In this series of videos, Kirby Beck – retired police officer, instructor and trainer with the International Police Mountain Bike Association – gives a comprehensive overview of cycling law enforcement. In part 1, Beck takes us through the fascinating history of cops on bikes, from the early police officers who stopped speeding horses, to the bike-based rapid response team that kept anarchists from burning St. Paul during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Plus, we get an amusing look back at 1970s TV cop show Adam 12, in which the protagonists clock a neighborhood cyclist at 45 mph.
Beck also gives an overview of the current state of enforcement of bicycle law – or lack thereof. Frustratingly for bike advocates, Beck says,
In Part 2, Beck describes what police mean when they describe something as a “problem” (hint: it’s different from how you or I might use the word), how to effectively report incidents to 911, and how to deal with police who cite you with cycling violations. In Part 3, he explains what police need to learn and how to get heard by your local police department.
Presentation by Dan Gutierrez at the 2013 I Am Traffic Colloquium:
The 6 ‘E’s of Bicycling Equity — Equality, Education, Engineering, Enforcement, Encouragement, Evaluation — is a program of bicycling advocacy: one that is more detailed and comprehensive than any other such program now existing. Dan Gutierrez, who formulated the 6 ‘E’s, spoke about the program at the I Am Traffic Bicycle Education Colloquium in February, 2013. He explained the development of the 6 ‘E’s formulation, how previous advocacy efforts were lacking, and how the concepts should be enacted to create equity for cyclists. Video was recorded by Tom Cook and edited together with Dan’s presentation by John Allen.
For decades, competent and trained cyclists have had to deal with the occasional ignorant motorist who hollers out some variation on “Get off the damn road ya idjyit, yer gonna get yerself killed!” Fortunately most of these incidents don’t escalate into anything serious, and while little has been done to change this attitude over the years, we could shrug off such blather with confidence that the logic of our road use was supported both by direct personal experience and objective scientific study. We also had the backing of the League of American Bicyclists to defend our rights, if only in words.
Well, things have changed. With a sophomoric “study” of fatal bicyclist crashes and subsequent statements by its President, the League joined the chorus of ignorance in agreeing that bicycling on regular roadway lanes is “gonna get you killed.”
Fear of the overtaking motorist has been a key arguing point between those supporting separated facilities as the primary accommodation for bicyclists, and those who prefer bicyclists be treated as normal vehicle drivers.
In May, 2014, the League released a report on bicyclist fatalities entitled Every Bicyclist Counts. A key finding was that 40% of bicyclist fatalities involved an overtaking motorist. This finding differs significantly from those of other studies and caused quite a stir among bicycle advocates. The fear of the overtaking motorist has been a key arguing point between those supporting separated facilities as the primary accommodation for bicyclists, and those who prefer bicyclists be treated as normal vehicle drivers. The report continues to be cited and has become part of the drumbeat of support for separated facilities.
Most notable in the various reporting following the publication of this report was an interview of League President Andy Clarke by BRAIN (Bicycle Retailer and Industry News) in which he attempted to make a connection between the 40% claim and the increasing desire to provide “protected bike lanes”:
Andy Clark: For the longest time it’s been an article of faith that we should be taking the lane, and that separated bike facilities are unnecessary … well, I think we are grown up enough now to say that’s not the case. Most people feel more comfortable actually having a paved shoulder or a cycle track or having a buffered or protected bike lane, and those things will reduce the fear and the incidence of being hit from behind. And we shouldn’t feel bad or awkward about saying that.
BRAIN: So this data reinforces the movement toward separated facilities?
AC: Yes, it reinforces and validates that approach. There is still a small, tiny percentage of people who think we should not be putting in that kind of infrastructure. They are hanging on to the idea that being hit from behind is not that big of a problem. Well, the data tends to suggest otherwise.
There are still going to be places where there isn’t that kind of infrastructure and you are going to need to know how to cope with that. So we are not diminishing the need for the kind of education programs that we have presented and are going to continue to present. But we are saying that infrastructure can and should play a role in eliminating some of the most serious kinds of crashes.
By undercutting the essential practice of lane control, Clarke was dismissing the key defensive driving strategy taught in the League’s own education program, not to mention that of every serious adult cyclist education program.
With such a statement from the League, this 40% overtaking claim is highly significant for those of us who believe bicyclists are drivers of vehicles and wish to protect our rights to use regular roadway lanes. Lane control mitigates many motorist-caused crashes due to turning and crossing conflicts, as well as overtakings, the majority of which are sideswipes in which the motorist is well aware of the cyclist’s presence. By undercutting the essential practice of lane control, Clarke is dismissing the key defensive driving strategy taught in the League’s own education program, not to mention that of every serious adult cyclist education program. A thorough review of the League’s methodology and analysis is called for.
This review will address a number of important shortcomings of the League’s report, including:
Their method of selecting crashes for assessment
Questions of how crashes are categorized
Key differences between urban and rural crashes
Alcohol and drugs, and cyclist use of lights and reflectors — two key factors in overtaking crashes
Bias in Crash Selection
Right up front, the League’s methodology for selecting and analyzing crashes has a built-in bias. The report states clearly that:
The majority of the information captured by Every Bicyclist Counts came from newspaper reports (56% of all reported sources), TV reports (25%) and blogs (19%).
Using news reports creates bias at two levels. First off, the types of stories that are most heavily reported are those involving the “good cyclist.” The person who is “just like us,” riding a well-maintained, good quality bike, wearing a helmet and obeying the rules. As one who has been following both media attention and official crash data for 20 years, I can tell you that the story of the homeless alcoholic hit while crossing a dark arterial at night without lights or reflectors gets scant attention from the media compared to those “good cyclists.” As the League notes, their study misses about 24% of the crashes. It’s quite reasonable to expect that the characteristics of those missed fatalities vary significantly from those they reviewed.
Next, the League’s sources are from the media rather than official crash reports, and so the facts have been filtered through a reporter, or a number of reporters. While we can certainly question the accuracy of official police reports in cycling crashes, we certainly aren’t getting more accurate information from the media, since they are themselves getting most of their information from law enforcement. Yes, an insightful analyst can spot inconsistencies or details that show flaws with the reporting, but that rarely tells us what actually happened, it only tells us what may not have happened.
Media reports can only be less accurate than official crash reports, because reporters only report what they’ve been told by law enforcement.
