Florida Study Shows Bicyclists Follow Laws Slightly Better Than Drivers

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That’s why a new study—commissioned by the Florida Department of Transportation and conducted by scientists at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research—is so damn interesting. The report, the largest of its kind ever attempted, concluded that cyclists were slightly more compliant with traffic laws than drivers. Conducting what’s known as a naturalistic behavior study, the researchers outfitted the bikes of 100 cyclists with multiple sensors and cameras, then recorded data as those participants went about their normal riding lives, pedaling roughly 2,000 hours in the Tampa Bay metro area. After the test period ended, the researchers and their grad students scrutinized the video footage and sensor data, tabulating how often cyclists and drivers failed to yield, rolled through stop signs, or otherwise broke the rules of the road. They paid special attention to instances in which a crash or a close call occurred. In the end, the results indicated that cyclists were compliant with the law 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time after dark. The same study determined that drivers who interacted with the study subjects complied with the law 85 percent of the time. In other words, drivers were slightly naughtier than the cyclists—even without measuring speeding or distracted driving.

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