A large study of 30,000 people in Copenhagen over 14 years found that those who biked to work lowered their risk of death by 40 percent compared to sedentary people. And in the short term, another study of 100 people in Perth, Australia, who replaced some car commutes with bike trips over the course of a year, found the bicycling improved aerobic fitness, cholesterol numbers, and lowered the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

That seems pretty straightforward. But what about the risk of getting crushed by a trash truck? Anyone who’s bicycled even a little bit knows all too well the fear of an encounter with a motor vehicle. Just yesterday the Washington Post reported on a 20-year-old bicyclist who was critically injured after being hit by a car in downtown D.C.

— Biking To Work: Healthful Until You Hit A Pothole : Shots - Health News 

Photo: John Rose/NPR

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John Nelson’s infographic, “Five Years of Traffic Fatalities,” comprises charts and maps made with little more than Excel spreadsheets.

Red lights in all directions at this intersection allow people to cross diagonally from one corner to the other in the heart of Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown. This is called a Barnes Dance, as All Things Considered Host Melissa Block learned this week in an interview with Gideon Berger of the Urban Land Institute.

“It’s named after the pioneering traffic engineer, Henry Barnes,” says Berger.

Until last year, the city that had the most intersections of this kind in the United States was Denver, Colo., where Barnes once worked. 

The conversation was part of the NPR Cities Project.

Traffic light timing may seem mundane but it affects us every day. And it’s tricky. Cities used to focus mostly on getting the times right for cars. But increasingly, they’re trying to take all modes of transportation into account.

“As they do that they’re making their jobs a little bit more complicated, but they’re also thinking about how people behave in the real world,” says Berger.

Photos: Franklyn Cater / NPR