The League illustrates the difference between their methodology and that of official sources:
Approximately 40% of fatalities in our data with reported collision types were rear end collisions. This is higher than what was found in the 2010 FARS* release that included PBCAT-based crash types (27% of fatal crashes with reported collision types), although the crash type “motorist overtaking bicyclist” was the most common collision type in that data as well.
*Fatal Accident Reporting System
Why would overtaking jump from 27% to 40% in 2 years? This speaks more to the problems with their methodology than to what’s actually happening. Their reporting of helmet use by the victim does so as well:
Among the fatalities tracked by Every Bicyclist Counts, only 150 of the 633 reported fatalities included information on whether the cyclist was wearing a helmet. In the majority — 83 or 57% — of those fatalities the cyclist was wearing a helmet. This is higher than other data sources that record helmet use have reported.
Again, this illustrates the bias in their event selection. Crashes involving “responsible cyclists” (sympathetic victims) are more likely to be counted than the ones involving intoxicated homeless persons.
Categorization
The League’s crash typology is nothing like the FHWA crash typing, and vagueness of some of the “types” leaves many questions. Without a consistent typology it’s very difficult to compare results. For example “Cyclist side/car front” could mean a number of different crash types. It could mean either a cyclist being hit by a motorist who ran a red light or stop sign, or the opposite. The same goes for a “T-Hit.” Since free crash typing software is available from pedbikeinfo.org it’s a shame that they didn’t take advantage of it so we could compare it to other reports.
“Sideswipe” is normally included in overtaking. The FHWA typing also includes “cyclist sudden swerve,” and “cyclist lost control” in the overtaking group. I cannot tell whether cyclist sudden lefts or swerves are included in the overtakings.
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Overtaking crash types:
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Motorist hits a bicyclist who is directly in front of him. Such crashes normally involve a night-time crash with a cyclist without lights or reflectors, or an exceptionally impaired motorist, either intoxicated or asleep.
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Motorist overestimates passing space and clips bicyclist.
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Motorist drifts into bicyclists (usually in shoulder or bike lane). May involve distraction; often occurs on bends or curves.
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Bicyclist swerves into motorist’s path while attempting to avoid a suddenly-appearing hazard.
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While a direct hit from behind is what most people fear, that type only makes up a small portion of overtaking crashes. Each crash type has different causal mechanisms and different countermeasures. Lumping them together creates misleading message about the safety of bicycling—specifically, the ability of bicyclists to discourage or prevent motorists from hitting them.
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Their “unknowns” are exceptionally high, at 30%; probably because media reports tend to be quite sketchy. By comparison, for my review of cyclist fatalities from official crash reports, only 3% fell into the “unknown” category. These usually involved a cyclist found dead after a hit & run. Their categorization also includes “None,” which I presume to be a solo cyclist crash with no other vehicle involved.
The League report’s 40% overtaking was arrived at by ignoring 41% of the crashes.
Already we have 24% not reviewed at all, and another 23% of the remaining 76% set aside as “unknown.” So 41% of the fatalities during the study period were not categorized by the League. The 40% overtaking was arrived at by ignoring 41% of the crashes. The League’s overtaking percentage drops to 31% with the “unknowns” included, which is of course much closer to the 27% overtaking from FARS.
Urban Versus Rural
In the League’s report we are shown that 31% of the crashes were on rural roads and 69% on urban roads (which includes suburban). But their data does not tell us what proportion of the rural or urban crashes involved overtaking. This matters because the League is arguing for separated urban bikeways based on that 40% number.
My review of 105 cyclist fatalities in the Orlando metro area (a predominantly suburban area) since 2006 found 15 overtaking deaths (14%). Of those, nine were rural and six were suburban. None were in an area one would characterize as strictly “urban.”
The State of North Carolina has provided a rich source of statewide bicyclist crash data online using official crash reports and the standard FHWA crash typing scheme. Using their online database, I found that 34% of their fatals were overtakings, and 37% of all fatals were urban/suburban, but their online interface would not provide a cross-tabulation of rural/urban and crash type, so we cannot get a direct read on how many urban/suburban fatalities involved overtaking. We’ll have to estimate that from other factors. If one assumes that urban and rural overtakings are just as likely to result in a fatality, then 48 of their 129 fatal overtakings would have been urban, which works out to 12.7% of the 379 cyclist fatalities in their database. But rural and urban crashes are not equal in their severity. The NC data shows rural crashes were 3.6 times more likely to result in a fatality than urban crashes (4.7% versus 1.3%), so let’s divide those presumed 48 urban overtakings by the 3.6 times higher fatality potential of rural crashes. That gives us 13 urban overtakings, which is 9% of their 140 urban fatalities.
While the League report paid legitimate attention to unsafe and illegal motorist behaviors that led to deaths, such as intoxication, distraction and leaving the scene, it’s also a sad fact that many bicyclist deaths involve cyclists behaving similarly. But the League report was strangely silent on this. In North Carolina’s data, 19% of fatalities involved an intoxicated cyclist. In metro Orlando it was 40% overall, two of the nine rural overtakings, and three of the six suburban overtakings involved intoxicated cyclists.
Use of lights by cyclists at night is also a key factor. Of the 15 overtakings in the Orlando metro area, four involved unlit cyclists at night; three of the six suburban overtakings involved unlit cyclists. (Cyclist lighting information was not available in the NC data.)
Undermining Lane Control
In his BRAIN interview, Andy Clarke said:
For the longest time it’s been an article of faith that we should be taking the lane, and that separated bike facilities are unnecessary … well, I think we are grown up enough now to say that’s not the case.
Of the report’s five victim profiles, three involved cyclists in bike lanes or on paved shoulders; none were noted as using lane control in a general purpose lane.
And yet their report did not give us any indication of how many lane-controlling cyclists had been hit from behind. Indeed, they didn’t even provide such an event among their five victim profiles. Of the five crashes, three involved cyclists in bike lanes or on paved shoulders; none were noted as using lane control in a general purpose lane.
In the North Carolina data, we can see the differences between overtaking crashes (for all injury levels) in rural and urban areas.
“Bicyclist Swerved” crashes are of course not relevant to lane control. “Misjudged Space” crashes are broadly understood to be remedied by lane control. “Undetected Cyclist” crashes mostly involve unlit cyclists at night. So it is the “Other/Unknown” that would most likely involve the totally distracted motorist who squarely hits the cyclist from behind. 7.5% of these “Other/Unknown” resulted in fatalities in North Carolina, but of course rural crashes are much more likely to result in fatalities than are urban ones.
