A paper, "Montana's Invisible Traffic Victims:
A Preliminary Report on Pedestrian and Bicyclist Injuries in the
Treasure State," released recently by the Montana
Livable Places Campaign, suggests that Montana may not be such
a safe place to walk or ride a bicycle after all,. Some of the
paper's most important points:
According to safety studies, only about 10 percent of all
bicycle crashes that send someone to an emergency room show up
in police reports. If this is true for Montana, bicycle injury
crashes may account for as many as 25 percent of all injury crashes
in the State, or six times as many as are reported in the statistics.
Only about 20 percent of pedestrian injury crashes may show
up in the reports. For Montana, such "under-reporting"
would put pedestrian injury crashes at 10 to 13 percent of the
total. This is about four times as many as are reported in the
statistics.
If, as is likely, both pedestrian and bicycle injury crashes
are under-reported as suggested, as many as 25 to 30 percent
of all Montana's traffic injury crashes may involve either bicyclists
or pedestrians. Currently, the statistics show only four to six
percent.
Approximately 30 percent of all pedestrians and over 50 percent
of all bicyclists injured or killed in Montana are under the
age of 15. Children are particularly at-risk for walking or biking
injuries.
There are seven times as many fatal pedestrian and bicycle
crashes as there are fatal car-train crashes. However, much more
attention is focused on improving railroad crossings and teaching
safe crossing practices than is given to improving safety conditions
for pedestrians or bicyclists.
While Montana appears to have a relatively low fatality rate,
compared to places like Florida or Texas, much of Montana's recent
development is patterned after that found in the most dangerous
communities of Florida and Texas.
For more information, you can contact
the author. For a hard copy of the paper, send $3
to the Montana Livable Places Campaign (PO Box 8311, Missoula
MT 59807). Or you can download
a 450k Adobe PDF (3.0) file of the paper from this website.
