Quote Originally Posted by lph View Post
In my experience, visibility is key, not separation from other traffic. But visibility depends on terrain and speed as well. On larger roads with higher speed limits, drivers don't have as much time to spot you and react to you as on city streets at lower speeds. And of course there's other traffic, intersections, the number of lanes etc. On the other hand, on quiet residential streets people can be very wandery and inattentive, so that fast bike riding is not a good choice. And my choice of route is usually a compromise between the fastest and the safest route. All in all i can't say that in general I would choose a bike lane over the road, depends on too many factors. Really good and separate and efficient bike paths are wonderful, and about as rare as white rhinos.
Here's an article with a table comparing the relative risk of accidents with different types of facilities on different types of roads: https://janheine.wordpress.com/2013/...rlds-together/. According to this, separate bike paths are safer on higher-speed roads with few intersections but not in any other case; on low-speed roads with lots of intersections any "facilities" appear to increase the risks. Makes sense to me, and would help city planners pick the best places to focus their efforts in terms of adding bike lanes/paths in places where they will be helpful while not putting them in places where they will be counterproductive.