Cyclists

How prevalent are crashes involving cyclists in Ward 2?

The line graph to the left compares the change over time of the percentage of all crashes involving cyclists in Ward 2 individually with a line of best fit representing the other 49 wards. As you can see, both the city and Ward 2 have experienced a relatively steep upward trend in the percentage of respective crashes involving cyclists since 2015; specifically, Ward 2, following a low in 2016 that was about half a percentage point lower than the overall city, has now risen to a whopping 2.5 percentage points higher than the rest of the city. This shows an immense disparity between bike crashes occurring inside Ward 2 and outside Ward 2. This may speak to a generally greater amount of cyclists, but it also may speak to a pattern of reckless driving amongst Ward 2 drivers, or a lack of proper infrastructure.

These are all of the accidents in the second ward involving bicycles. Compared to other types of crashes, bicycle crashes have a high percentage of crashes that have at least one injury, which means that bike crashes are some of the most dangerous crashes because bikers are unprotected. There are a lot of crashes at North Avenue and Halsted Street compared to other crash types. One possible solution is adding the painted squares at the corners for bikes turning to try to prevent bike crashes. Adding a protected bike lane would be the ideal solution, but there is not enough extra room on both streets to add the bike lane without getting in the way of traffic, so it would take a lot of reorganizing to get that done.

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