Henry Abraham via Substack:

‘What remains a mystery to me, though, is why Americans aren’t angrier over Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors. Have we forgotten our values of honesty, compassion, and creativity? Hasn’t anyone noticed that a third of the White House has been demolished? For a ballroom-bunker? Is patriotism only for “suckers and losers”? Are we ready to throw in the towel defending the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, and gays? Have we forgotten that we are “created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights”? What’s wrong with this picture and how did it get that way?

In 1941 the jurist Ernst Fraenkel who had fled Nazi Germany wrote a seminal book, The Dual State, in which he described two forms of government that could exist side by side. The first he called “the prerogative state,” and the second, “the normative state.” The first was the government that did whatever it wanted. The second was bound by the rule of law. The first is Donald Trump ignoring the birthright decision of the Supreme Court, or ICE agent Jonathan Ross killing Renee Good in Minneapolis without accountability. The normative state does what the law directs. The prerogative state does what it wants.

Americans live in both states, but unless the prerogative one affects us, we go about our business living under the illusion that our state is entirely “normative.” The prerogative Trump incinerates 300 school children on the first day of the Iran war, and we go out that evening for ice cream. Our illusion of normality protects us from shame, guilt, and rage because Trump’s paranoia, sadism, and slipping cognition don’t affect us personally. It’s time to shatter that illusion…’

After proving herself in battle, Esmay Suiza is continuing her RSS Fleet training alongside her erstwhile love Barin when she meets Brun—the ebullient daughter of Lord Thornbuckle—who idolizes her as a reluctant hero. But Esmay cannot abide Brun’s highborn airs. And when their shared affection for Barin ignites a rivalry between them, Esmay is exiled to remote duty. Crushed by the rebuke of her friendship, Brun leaves the facility—and enters a nightmare.

For the enemies of civilization are on the move. The savage New Texas Militia, driven to spread their fanatical dogma, has been stealing the Familias government’s own weaponry to use against them. When Brun accidentally witnesses their depredations, her life is all but forfeit. Taken by the Militia, she is subjected to inhuman torment as Esmay is blamed for the disastrous situation and the galaxy prepares for inevitable conflict.

With the life of Brun and the dominance of the Familias Regnant both in peril, Esmay must go into action once again against a brutal, deranged enemy who would rather die than face defeat…

This story got darker and darker. Not a built-to-scare-as-entertainment dark. A dark that felt real and wrong. Taliban dark. IDF in Gaza dark. Elizabeth Moon brought her characters into conflict with a violent, self-righteous, misogynistic, male-supremacist military group for whom the murder, mutilation, enslavement and rape of women who live ‘ungodly lives’ was a holy mission. It didn’t make for easy reading, but it wasn’t exploitative either. 

What made this part of the book work was that the people, even the ‘warriors’ doing these terrible things, felt human and multidimensional and that the women who had been abducted refused to give up hope, despite the things done to them.

The book also dealt with the internal politics of the military, ranging from manipulation and corruption in pursuit of career goals through to organised treachery, in a way that felt realistic and delivered a fair amount of suspense.

I liked the passage when Esmay Suiza, currently in bad odour with the Fleet, is called home to succeed her recently deceased grandmother as the Landbride of her substantial estates. I loved the concept of the Landbride both for its links to the land and for the matriarchal model that it offered in contrast to the military patriarchy. It was refreshing to get planetside for a while, and the description of the ceremony that made Suiza a Landbride was beautiful. 

The ending was satisfying, and the many challenges ahead of the main characters left me eager for the next book.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett once said that good researchers find results that are “so obvious as not to need elaborate statistical methods to demonstrate their truth.”

For almost a decade, staff at the District Department of Transportation have analyzed crash figures before and after installing bus and bike lanes. The results are what Blackett sought: so striking as to hardly need statistics.

This piece will:

• summarize DDOT’s findings,
• attempt to replicate their results, and
• extend DDOT’s methodology to another 19 projects that the agency hadn’t publicly analyzed yet when we wrote this.

You can find an interactive version of this analysis, with details on all of the projects, here. You can find the R code here.

DDOT’s evaluations

The charts below summarize DDOT’s findings for six bus and bike lane projects completed between 2020 and 2023. (DDOT recently released additional evaluations with broadly similar results; you can find those on this webpage). After these projects were installed, total crashes and injurious crashes per 100 days fell dramatically, sometimes to zero.

For example, on Virginia Avenue NW, after DDOT installed protected bike lanes between the Mall and Rock Creek Parkway, pedestrian injuries fell from one every 166 days all the way to zero. Overall crashes decreased by 50%.

These reductions in crashes were achieved at the same time that average driver travel times fell by 25 seconds. In the cases where travel times rose (on Virginia Avenue NW, and Minnesota Avenue SE in the afternoon), it was by about 1 minute over the length of the corridor.

Opponents of bus priority and protected bike lane projects sometimes frame the safety benefits as coming at the cost of their personal convenience. Overall, these data show that is not a significant tradeoff.

