PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Change in cycle track policy needed to boost ridership, public health

2013-05-17
(Press-News.org) Boston, MA – Bicycle engineering guidelines often used by state regulators to design bicycle facilities need to be overhauled to reflect current cyclists' preferences and safety data, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. They say that U.S. guidelines should be expanded to offer cyclists more riding options and call for endorsing cycle tracks – physically separated, bicycle-exclusive paths adjacent to sidewalks – to encourage more people of all ages to ride bicycles.

The study appears online May 16, 2013 and will appear in the July 2013 print edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

Standards set by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in its Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities generally serve vehicles well but overlook most bicyclists' needs, according to lead author Anne Lusk, research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, who has been studying bicycling patterns in the U.S. and abroad for many years. "In the U.S., the default remains the painted bike lane on the road," she said, which is problematic since research has shown that women, seniors, and children prefer not to ride on roads with traffic.

According to the researchers, the AASHTO guidelines discouraged or did not include cycle tracks due to alleged safety concerns and did not cite research about crash rates on cycle tracks. This study analyzed five state-adopted U.S. bicycle guidelines published between 1972 and 1999 to understand how the guidelines have directed the building of bicycle facilities in the U.S. They also wanted to find out how crash rates on the cycle tracks that had been built compared with bicycle crash rates on roadways in the U.S. They identified 19 cycle tracks in 14 cities in the U.S. and found these cycle tracks had an overall crash rate of 2.3 per one million bicycle kilometers ridden, which is similar to crash rates found on Canadian cycle tracks and lower than published crash rates from cities in North America for bicycling in the road without any bicycle facilities.

Anne Lusk stressed the new overlap of transportation and public health. "Bicycling, even more than walking, helps control weight and we need to provide comfortable and separate bicycle environments on existing roads so everyone has a chance for good health."

The authors concluded AASHTO bicycle guidelines should be based on more rigorous and up-to-date research. If policies could allow for easier construction of cycle tracks, studies have indicated that more individuals would be willing to bicycle. Encouraging more cycling would be helpful for weight control, heart function, and would boost physical fitness for children and adults in addition to helping to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution from vehicles, said the authors.

### Support for the study included a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (F32 HL083639) from the National Institutes of Health and the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. Luis Miranda-Moreno was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

"Bicycle Guidelines and Crash Rates on Cycle Tracks in the United States," Anne C. Lusk, Patrick Morency, Luis F. Miranda-Moreno, Walter C. Willett, Jack T. Dennerlein. American Journal of Public Health, online May 16, 2013; July 2013 print edition.

Visit the HSPH website for the latest news, press releases and multimedia offerings.

Harvard School of Public Health brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere. As a community of leading scientists, educators, and students, we work together to take innovative ideas from the laboratory to people's lives—not only making scientific breakthroughs, but also working to change individual behaviors, public policies, and health care practices. Each year, more than 400 faculty members at HSPH teach 1,000-plus full-time students from around the world and train thousands more through online and executive education courses. Founded in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT School of Health Officers, the School is recognized as America's first professional training program in public health.

HSPH on Twitter: http://twitter.com/HarvardHSPH

HSPH on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/harvardpublichealth

HSPH on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardPublicHealth

HSPH home page: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

World's melting glaciers making large contribution to sea rise

2013-05-17
While 99 percent of Earth's land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the remaining ice in the world's glaciers contributed just as much to sea rise as the two ice sheets combined from 2003 to 2009, says a new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder. The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an ...

Sea level: One-third of its rise comes from melting mountain glaciers

2013-05-17
How much all glaciers contribute to global sea-level rise has never been calculated before with this accuracy. An international group of researchers involving two geographers from the University of Zurich has confirmed that melting of glaciers caused about one third of the observed sea-level rise, while the ice sheets and thermal expansion of sea water account for one third each. So far, estimates on the contribution of glaciers have differed substantially. Now 16 scientists from nine countries have compared the data from traditional measurements on the ground with satellite ...

