Boston Globe op-ed

This is a comment on the Boston Globe op-ed at https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/11/opinion/bicycle-crashes-separated-bike-lanes-cambridge-boston/

With all due respect and sympathy for the friends and relatives of the three cyclists killed in Cambridge in 2024, also my personal sense of loss as an MIT alumnus about the cyclist who was a star grad student there, two of the three cyclists were channeled into a “coffin corner” by barriers. The third was killed by a motorist who drove up off the street onto the sidewalk. The only solution which the article’s authors propose is special infrastructure, but all three of the cyclists were riding on special infrastructure. A problem with people’s driving behavior and the tsunami of e-bikes ridden by people who don’t have needed skills can’t be solved with infrastructure, not even good infrastructure, which the coffin corners are not. Education and enforcement and better public transportation could help now. In the long run, I think that autonomous vehicles will be able to help by being safer than human drivers: able to see in every direction at once, and programmed for safe operation.

As to the claim that Federally vetted research shows that separated bike lanes reduce crashes by 53% — it conveniently covered only segments between intersections, but most car-bike crashes occur at intersections. And also the barriers themselves in barrier-separated bikeways are causing crashes, including fatalities. A good counterperspective: https://cyclingsavvy.org/2024/06/how-to-ruin-a-buffered-bike-lane