None of the 105 metro Orlando fatalities involved lane control.
The real “article of faith” being presented here is that a practice promoted by the most experienced and highly trained cyclists in our culture is now being dismissed without evidence.
The real “article of faith” being presented here is that a practice promoted by the most experienced and highly trained cyclists in our culture is now being dismissed without evidence. And it’s being dismissed by a national organization that was originally formed to promote safety and excellence in cycling.
Context Matters
There is no question that we need better reporting of bicyclist crashes by law enforcement, but the League’s report only adds confusion, not clarity. We also should use more than just fatalities when making decisions about street design; adding incapacitating injuries will provide us with far more comprehensive data to combat the most serious crashes.
And no, this review of the League’s fatality report is not intended as a blanket refusal of separated bicycle facilities. There are certainly some roads along which a sidepath would work. High-speed rural highways are good candidates. I used an excellent one in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. Paths along riverfront and lakefront roads are workable as well. And certain suburban high-speed arterials may be suitable for sidepaths or bike lanes if they have limited and well-managed conflict points. But when it comes to regular urban streets, overtaking is the least of our concerns as cyclists. That is where the turning and crossing conflicts are most common, where savvy, integrated cycling is essential, and where channelization of cyclists leads to unnecessary conflicts.
Do you think requiring bicyclists to have licenses, similar to automobile drivers (or a spot on our driver’s licenses similar to motorcyclists), would raise bicyclists’ stature in the eyes of law enforcement and the driving public? Would the inconvenience this would cause to cyclists be worth it to more clearly send the message to everyone else that we cyclists seriously want to be given the same respect as the automobile?
It has often been suggested, usually by non-bicyclists, that bicyclists should be required to pass a skills and knowledge test as a precondition for using our public roads. Anyone can see that inept and unlawful bicycling behavior is widespread here in the US, and studies show that moving violations by bicyclists contribute to about half of all car-bike crashes1. So why not license bicyclists like motorists to improve public safety?
While many proponents of bicyclist licensing have motivations that are hostile toward bicycling, some others have a sincere interest in promoting safer bicycling, and so the question deserves a serious and reasoned response. No US state, and apparently no government on the planet, requires adults to pass a skills and knowledge test as a precondition for exercising the right to travel by bicycle on public roads. There are many reasons why this is so, ranging from beliefs about the appropriate role of government to cost-benefit considerations, regulatory program efficiency and social justice.
Danger to Whom?
Moving violations by motor vehicle operators pose a grave danger to members of the public, killing thousands of people each year in the US alone2. By comparison, moving violations by bicyclists rarely injure anyone but the bicyclist. When bicyclists do injure people, the victims are usually pedestrians, and these bike-pedestrian collisions are more likely to happen when bicyclists operate on sidewalks, paths and other non-roadway facilities that bicyclist licensing advocates usually exclude from their proposed regulations. As a result, a licensing requirement for roadway use is unlikely to protect the safety of people, and may actually increase danger to pedestrians by encouraging more use of sidewalks by unlicensed bicyclists trying to avoid roadways, which studies have shown are the safer location for bicyclists to operate3.
Self Protection
Rather than having a credible goal of protecting the public from bicyclists, bicyclist licensing is usually touted as a way to protect bicyclists from themselves. By that reasoning, why not require people to pass a swimming skills and knowledge test and obtain a swimming license before being allowed to use public pools, beaches, and lakes? After all, more people drown per million hours of swimming than are killed per million hours of bicycling4. But the public would reject such a swimming license scheme because it creates a high government-imposed barrier to entry into a relatively harmless activity where the risks are private rather than public. Instead, most people prefer to invest in swimming skill development voluntarily and gradually as their interest and participation in the activity grows. Another preferred strategy is to incorporate key swimming education components into public school programs. This is the practice for bicycling education in many countries, but here in the US there appears to be less appreciation of the safety benefits of bicyclist knowledge and skill than of swimming knowledge and skill.
Government Overhead
Some “nanny” laws, such as seat belt use laws and helmet use laws, have a fairly low cost of compliance for the individual, and yet these laws are often hotly debated. A bicyclist license regulation scheme, by comparison, would have a much higher cost of compliance, on par with the cost of motor vehicle driver licensing. Not only are there the government costs of developing and administering the testing and licensing program (costs that would presumably be passed on to the bicyclists), but also the time and cost of training. Motorists accept the costs of licensing because they appreciate the potential danger posed to them and other people by those motorists lacking important skills and knowledge. But for bicyclists, the threat posed to them by unskilled bicyclists is not compelling, especially if those bicyclists ride very little.
Unintended Consequences
An avid bicyclist who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on bicycling equipment and hundreds of hours per year bicycling wouldn’t be deterred from bicycling by a licensing scheme, but many occasional, casual bicyclists would be. Bicycle licensing costs would be especially burdensome for the lowest-income people, many of whom cannot afford cars and depend on bicycling for basic travel. And children make up a significant part of the current bicycling population. The result of a bicyclist licensing requirement would be an immediate reduction in bicycling participation by casual, low income, and young users. Such a reduction would have negative consequences for public health because the health benefits of bicycling greatly outweigh the health risks, even for unskilled participants. A reduction would also have negative consequences for transportation accessibility, transportation system efficiency, and air quality. Many health and transportation stakeholders consider any policy change that makes bicycling more difficult to be a move in the wrong direction.
Police Enforcement
Some bicyclist-licensing advocates have claimed that police will not or cannot ticket bicyclists for moving violations unless bicyclists are licensed. In fact, police have little difficulty stopping and ticketing bicyclists for moving violations when they are motivated to, and have numerous ways to determine the identity of a person without a driver’s license. If for any reason police are unable to obtain satisfactory identifying information in the field, they can always bring the bicyclist to the police station (as happened once to actor Alec Baldwin when he was stopped by NYPD for bicycling against traffic). The real reason why police rarely stop bicyclists for traffic violations is that police don’t consider it a priority, in large part because our society does not consider these violations to be a significant threat to the general public.
