At a time when many U.S. cities are encouraging more residents to use bicycles for transportation, Michael McGuire’s story (“Cuba’s mass transit rides on 2 wheels,” Transportation, Sept. 11) seems to suggest that increased bicycle ridership is to be dreaded.
The ostensible cause for alarm is the increasing number of traffic accidents and deaths linked to bicycles, now that few Cubans have the means to own and drive automobiles. Cyclists were involved in a third of Havana’s 1,319 traffic accidents in the first eight months of 1993 and accounted for almost half of the fatalities.
If a small number of automobiles are involved in two-thirds of the traffic accidents and a large number of bicycles are involved in just one-third, aren’t bicycles a safer choice? As for those fatalities, head injuries are the leading cause of bicycle-related deaths, and the photos accompanying the story showed not one cyclist wearing a helmet. If Castro had included helmets when he imported those 200,000 bicycles, those bicycle-related death figures would undoubtedly be much lower than they are.