Breakthrough for IVF?

2013-05-17
Amsterdam, May 17, 2013 - Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the publication of a recent study in Reproductive BioMedicine Online on 5-day old human blastocysts showing that those with an abnormal chromosomal composition can be identified by the rate at which they have developed to blastocysts, thereby classifying the risk of genetic abnormality without a biopsy. In a new study the same group has undertaken a retrospective study, using their predictive model to assess the likelihood ...

Global health policy fails to address burden of disease on men

2013-05-17
Men experience a higher burden of disease and lower life expectancy than women, but policies focusing on the health needs of men are notably absent from the strategies of global health organisations, according to a Viewpoint article in this week's Lancet. The article reinterprets data from the 'Global Burden of Disease: 2010' study which shows that all of the top ten causes of premature death and disability, and top ten behavioural risk factors driving rates of ill-health around the world, affect men more than they affect women (see tables in Notes to Editors). In every ...

Sanford-Burnham researchers identify target to prevent hardening of arteries

2013-05-17
ORLANDO, Fla., May 16, 2013 — The hardening of arteries is a hallmark of atherosclerosis, an often deadly disease in which plaques, excessive connective tissue, and other changes build up inside vessel walls and squeeze off the flow of oxygen-rich blood throughout the body. Now, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have described the molecular and cellular pathway that leads to this hardening of the arteries—and zeroed in on a particularly destructive protein called Dkk1. Their study was published online today by Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and ...

World's biggest ice sheets likely more stable than previously believed

2013-05-17
For decades, scientists have used ancient shorelines to predict the stability of today's largest ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Markings of a high shoreline from three million years ago, for example – when Earth was going through a warm period – were thought to be evidence of a high sea level due to ice sheet collapse at that time. This assumption has led many scientists to think that if the world's largest ice sheets collapsed in the past, then they may do just the same in our modern, progressively warming world. However, a new groundbreaking study now challenges ...

Women with chronic physical disabilities are no less likely to bear children

2013-05-17
Philadelphia, Pa. (May 16, 2013) – Like the general public, health care professionals may hold certain stereotypes regarding sexual activity and childbearing among women with disabilities. But a new study finds that women with chronic physical disabilities are about as likely as nondisabled women to say they are currently pregnant, after age and other sociodemographic factors are taken into account. The findings are reported in the June issue of Medical Care, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Health care professionals can expect—and ...

Beautiful 'flowers' self-assemble in a beaker

2013-05-17
"Spring is like a perhaps hand," wrote the poet E. E. Cummings: "carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here placing / an inch of air there... / without breaking anything." With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns. These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don't resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that's what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to ...

Artificial forest for solar water-splitting

2013-05-17
In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While "artificial leaf" is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an "artificial forest." "Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants ...

Can math models of gaming strategies be used to detect terrorism networks?

2013-05-17
Philadelphia, PA— The answer is yes, according to a paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. In a paper published in the journal last month, authors Anthony Bonato, Dieter Mitsche, and Pawel Pralat describe a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, such as a terrorist organization, using minimal resources. Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, where information flows in one direction from a source, which produces the information ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Plant doctor: An AI system that watches over urban trees without touching a leaf

Study tracks chromium chemistry in irradiated molten salts

Scientists: the beautiful game is a silver bullet for global health

Being physically active, even just a couple of days a week, may be key to better health

High-fat diet promote breast cancer metastasis in animal models

A router for photons

Nurses and AI collaborate to save lives, reduce hospital stays

Multi-resistance in bacteria predicted by AI model

Tinker Tots: A citizen science project to explore ethical dilemmas in embryo selection

Sensing sickness

Cost to build multifamily housing in California more than twice as high as in Texas

Program takes aim at drinking, unsafe sex, and sexual assault on college campuses

Inability to pay for healthcare reaches record high in U.S.

Science ‘storytelling’ urgently needed amid climate and biodiversity crisis

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

[Press-News.org] Change in cycle track policy needed to boost ridership, public health