In some places, mandatory bicycle registration programs have been employed as a means to identify the owners of bicycles. These programs imitated motor vehicle registration programs with the objective of reuniting owners with lost or stolen bicycles. In some cases, these programs were also promoted as a way to hold bicyclists accountable for moving violations by facilitating revocation of bicycling privileges through seizure of the registration plate or even impoundment of the bicycle5. Most mandatory bicycle registration schemes resulted in several unintended consequences. Cost and inconvenience deterred many occasional, child, low-income bicyclists — and ones who owned multiple bicycles — from purchasing the registration; in many cities, the vast majority of bicycle owners did not comply with the law. Police ended up spending less of their time and attention enforcing actual traffic laws and shifted their energy to enforcing the mandatory bicycle registration laws. Low compliance rates also meant that police could often use the suspicion that a bicycle was unregistered to conduct pretextual stops and searches of most any bicyclist they wished6. Because of the the high cost of bicycle registration programs compared to the price bicyclists were willing to pay, such programs were generally ineffective at revenue generation and often lost money. As a result, most localities that experimented with bicycle registration either eliminated the programs or made them voluntary in the wake of citizen complaints.
Toronto Conclusions
Despite a rich history of problems, new proposals for bicycle registration and bicyclist licensing still arise. In 2004, the City of Toronto studied the issue in response to a request by the City Council and arrived at the following conclusions7:
Bicycle registration is not effective in preventing bicycle theft;
A bicyclist operating license is not required for police officers to enforce the existing traffic rules;
Developing a bicyclist testing and licensing system would be expensive and divert resources from enforcing the existing traffic rules for bicyclists; and
Providing more resources for bicyclist education and training and increased police enforcement would be a more cost-effective approach for improving safety.
Right to Road
Yet the weakest argument that has been levied in favor of bicyclist licensing is the idea that travel upon our public roads is a privilege that should come at a price and that the price should be as high for bicyclists as it is for motorists as a matter of “fairness” or for symbolic “legitimacy.” This argument attempts to turn centuries of road-rights law on its head. Since about the time of the Magna Carta, travel upon the public roads has been considered a basic human right to be protected from unnecessary interference. Early regulations such as medieval tolls were tolerated only when they were demonstrably fair and necessary for road construction and maintenance891011. Motor vehicle-specific regulations, including licensing requirements, were developed in response to the new dangers motor vehicles posed to the general public. As the public costs of motoring dwarfed the public costs of human and animal powered modes, motorists became the focus of revenue collection for road funding. The few direct user fees that existed for nonmotorized travelers were generally abandoned as inefficient and impractical to collect compared to the alternatives, such as property taxes. The regulatory burden for all users, motorized or not, should be kept as low as the safety of travelers and the maintenance of the facility allows. Lower energy modes create much less public danger and pavement wear than higher energy modes, and so will have a lower regulatory burden. In a fair and free society, our traffic regulations are a means to an end rather than an end unto themselves.
What to do?
If bicyclist licensing is not the solution to dangerous bicycling behavior or negative perceptions of bicyclists, then what is? We recommend the following:
Incorporate bicycling education into public-school curricula. Most nations that value bicyclist safety offer bicycling skills and knowledge programs in their schools. Over time, this provides all members of society (including children, adult bicyclists, motorists, police, politicians and traffic engineers) with a consistent concept of operations for effective traffic negotiation by bicycle, instead of the misconceptions, myths and taboos that Americans hold about bicycling.
Educate motorists about bicyclists’ rights. The common myth that roads are for cars and not bikes adds fuel to another myth that the traffic laws are for cars and not bikes. Motorist harassment of bicyclists on roadways breeds contempt among some bicyclists for the driving culture including the normal rules of movement, and results in more unpredictable operation, such as sidewalk bicycling, red light running and wrong-way bicycling. Motorist education is sorely needed to address this social dysfunction and to provide a more hospitable environment for predictable and lawful bicycle driving.
Train police in enforcement techniques that support safer bicycling. Most police are not adequately trained in traffic law as applied to bicycling or how to effectively prioritize enforcement actions to promote bicyclist safety. As a result, police often err by stopping bicyclists for bogus infractions, such as impeding traffic, while ignoring unlawful and truly hazardous violations, such as bicycling against traffic or bicycling at night without lights. Clear policies, priorities and procedures empower police to focus their actions on significant safety problems while promoting respect for the traffic laws.
Invest resources in basic traffic law enforcement and related education. Enforcement campaigns that combine educational materials, advance publicity, verbal and written warnings, and targeted but fair issuance of citations can be highly effective at improving bicyclist and motorist compliance rates while protecting bicyclists’ access to their road system. Consistent enforcement maintains compliance and reduces long term crash rates.
This article is from May, 2014,now a decade old, but the issues are as relevant, and the official oppression as loathsome, as ever.
Recently, the bicycling world has been aghast to learn that a law-abiding citizen is being charged with “reckless driving” in Kentucky…despite all facts to the contrary. Cherokee Schill, a single mother, cut expenses by using her bicycle as transportation to work. Her route to work includes a section of U.S. 27, a high speed limit, multi-lane road.
Schill, 41, said if there were an easier way to get to work, she would take it. Her 1992 Toyota Camry with 360,000 miles is not dependable. To be able to afford housing and food for herself and two teenagers, the divorced mother said commuting by bike keeps her household afloat.
“I’m not putting myself here because I think it’s fun or exciting,” Schill said of the commute. “I’m here because I’ve got two kids to feed and a roof to put over their head. … I’ve got to pay rent, pay bills and buy groceries.”
The Lexington Herald-Leader also notes that she has not been involved in any crash since she started commuting by bike last June. Despite the fact that Cherokee is operating completely within the local and state laws, the Nicholasville police officers and Jessamine County deputy sheriffs have cited her three times, twice for “careless driving” and once for “reckless driving”, and the Jessamine County Attorney’s office has asked the county judge to prohibit her from riding on U.S. 27.
Reading the news reports, it’s clear that a reverse logic is working here. Instead of holding motorists responsible for inattentive driving, the police and county attorney are persecuting a law-abiding bicyclist.
“It just creates a very dangerous situation when you’ve got somebody on a bike that’s difficult to see to begin with, on a very highly travelled [sic] road, with signifigant [sic] speeds and a lot of people don’t pay attention to what they should be while driving, so it all compounds itself,” said Jessamine County Attorney Brian Goettl.
Goettl says a deputy sheriff responding to a robbery almost wrecked because Schill backed up traffic.