Replicating DDOT’s findings

We were able to more-or-less replicate DDOT’s results, despite only having a paragraph of text that describes the agency’s methodology. This suggests the results are real, not just an artifact of small choices about how the analysis was done. When DC adds bus and bike lanes, crashes go down by a lot.

Our results did have some differences from DDOT’s. That is partly because the version of the crash data DDOT uses is more accurate than the version we pulled from Open Data DC. For their evaluations, DDOT staff spend many hours reviewing detailed, non-public crash diagrams and narratives from MPD. They use this extra information to accurately locate each crash. We didn’t have this corrected data set.

If you want more details, check out our full analysis, which has crashes plotted over time for each project. For example, after DDOT completed the 16th Street NW Bus Priority Project, we found total crashes fell 23%, and injurious crashes fell 42%.

Expanding the analysis

Next, we took all of the protected and buffered bike lanes listed in DC’s bike lane shapefile, and hand-labeled when each segment of bike lane was installed. The map below shows those projects.

These projects led to massive declines in total crashes and injurious crashes. Total crashes per month fell by 40% on average. Injurious crashes per month fell by 60%.

DDOT’s definition of “serious injury crashes” includes “Unconsciousness; Apparent Broken Bones; Concussion; Gunshot (non-fatal); Severe Laceration.” These crashes fell by 21% on average. If you include the projects DDOT has already studied, the reduction is 36%.

The table below pools all of the projects and shows the raw change in crashes, by severity. There were 19 serious injury crashes/year in the pre-install period, for example. There were roughly 10 per year after installation. That’s at least nine people a year on these corridors who avoided life-altering injuries.

Fewer crashes also save everyone money: fewer car repairs, sick days, and hospital trips. According to the US Department of Transportation, the comprehensive cost of a crash resulting in disabling injuries exceeds $1 million. So the monetary benefit of these nine serious injury crashes avoided on these 24 corridors is somewhere around $9,647,906 per year.

Totalling up these crashes, and multiplying by USDOT’s cost estimates, these bike lane projects saved almost $112 million per year. Even if you make conservative assumptions about minor crashes, the savings still exceed $88 million per year.

Two of 24 projects were exceptions to this overall trend: C Street NE and K Street NW. These projects saw modest (~3% to 15%) increases in crashes. Part of this may improve with time: C Street crashes have trended down in the last year. Notably, serious injury crashes fell to zero on C Street after project installation. On K Street, serious injury crashes were unchanged. Following these evaluations, DDOT will redesign aspects of these corridors to make them safer. This, after all, is the purpose of the evaluations.

Again, the K and C Street projects are exceptions. Overall, DDOT’s bike lanes have had gigantic safety benefits, reducing total crashes by 40% and injurious crashes by 60% on the corridors where they are installed. These 24 bike lanes have saved one to two human lives per year.

Comparing against District-wide trends

It could be that these results are just mirroring a larger, District-wide trend toward fewer crashes. In other words, it’s possible the bike and bus lanes themselves aren’t generating crash reductions.

To test this, we compared all of the project corridor road segments against all other road segments in DC (omitting non-comparable segments like those on interstate highways). As the chart below shows,

• Project corridors started with higher crash rates, partly because DDOT is targeting dangerous corridors for project installs.
• Project corridors saw much steeper declines in crashes.

This suggests the projects are driving crash reductions, although regression to the mean likely explains some of the decline as well.

The one exception is for people on bikes. Bike crashes increased on project corridors. This is partly because bike lanes lead more people to bicycle. For example, we found that bike crashes doubled on Pennsylvania Ave SE after project installation. But DDOT found bike trips increased 341%, so that doubling actually represented a decrease in crashes per trip. It is also possible that some of the crashes we’re counting really occurred on adjacent streets. (DDOT has the data to correctly locate those crashes).

Relatedly: Bikeshare ridership has exploded; there are more of these riders on the road, especially on bike lane corridors. All else equal, we would expect more bike traffic to mean more bike crashes. Ironically, drivers seem to benefit the most from these projects. They experience the biggest absolute decline in crash rates.

After grabbing data on micromobility trips from RideReport.com, which captures the routes that people riding e-bikes and e-scooters follow, we find evidence that suggests bike traffic increases are at least partially responsible for the increase in bike crashes. Micromobility trips increased on both project and non-project corridors, but they increased much more on project corridors. So while annual bike crashes on a subblock might rise, the number of crashes per bike trip (which we do not directly observe) is likely falling.

Des pistes cyclables? Oui!

Earlier this year, soon-to-be DC Mayor Janeese Lewis George wrote that “Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has shown how quickly you can get results from building a cohesive and connected bike and pedestrian network.”

Paris has seen big declines in air pollution. Emergency response times have shortened, as EMS vehicles can now shortcut traffic using bike lanes. Injury crashes have fallen, and even drivers are spending less time in traffic. As DDOT’s own analysis suggests, DC is poised to reap those same rewards, if we build the sustainable future Lewis George and her allies envision.

Top image: The Metropolitan Branch Trail Counter (left) and the East Capitol Street Bike Lane Counter (right). Image by DDOT.

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