The Police Department has attributed the impressive drop in cyclist-pedestrian accidents to its aggressive ticketing policy of cyclists. There is a certain correlation: from 1985 to 1986, when the bicycle messenger industry gained visibility and notoriety, the number of summonses issued to cyclists nearly tripled from 6,578 to 18,130, while bicycle-pedestrian accidents dropped 11 percent, from 707 to 631. Yet since then the rate of summonses has dropped back down, to 10,395 in 1990, while bicycle-pedestrian accidents have continued to decline. Moreover, while there is no record of which party is at fault in bicycle-pedestrian accidents, clearly a good proportion of them can be traced to jaywalking, for which the Police Department issued virtually no summonses.
The bicycling community ascribes the halving in bicycle-pedestrian accidents since 1985 instead to a gradual mutual accommodation of cyclists and pedestrians. The increase in accidents occurred in the mid-1980s, during a big boom in city cycling. As pedestrians and cyclists have learned to adjust to each other and anticipate each other's moves, the number has fallen back down.