“He was almost in a wreck because of Miss Schill, and so it added to me another element of danger that I hadn’t even thought of before,” Goettl said.
Instead of persecuting Cherokee, why are the inattentive motorists not being ticketed and targeted for prosecution? Why was the deputy sheriff not paying attention to his own driving? Is the deputy sheriff’s story about almost wrecking even true? Or is it merely a rationalization of his feelings that cycling has no place on that road? Why is the convenience of other road users a higher priority than Cherokee’s right to the road? If a slow-moving tractor were on U.S. 27, would motorists be calling 911 for help? Would the 911 operators and police even give a moment of attention if someone was commuting via horse-drawn carriage (such as many do in Amish and Mennonite communities)?
Randy Thomas, president of the Bluegrass Cycling Club, said Schill is operating within her legal rights and in accordance with safety requirements. Asked if he would ride U.S. 27, Thomas said, “I personally am not going to comment. I ride all over the area, and I’m sure I ride roads that cyclists wouldn’t feel comfortable on. It’s irrelevant what I would do or what anyone else would do, if she’s riding within her rights and what she’s comfortable in doing.”
While she awaited a trial in August, the county attorney asked a judge to stop her from riding on U.S. 27. Fortunately, the county judge ruled in favor of Cherokee Schill and allowed her to continue to commute to work.
i am traffic applauds Cherokee Schill, Judge Booth, and local advocates like Randy Thomas who are affirming all bicyclists’ right to the road. Attorney Steve Magas, a contributor and friend of i am traffic, helped to defend Cherokee pro bono. We encourage you to continue sharing this story.
Our local highway and traffic department has striped a “bike lane” on the shoulder of a busy road. Aside from the fact that it is a bike lane, there are two big problems – the concrete aprons from all the driveways extend across the bike lane (but not into the general travel lane), and much of the bike lane is split between “road grade” pavement and “shoulder grade” pavement by a meandering line. Needless to say, such pavement conditions are very unsafe for a cyclist.
I brought this to the attention of the highways and traffic people, and this is how they responded:
“This Department considers the shoulder … suitable for a bike lane.”
I don’t use the bike lane anyway, but its existence makes motorists much more aggressive toward my presence in the traffic lane. So my question is this: Are there any standards at all for condition of the paved surface in a bike lane?
This crappy shoulder condition problem highlights the disconnect between how engineers and legislators define the roadway. The legislature typically defines the roadway as exclusive of the berm or shoulder, and defines bike lanes as that portion of the roadway set aside for the exclusive or semi-exclusive use of bicycles. The engineers routinely include the shoulder in the definition of roadway and than refer to the legal roadway as the “traveled way”.
This nomenclature disconnect sets up the problem Nick is facing, since the engineers consider a bike lane NOT part of the traveled way, but as a part of the engineering roadway via the shoulder, and since shoulder standards are NOT bike compatible, they can tell Nick to suck it up and live with it. Yet if they followed the legal definitions, the shoulder would NOT qualify as roadway space, and could not be converted into a bike lane without upgrading the space to legal roadway (what the engineers call “traveled way”) standards.
This slide, showing minimum edge bike lane widths from the classes I teach to professionals, shows the disconnect as it relates to shoulders and bike lanes. CVC = CA Vehicle Code, HDM = CA Highway Design Manual.’
And a similar problem exists for door zone bike lanes:
This is the story of living with a disability, overcoming that disability, suffering under a forced re-imposition of that disability, struggling against that imposition, and finally subduing it. That is not my physical disability of blindness, but my intellectual disability of ignorance and fear.
I wrote the first half of this more than a year ago, but I could not bring myself to publish it. I felt like the final chapter was missing, and I had to live that chapter before I could write it.
I dedicate this article to John Forester, who through his writing rescued me from my own accidental ignorance. And to attorney Andrew Fischer, who came to my aid in the struggle against others’ willful ignorance.
I am deeply grateful to my friends, particularly members of the Barony of Bergental and the bicycle driving community, for giving me some light during a very dark period. There were many days during that period (and there continue to be such days) when I could not find a compelling reason to get out of bed. But there were also days when my friends provided such a reason when I would not otherwise have found one.
Blindness
I am blind. I am not totally blind. Some would describe me as “partially blind” or “visually impaired.” The details are not important to the rest of the story, but people tend to be curious about it, so I will explain.
I was born with a rare, hereditary eye disorder called “retinoschisis.” Balls of fluid, called “scheses” (plural of “schesis”), partially separate my retina from the back of my eye. My acuity is impaired and I am missing some parts of my peripheral vision. The disorder also comes with a risk of retinal detachment, which results in total blindness in the affected eye. There is currently no corrective procedure. Since the defect is in the retina rather than the lens, it cannot be corrected with glasses or contacts.
I also have some secondary symptoms. I don’t have as much control over my eye movements as most other people. I must compensate for my reduced peripheral vision and eye movement control by turning my head more than most people do. I can’t wink, and I tend to blink more than most people. I have what is called a “nystagmus.” If I look intently, my eyes instinctively dart around, trying to focus. But they can’t get the focus they expect, so they just keep darting around. It’s a neat party trick.
It is hard to describe my vision or to compare it to normal vision because I have never had normal vision. It looks normal to me, and I have no other experience to compare it to. But I am told that everything looks blurry to me compared to someone with normal vision and that parts of my peripheral vision are missing. The blurriness means that I cannot make out as much detail as most other people.
I have trouble recognizing people. I have trouble making out small details or details of distant objects. My night vision is especially poor.
My blindness renders me unqualified to legally drive a motor vehicle. For a long time I thought of this as a severe limitation. I did not know of any other means of transportation that would give me the flexibility I needed to live a full and normal life.
On the spectrum of blindness, my vision is actually quite good. It is far better than the uncorrected vision of many people whose vision is fully corrected with glasses or contacts. Most people cannot detect my blindness through casual observation. Until I tell them that I am blind, they just think I’m weird (which I am, and proudly so). I can read most normal-size print under the right conditions. I do not use a cane or dog when I walk.
Apparently, I am quite comfortable performing many tasks by feel for which most people rely on their vision: for example, climbing/descending stairs, shaving, and turning a bolt with a screwdriver.
