Fort Greene And Clinton Hill Lead The City In Cyclist Injuries, Says Auto Insurance Center Report
Fort Greene and Clinton Hill leads city neighborhoods in cyclist injuries with 7.7 injured cyclists per 100 collisions, compared to a citywide average of 1.9 injured cyclists per 100 collisions, according to data compiled through the city’s OpenData portal into a new report by Utah-based Auto Insurance Center (an online resource for car insurance consumers).
As reported by New York Business Journal, the report’s purpose was to ask “how safe is riding around the city, and which neighborhoods require special caution?”
The most vulnerable type of vehicle in New York City traffic accidents is the bicycle: 77.5 percent of collisions involving bikes resulted in an injury, the report found.
Scooters (57.3 percent) and motorcycles (51 percent) followed in second and third place. Taxi collisions, in fifth place, were slightly more likely to involve injuries than regular passenger vehicles. This, the report speculates, could well be because taxi drivers in New York frequently don’t wear seat belts since they are not legally obliged to do so under state law and because many taxi passengers forego the use of seat belts too.
The data also lists Brooklyn as leading the boroughs overall in bicycle collisions — most of them beginning at 9:30am and peaking at around 6pm, for morning and evening rush hours.
After the 88th Precinct (Fort Greene and Clinton Hill), the second most dangerous neighborhood was the 66th precinct (Borough Park and part of Midwood and Kensington) with 5.1 cyclist injuries per 100 collisions.
Summons against cyclists have also reportedly gone up in the 88th Precinct, with 14 summonses issued this past March compared to two summonses in March of 2014. However, police reports noted that many of those citations involved accidents where bicyclists ran red lights.
The data included over 200,000 collisions across the five boroughs from the past 12 months.
The report comes on the heels of a fatal collision that killed a cyclist at Flatbush and Fourth Avenues this past Monday, July 13.