The report on pedestrians injured in collisions with cyclists put out by Hunter College professors Peter Tuckel and William Milczarski earlier this week is drawing some criticism from their colleagues.
Thomas Angotti, another professor in the urban planning department, whose office is located three doors down from Mr. Milczarski’s, dismissed the study as “very skimpy.”
Mr. Angotti said that the study failed to account that sometimes pedestrians were the cause of cycling accidents, and wondered why it did not highlight more that the number of pedestrians injured declined during the study.
“I can tell you as a bicyclist, pedestrians are just as irresponsible as bicyclists are,” he said. “This is just very skimpy. It’s really a report on data. It’s not really a study. It’s some tables and a few descriptions.”
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The professors’ research also raised concerns from Lorna Thorpe, an associate professor at Hunter and former city public health department commissioner who worked on a study on bicyclist fatalities and serious injuries in New York City from 1996 to 2005. While she said that much of her findings from her study fit with this research, she questioned why the report didn’t provide context about whether New York City is more or less safe to cycle in.
She also criticized her associates for not measuring data in terms of rates per population and using often debated race and ethnicity data. She said while that she had not brought her concerns directly to Professors Tuckel and Milczarski, she was focused on the academic rigor of their work.
Streetsblog has a request in with the authors for year-over-year data broken down geographically, so we can see some of the trends specific to New York City.