Immobility
My blindness renders me unqualified to legally drive a motor vehicle. (My brother has slightly higher acuity than me, and did have a driver’s license for a short period.) For a long time I thought of this as a severe limitation. I did not know of any other means of transportation that would give me the flexibility I needed to live a full and normal life. I got by with a combination of walking, biking, riding buses, and getting rides with friends and family members. With these methods I could meet my basic needs but not much more. Limitations on my mobility constrained my opportunities much more than any direct consequence of my disability: my options for where I could live, work, shop, and socialize.
Socializing was especially difficult for me for many reasons, but an important one was that my mobility limitations hindered my ability to act spontaneously or to interact with others on an equal basis. I could not go where other people went without great effort and planning.
Walking was slow and impractical for almost all trips. Biking was also slow, although faster than walking. It was also difficult, stressful, and still quite limiting. I only felt comfortable going short distances on familiar and comfortable routes. I had quite a few crashes too. Riding buses could be faster than biking, but it could also be slower than walking. It was extremely inflexible and unreliable. Bus routes only go certain places and only at certain times. Often buses are late, don’t stop, or don’t come at all. Missing a bus, even by a minute, could mean being twenty minutes late, an hour late, or not getting there at all. It could also mean becoming stranded far from home. So it was necessary to plan a trip well in advance and leave a lot of buffer time. There is also a severe limit on what can be carried on a bus. Getting rides from friends and family was also inflexible and unreliable, as well as humiliating. I would have to start looking for a ride days or weeks in advance, and I often did not find one. I could not choose when to arrive or depart or even know when I would arrive or depart. If my ride was late to pick me up, then I was late to arrive. If my ride wanted to leave early or stay late then I had to leave early or stay late. And there was a social liability in that my ride’s flexibility was constrained by their commitment to me.
Socializing was especially difficult for me for many reasons, but an important one was that my mobility limitations hindered my ability to act spontaneously or to interact with others on an equal basis. I could not go where other people went without great effort and planning, which often included the indignity of imposing on others for a ride, which I might or might not receive. Asking for a ride might not seem like it should be so humiliating, but as an integral part of my life, it left me in a constantly dependent and inferior social position. I was lonely and isolated. I could not relate to other people, and I resented them for taking for granted the freedom that for me was unavailable. I resented the World for leaving me behind.
“You Are Healed-AH!”
In the summer of 2005, approaching my twenty-eighth birthday, I separated from my wife (now my ex-wife). My principal social outlet at the time was my weekly choir practice, which I had been traveling to with my wife in her car, so it was important to me to continue attending. It was fifteen miles away (ten miles was my limit at the time) on unfamiliar, difficult, scary roads, so biking seemed impossible. I was too far out of the way for other members of the choir to pick me up. There were no buses that could take me.
Before we were married, my wife (then my fiancé) had bought me a book about cycling. She had known even less than I did about cycling (which was not much at the time) and was not at all familiar with the book. But she knew that I rode a bike. She had been poking around on the Web, had come across the book, and bought it for me.
I had never gotten around to reading it before, and I had forgotten about it until this transportation crisis arose. In desperation, I dug the book out and started reading it, hoping to find a clue to my mobility problem. The book was Effective Cycling by John Forester.
As I read the book, I became very excited. It suggested that I should ride my bike according to the same rules as drivers of motor vehicles and that I should stay away from the edge of the road, sometimes riding in the center or even on the left side of a lane, thus occupying the entire lane. I knew that the designs of roads provided a simple and predictable environment for motorists to travel with ease and flexibility. If I could use the roads in the same manner on a bike, then I could go anywhere with the same ease and flexibility. This was a totally new concept to me, and I was somewhat skeptical of it, but I recognized its immense potential.
It was as if I was no longer disabled. I was still blind, but ignorance, not blindness, had been my disability all along. I had been healed. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
I cautiously began to test out the techniques I had read about. On a familiar, comfortable road near where I lived (Strong St. in Amherst, MA), I rode a little farther from the edge than I had before. I immediately noticed that motorists passed me at a greater, more comfortable distance. I tried moving a little farther from the edge, and motorists left me an even wider gap. I also noticed that I could ride a straighter course, at a higher speed, with less effort away from the edge than I could near the edge.
I quickly became comfortable riding assertively on small quiet roads. I advanced my testing to bigger, busier roads. And then even bigger, even busier roads. I learned how to look at the horizon and follow the lane line to my left rather than following the right edge. I also grew more comfortable with scanning and signaling. I was ready to take on the scariest road I knew of: Route 9 in Hadley, a major four-lane arterial.
Eli Damon riding Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts
I headed out to the Hampshire Mall. Approaching University Drive, where Route 9 widened from two lanes to four, and where I would earlier follow the edge, I continued on a straight course to end up in the middle of the right lane. It worked! I looked straight ahead and held my position. Motorists passed me in the passing lane rather than squeezing by right next to me. With the edge of the road farther away from me, I found that I was able to focus my gaze farther ahead and move faster with less effort. Traffic controls no longer took me by surprise as they did before because they were all placed so as to be easily noticed from that middle-of-the-lane position. I also noticed that being directly in line with other traffic enabled me to take clues from traffic ahead of me about what I would encounter. When I got near the Mall, I scanned, signaled, yielded, and moved to the left through lane. When I got to the beginning of the left-turn lane, I moved directly into it. It was amazing how easy it was. When the light turned green, I turned into the Mall. I was no longer afraid.
It was as if I was no longer disabled either. I was still blind, but ignorance, not blindness, had been my disability all along. I had been healed. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I could do all of the normal things that other people did. I could live a full, normal life. I could go to choir practice.
I had the honor of meeting John Forester at the I Am Traffic Bicycle Education Colloquium. The image above is my copy of his book, which he signed at that event.
Conquering Unfamiliar Territory
On a 95-degree summer afternoon, I started on the fifteen mile trip to Holyoke, where my choir practiced. I passed Atkins Market and entered unfamiliar territory.
I continued to exploit my newfound freedom and expand my sense of possibility, cycling on a wide variety of roads under a wide variety of conditions, even making a couple of three-day, two-hundred-mile journeys.
I struggled up the steep winding road to the Notch, where the road goes between mountains, in my lowest gear. I fought to keep the pedals moving and the front wheel pointing forward. I rounded a curve, hoping to see the top, but there was just another curve. I kept going. Finally, I rounded a curve and I saw the top. My muscles hurt terribly, but I kept pushing until I reached the top. I rested and drank some water. Then I claimed my reward: flying down the smooth, straight, south side of the Notch.
