The bicyclist who protected the bike lane

Outside of the bike thing.. we often talk about BRT and dedicated lanes. In cities without snow, the dedicated lane has these things to prevent people from using it. But in cities with snow, it seems like they would be replacing these year after year...

http://www.newsweek.com/us-traffic-deaths-injuries...

Nearly 2.3 million “serious injuries,” which the NSC defines as those requiring medical consultation, were sustained during the six-month period, up 30 percent when compared with the first half of 2014. In a similar upward trend, the estimated costs of these crashes—including medical expenses, wage and productivity losses and property damage—increased 24 percent, to roughly $152 billion.

Even if injuries are up for cyclists over 45, these people won't be having nearly as many heart attacks, will become diabetic at later ages (if at all), and won't also be wandering around whining about how they might have to walk a few feet from their car to their destination due to their largely self-inflicted morbidities.

Those realities are generally incorporated into research on air pollution effects on cyclists - and the reality is that accidents and exposure are utterly and completely overwhelmed by the steep reduction in these morbidities. Of course, you only did a superficial scan of stuff without reading the actual articles or understanding the literature base from whence it came, as usual.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/ (I have personally worked with two of the authors on a regular basis)

Also, everything is up for anybody over 50 or so - this is also known as the Baby Boom generation. In other words, enormous demographic bulge that brought us the crime wave in the 1970s-1990s is going to have a lot of everything. The number of injuries has increased, but not proportionally to the proportion of people in this age group maintaining an active lifestyle or the sheer number of people in that age group. Simple.