at #9 just above LA. (On mass transit use alone, we’re a little better, at #5, and 11.3% of using transit for our commutes.) Overall, San Francisco ranks #1.

I have no illusions that Carless in Chicago alone will make a big dent in these statistics, but perhaps it will help move the needle a little. So watch out, Portland and Boston (tied for #7); we’re coming for you.

(Via The Pump Handle)

Informative and Entertaining Transit Advocacy

Jason — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:34:20 +0000

This is actually New York-related, but I thought this short animation from StreetFilms was a particularly well made piece of transit advocacy.

(Via Freakonomics.)
(Updated to embed YouTube version instead of original Flash movie.)

Bicycle Density = Bicycle Safety

Jason — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:21:54 +0000

After posting Matt Yglesias’s observations on mass transit safety yesterday, I had a vague recollection he wrote something along similar lines about bicycles a couple weeks ago. It turns out, I was remembering him linking to an interesting post on Streetsblog, highlighting data from NYC that as the number of bicycle riders goes up in the city, the average number of bicycle accidents goes down.

NYC Bicycle Ridership & Casualties

It turns out that the feeling of greater safety you probably experience when you see another cyclist on the road isn’t an illusion. It’s part of the Safety in Numbers Effect, identified by public health consultant Peter Jacobsen. The reasons for the effect are a bit unclear, but many safety experts speculate that the explanation is pretty simple: The more bikes on the road, the more aware motorists become of the cyclists around them.

So when you pick your bike, you’re not just helping yourself, you’re helping the other cyclists you encounter on the streets too.

Mass Transit Safety

Jason — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:46:20 +0000

I’ve certainly overheard a couple of conversations on the El this week about the terrible events on the DC Metro earlier this week, when one train on their Red Line collided with another in Maryland. Of course, transit safety is critical, and we should all hold our transit agencies to a high standard. But Matt Yglesias, who mostly blogs about politics, but also produces some of the best transit-policy blogging I’ve read, reminds us as to just why the DC Metro crash is such a big story:

One story you’re not going to see leading tomorrow’s newspaper is “97 dead in fatal car accidents.” And yet in 2007, this country saw 37,284 people die in car wrecks. That averages out to 97 per day—much more than the seven people whose death in yesterday’s Metro crash has acquired so much coverage today. Obviously in part that’s because driving is much more popular than transit. Still, according to the Census Bureau 87.7 percent of people get to work either by driving alone or in car pools, while 4.7 percent take transit. That’s about 18 times more driving than transit usage. By contrast, 14 times more people die in car wrecks on an average day than died on the rare day that anyone died in a train crash. On a typical day, of course, the United States has zero train-related fatalities.

Something to think about the next time someone tells you that driving makes them feel safe and in control.