I would never have made it up that hill with mind and body divided by the stress and difficulty of my old way of cycling. By freeing myself of that stress and difficulty, I was able to unite mind and body to achieve new heights, literally and figuratively.
I reached the South Hadley side of the Connecticut River, but I couldn’t find the bridge to Holyoke. I went around and around trying to find it until I finally realized that I was misreading my map. Before, being lost like that would have been terrifying, but with my new ability, being lost no longer meant being stuck. I calmly searched for the bridge until I found it.
South of the bridge, I entered the urban core of Holyoke, another unfamiliar setting. But an unfamiliar road no longer scared me. I knew that I could count on the familiar patterns of other roads. I was hot and exhausted, but I was also happy and confident.
I made my way to my friends’ house where practice was held, and I collapsed. They weren’t home. I sat and waited until some relief came along in the form of an ice cream truck. A little later, my friends came home and reminded me that there was no practice scheduled that week. Oh, well.
I continued to exploit my newfound freedom and expand my sense of possibility, cycling on a wide variety of roads under a wide variety of conditions, even making a couple of three-day, two-hundred-mile journeys. I made these trips because there were opportunities at the end that I wanted to take. I could never have made those trips or taken those opportunities before my transformation. It would have been overwhelmingly difficult, stressful, and scary.
I felt compelled to share the knowledge that led me though such a powerful transformation with others. I began corresponding with cycling instructors and pursuing cycling instruction certification.
A Crippling Blow
As I continued to exploit my newfound freedom, I was sometimes stopped and threatened by police officers, who disapproved of my assertive cycling behavior, the defensive driving techniques that made bicycle transportation practical and allowed me to build a life for myself. I had never interacted significantly with a police officer before, and the experience was quite scary. However, these encounters did not deter me because they all ended quickly. They would stop me, order me to move to the edge, or sometimes to get off of the road entirely, threaten to arrest me, and then move on. So I would simply move on as well, confident that my right to the road was secure and that I was not in significant danger.
But these threats escalated in the Fall of 2009. First I was stopped in Hadley. Hadley was close to Amherst, where I lived, and I had been through it many times. I had never been stopped in Hadley before. The other stops had been farther from home, in places where I did not expect to travel very often. Being stopped in a place where I traveled on a weekly basis was a higher level of threat. The threat was intensified when the same officer stopped me a month later, seized my bicycle, made me walk to the police station to retrieve it, and renewed his threat of arrest.
My spirit was crushed. I was terrified. Knowing that I would eventually be stopped by a police officer again, that I was under a standing threat of arrest and that I could be held in jail for an indeterminate duration without even being convicted of a crime: It all made me feel completely helpless.
Shortly thereafter, I was stopped by a police officer in West Springfield. I had been stopped in West Springfield several times before, but nothing had come of them. During the previous West Springfield stop, officers had even acknowledged my legal right to the road. But this time the officer arrested me and charged me with the crime of disorderly conduct. At my arraignment, the judge informed me that if I was arrested anywhere, for any reason, while the charges were pending, that I could be held in jail until their resolution.
My spirit was crushed. I was terrified. Knowing that I would eventually be stopped by a police officer again, that I was under a standing threat of arrest in Hadley, that a police officer who stopped me would discover that I was facing criminal charges, that the discovery could further bias them against me, that a threat of arrest and criminal charges was credible, and that I could be held in jail for an indeterminate duration without even being convicted of a crime: It all made me feel completely helpless. I was afraid to leave my home unescorted for fear of another police stop. And when I did leave my home, I was overcome with such intense anxiety that I could not enjoy what I was doing. I was extremely depressed, feeling like a prisoner in my home.
Moreover, I was afraid of the possibility of being found guilty. Such a finding would be terrible and not only for the usual reasons that a criminal conviction is terrible. It would also render illegal an essential function of my life, one that I had suffered without for most of my life. After living with a disability for twenty-eight years, then being freed from its constraints and enjoying that freedom for four years, I was forced back into the constraints of my disability once again. It was like I imagine it would be for someone who lives to adulthood unable to walk, then learns to walk as an adult only to have someone shatter his knees with a sledge hammer a few years later and again be unable to walk.
The Nightmare Continues
After four months of prosecution, a week before the scheduled trial, the district attorney agreed to drop the charge. I was a little bit freer, but I was still terrified of the possibility of future encounters with police officers, and I was still overcome with anxiety when I left home. I desperately wanted some means to ensure my safety, but I was told that there was nothing I could do to achieve it. Short of that, I wanted to at least know for sure what danger I was in, particularly in Hadley, but I was told that the only way achieve that was to go out and see what happened. I apparently had no choice but to pretend to live my life as normal, all the while expecting the nightmare to resume at any time.
I have never had a talent for acting. I was unable to pretend that everything was okay. But I did venture out a little and try to rebuild some of the life I had before. I had been doing some private tutoring and looking for a full-time teaching position before I was arrested. I felt that things were too uncertain to resume that. I started with some social activities with people I felt comfortable with. That would reduce my anxiety a little. But I was always apprehensive of the possibility of further conflict with the police. And being unable to determine where I stood with them was especially upsetting. There was no way to ask them if their threats still stood and get a meaningful answer.
A few months after the disorderly conduct charge was dropped, the same Hadley police officer stopped me a third time. He accused me of wiretapping and seized my camera. I received notice a few days later that he had charged me with wiretapping as well as disorderly conduct.
I bought a sport video camera with the hope of collecting on-bike footage for educational videos. When I went out, I mounted it on my helmet and set it to record my trip, hoping to refine my camera technique and maybe catch some interesting traffic interactions. It also gave me some security in that it would enable me to document a police encounter.
A few months after the disorderly conduct charge was dropped, the same Hadley police officer stopped me a third time. He wrote me a traffic citation. He also accused me of wiretapping and seized my camera. I received notice a few days later that he had charged me with wiretapping as well as disorderly conduct.
I was again a helpless prisoner. I pleaded for help from anyone who might have been able to help me, but most were unwilling to do much. After six months of prosecution, a judge eventually threw out the charges in response to a motion to dismiss. But I now knew that the Hadley police were willing to carry out their standing threats. I knew that I was not safe. I was still a prisoner.
