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 That’s a better return on investment than some direct health
treatments, like dialysis, which costs $129,000 for one
quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, said coauthor Dr. Babak Mohit
of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New
York.
Our greatest public health intervention, vaccines, take about $100
investment to yield one QALY, Mohit told Reuters Health by phone.
New York built 45.5 miles of bike lanes in 2015, with an investment
of about $8 million. This increased the probability that residents
would ride a bike by 9 percent, the researchers calculated.
Based on a population of 8.5 million, they compared the direct and
indirect costs and benefits of building those additional miles of
bike lanes versus maintaining the status quo before they were built.
Adding bike lanes to motor vehicle roadways reduces the risk of
injury and raises the probability of ridership, which increases
physical activity and decreases pollution from the vehicles riders
would otherwise be using, they found.
Per person, bike lanes created an additional cost of $2.79 and a
gain of .0022 quality-adjusted life years, according to the results
published in Injury Prevention.
“For bike lanes the cost per QALY is $1,300, a little bit higher
than vaccines but way lower than most medical interventions that we
have in healthcare,” Mohit said. “We’re finding more and more of
these social interventions are not directly medically related but
have an extremely positive effect on giving us more life years.”
Bike lanes increase both recreational and commuter biking, he added.
“I definitely think there’s room for expansion of bike lanes, the
city spends $67,000 per QALY for Medicaid and we think spending
$1,300 per QALY buys you a lot more life for a lot less money,”
Mohit said.
The data here is unique to New York, but even in some European
cities where there are bike lanes on practically every street,
researchers are still seeing additional benefit to adding bike lanes
to more rural roads, he noted.
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The authors also point out that their model can be adjusted by other
cities to calculate the benefits of making bike riding easier in
those communities.
The study did not distinguish between bike lanes, bikeways,
shared-use paths and other bike facilities, said Anne Lusk, a
research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
in Boston who was not part of the new study.
One study, cited by Mohit and coauthors, found that bike lanes made
the city safer for drivers and pedestrians but less safe for
bicyclists, Lusk told Reuters Health by email.
“In sum, I am glad to read the conclusion that bicycle facilities
are a worthwhile health investment but saddened that the author did
not clearly specify that the facilities built in NYC starting in
2007 were primarily Class IV cycle tracks (barrier-protected
bicycle-exclusive paths beside sidewalks),” she said.
Painting unprotected bike lanes into roads may not reduce injury and
death, she said.
“Once considered desirable because they were 'low hanging fruit,' we
need to stop painting door zone bike lanes and start creating
barrier protected cycle tracks,” Lusk said. Riding in the so-called
door zone can be fatal if someone in a parked car opens their door
at the wrong time, she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cYwmGQ Injury Prevention, online September 9,
2016.
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