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From the Big Wheel
Rich Moeller, LMB Executive Director
From the Spring '08 MI Bicyclist Magazine
I recently took a winter sojourn to Arizona. I packed my Bike Friday in its trusty suitcase and boarded a Southwest jet out of Detroit with my wife during a snowstorm with great anticipation. The weather did not disappoint; it was in the 80s for the seven days we were there. But my riding experience there made me think a lot about the question, “What is a ‘safe’ bicycling environment?”
The city we stayed in has won the League of American Bicyclists’ gold level “Bicycle Friendly Community” rating. The scenery is spectacular and the weather is outstanding and very conducive to bicycling (especially in winter). It probably has more miles of bike lanes than Lansing has miles of roads. It has hundreds (maybe thousands) of “Share the Road” and “Bike Route” signs. Bike lanes are prominently marked, with “Bike Lane” painted on the lane itself. State trunk highways have six- to 10-foot shoulders to ride on. Last year, Arizona passed a three-foot safe-passing law for bicyclists
Sound like utopia? Here’s the rest of the story.
Desert sand and gravel was everywhere, often covering the entire bike lane and/or shoulder. Arizona has no bottle law, so most bike lanes are full of glass. The road surfaces on all but the most recently paved are rough and very bumpy. Michigan has frost cracks; Arizona has heat cracks, which are worse and more prevalent. I would have been better off on a fully suspended mountain bike on most of the roads I traveled. Despite its 3-foot passing law, Arizona motorists give you less room than Michigan drivers. Maybe five percent of drivers gave me three feet. (Interestingly, Arizona law requires five feet when passing motorcycles. Go figure!)
Yes, they have an abundance of bike “facilities,” but the quality of my riding experience there was worse than in many other places with fewer facilities. It’s a no-brainer to advocate for bike facilities — and easy to measure ‘progress’ by how many we have. But facilities don’t guarantee our bicycling experience will be as enjoyable or safe as it should be. Because we can’t easily measure it, we tend not to deal with the ‘quality’ of our cycling experience.
As cycling advocates, we have pushed hard for bicycle infrastructure.
But, has that simply handed planners a way (via bike lanes and striped shoulders) to get us out of the way of motorists, so that they don’t have to think about our safety? Not only are we out of the way but in Michigan, if there’s a white line between the roadway and shoulder, governments don’t have to maintain the shoulder and we can’t sue if we’re injured on one.
In every state in the U.S., bicyclists have the same right as motorists to be on the roads. We don’t need more infrastructure to ride our bikes, nearly as much as we need awareness by motorists (and law enforcement) that we ‘belong’ on the roadways. The goal should be to make motorists sharing the road with bicyclists a national cultural norm, with a common understanding that our society does not tolerate endangering a cyclist’s life or safety.
This isn’t a radical idea. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spends millions annually on seat-belt campaigns, bus-safety campaigns, motorcycle-safety campaigns and deer-crash campaigns, to name just a few. But we have no national bicycle-safety campaign.
Think about this. According to the Outdoor Industry Foundation
Fall 2006 survey, 35.6 million folks in the US rode a bicycle that year. Our government conducts a safety campaign to protect approximately 50 million deer in the U.S., but does nothing to protect 35.6 million citizens riding bicycles.
Maybe we, too, need to shift our priorities to advocating for local, state and national campaigns to promote sharing the road. Pamphlets, signs and questions on the driver’s exam will not get that job done.
What if, over the last 20 years, instead of using hard-won non-motorized transportation-enhancement (TE) monies to build boxes to put bicyclists in, we had spent it to teach America how to share the road? After all, bicyclists are America’s sons, daughters, moms, dads, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers and sisters.
Read more articles from the current issue by downloading Michigan Bicyclist Magazine as a PDF. Click here to download. Read about Michigan law concerning bicycling by contributing lawyers, Sarah W. Colegrove and Todd E. Briggs |
