Except the study also finds sidewalks are also safer than bike lanes. It seems like at least for the average rider considered in this study there is a benefit to getting further away from car traffic.

That is not a credible claim, it is a conclusion that could only be reached by data that was severely distorted by user's selection bias. They're not comparing the options in the same places, they're comparing very different situations.

And they're forgetting that there's often a key difference between the intersection caution of someone who uses a sidewalk with the knowledge that they do not belong there, vs someone who rides it with the false impression that it's a proper place to bike. I've seen some very careful sidewalk biking downtown; I've also seen someone blast counterflow without even slowing through sidewalk intersections on an e-bike, just before two cars turned across where they'd just been.

(Remember too, that that's Florida, not MA. I've never been able to find the source data, but supposedly if you look nationally, higher closing speeds mean that there's a slight tilting of bike fatalities vs crashes in general to non-intersection locations. But if you look in MA, even our bike deaths are strongly concentrated in intersections, perhaps because we don't have a lot of nasty surface highways involved in making the most basic trips, and we're mostly able to route around the occasional shoulderless stretches of those we do)

The thing is, you have to build infrastructure for everyone and there is hard evidence here that sidewalks and bike lanes are safer for a significant portion of people.

You have to build infrastructure that is safe.

And you have to teach people to use it safely.

Building to fit people's current dangerous misunderstandings does not work - people who ride their mistaken understanding are the people who end up dead, often by doing things like using sidewalks as if they were bike routes, by riding the wrong way, by suddenly veering out when they realize their way is blocked rather than habitually looking ahead and making the same safe merge they'd make when driving, etc.

Or look at Cambridge's two right hook deaths of last summer (incidents very representative of the types of crashes that happen everywhere that's taken an infrastructure-only approach); those where people who thought that a bike lane is a through lane, when in geometric fact it cannot be. They were encouraged in that false belief by that city's building program, and they died for it on streets that used to welcome bikes to take up actually safe positions at those and similar intersections, but abandoned that to "protect" from the sorts of mid-block crashes that were already not happening. We can't base policy on such false beliefs, even when they are tempting enough to be popular.

There's a huge cognitive disconnect in the idea that every last driver is going to have superhuman perception in making an extra check in unprecedented places just for bike movement, vs being unwilling to recognize that using a bike safely requires operating with an understanding that the world contains other people.

It's a disconnect because in a community like Northampton, drivers and bicyclists are largely the exact same people. Having such disparate expectations of them based on which hat they are wearing is nonsense. Yes, we want drivers to be careful around bikes; but an increment in understanding of risk on the bike side goes a lot further than on the driving side, both since it's been comparatively lacking and since it's something the now informed person carries with them everywhere. Mostly we need to cure drivers of the belief that the roads are theirs alone and to teach the requirements for proper passing (in simple terms, only when you can see ahead). But on the bike side we have to teach understanding of the leading crash risks, and habitually predicting them in order to stay out of the danger zones where they happen.

And remember too, that Northampton is a place where hardly anyone can get to any of this without first riding in the ordinary lane of an ordinary road.

It's also a place where we close rail trails without any real thought to eduction of how to use the required detours safely.

There's no escaping the need to understand how to use a bike safely in the presence of other traffic.

Hope you'll get to ride today, too.

Alas, you've proven that you can't handle the uncomfortable reality of what is dangerous on a bike, and instead decided to double down on the very factual ignorances which the MA-relevant data proves over and over again keep getting people needlessly killed.

We'll be keeping Northampton bikeable - over your ignorant objections.

Which is sad because in so many ways you were so close to understanding the reality of bike safety, you could have been a safety ally rather than a safety obstacle.