One of the people that I had asked for help was attorney Andrew Fischer, and in the Fall of 2010, he agreed to pursue a lawsuit against the Hadley police, in which we would ask the court for an injunction, an order to leave me alone.
It was another year before he filed the lawsuit. At that point, I felt a good deal safer traveling because I knew that the judge would hear about any interference from the Hadley police. I was still in a tenuous position, but a much better position than before. I could at least begin to rebuild my life. I moved to a new home in Easthampton. One major difficulty in coping with the pending lawsuit was the legal hazards of speaking or writing about my experience. I felt an intense desire to discuss the experience that dominated my thoughts with others, and suppressing that desire was intensely frustrating and it continued to isolate me. The lawsuit continued for more than two years.
Victory, Affirmation, Freedom Restored
Many people take for granted the ability to travel freely. They do not realize how precious it is, and they do not understand what it is like not to have it.
I was unable to secure the injunction I had asked for, but I was able secure a summary judgement ruling and a settlement that clearly constitute a victory, albeit a weaker victory than I had hoped for. Through the settlement, I was able to achieve a solid sense that I would have some recourse if the Hadley police were to interfere with my travels again. My victory was, in fact, historic, being the first time a federal court had ever affirmed a cyclist’s right to the road. I have come a long way toward rebuilding my life, but I also have a long way to go. I cannot simply “move on.” However, I am now free to move forward. Things are slowly getting better.
Many people take for granted the ability to travel freely. They do not realize how precious it is, and they do not understand what it is like not to have it. Having discovered it after living without it for most of my life, it is certainly very precious to me. And having recovered it after it was seized from me makes it all the more precious.
You can hear me speak about my long conflict with the Hadley police in my recent interview on the Strong Towns podcast.
Since August 2009, Eli Damon has been put through the wringer of the justice and legal system, but perhaps most demeaning: Lousy media reporting. All because Eli was looking for a job near his home in Easthampton, Massachusetts. After a series of harassing traffic stops by local police, the town of Hadley began pursuing legal action against Eli for his right to use the road safely. Unlike many states, Massachusetts does not require that cyclists ride “as far right as practicable.” Instead, the Massachusetts General Laws have a requirement for overtaking that is applied frequently to cyclists:
“Except when overtaking and passing on the right is permitted, the driver of an overtaken vehicle shall give way to the right in favor of the overtaking vehicle on visible signal and shall not increase the speed of his vehicle until completely passed by the overtaking vehicle.” (MGL 89-2)
Eli is an experienced transportation cyclist and traffic cycling instructor, and well-versed in the numerous safety benefits of visible lane positioning. He also has a thorough understanding of how to facilitate safe overtaking when appropriate (a CyclingSavvy technique called “Control & Release”).
With all of this in mind, I was completely stunned while reading a recent editorial titled “A wise ruling on bicyclist’s use of Route 9 in Hadley” in The Daily Hampshire Gazette. The un-attributed author of the piece shows a complete ignorance of cycling safety, actual laws, and even journalistic ethics.
Imaginary Motivations
Without asking Eli directly or reading any of his online posts, the editor assumes Eli’s motivations and reasoning for (assumptions italicized):
Wearing a video camera while riding. “But by gearing up with a camera, he seemed to expect a confrontation; he claimed what he got was harassment.”
Filing a complaint. “Damon’s 2011 U.S. District Court complaint, by the way, did not seek money. He wanted to prove a point.“
Lane position. “Though the magistrate makes clear bicyclists have the right to use roads, too many motorists seem to think riders have no place on public ways. Damon’s decision to ride in the middle of a travel lane pushed back against that, with predictable results.“
Perhaps had the editor inquired into his actual motivations — instead of fabricating a narrative convenient to editorial bias — they would have learned how vital unencumbered, safe cycling is to Eli’s livelihood:
“The primary allegedly criminal act on my part is one that I must commit as part of my daily life, namely traveling on public roads in a safe and efficient manner. Indeed, traveling on public roads is almost universally considered to be essential for full participation in society. The effect of this is to place me on a kind of virtual house arrest, since any attempt I make to travel unescorted carries the risk of interference by police officers.” (Eli Damon, “Undue Process of Law”, June 12, 2010)
For additional context, the following is Eli’s CyclingSavvy Instructor bio:
I was born in 1977. I am principally a math teacher and have been teaching since the age of 17. I have a B.E. in computer engineering from SUNY Stony Brook (2000) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from UMass Amherst (2008). In the Society for Creative Anachronism, I am Lord Eli of Bergental, member of The Order of the Fountain. I first learned to ride a bike, in the common sense, at age 7. Due to a visual disability I cannot acquire a driver’s license. I once thought of this limitation as a severe one. I made some trips by foot, bike, and bus, and relied on friends and family members with cars to give me rides for some other trips. For the most part, however, the difficulty I had in traveling prevented me from living what most people would consider a full life. I learned to DRIVE a bike at age 27, and it radically transformed my life. Suddenly, I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, in a reliable, flexible, carefree manner. It felt as if I was no longer disabled. Now I travel almost entirely by bicycle. I have found that good cycling habits provide me with more freedom and flexibility than I could ever achieve through driving a motor vehicle. I have cycled in ten states and the District of Columbia, on a wide variety of roads under a wide variety of conditions. I have made trips of up to 200 miles.
The unwarranted police interference with Eli’s right to travel safely on our public roads made his only means of independent travel nearly impossible. Eli had been repeatedly harassed by police officers (The Hadley Encounters, The West Springfield Encounters, The Third Hadley Encounter: Relapse), so he should not be chastised for using common video equipment to record the encounters. The justice system holds a sworn law officer’s word in higher regard than that of a citizen. Unfortunately, this favors dishonest officers. Many of us have seen videos that contradict statements made by such officers. It’s a sad reality that citizens (especially ones in a minority) need to protect themselves from some of those sworn to serve and protect us.
Confrontation was not Eli’s motivation for recording his rides. In fact, his motivation was quite the opposite:
When I originally bought my Oregon Scientific ATC5K sport video camera, it was because I wanted capture footage of my bike rides for educational videos. I had seen videos from John Allen, Dan Gutierrez and Brian DeSousa, and Keri Caffrey and Mighk Wilson, and I wanted to do something like they had done. I wanted to show my community our local roads from a new perspective. I wanted to show them that there was no reason to be afraid of motor traffic on those roads, and wanted to show them the benefits of an assertive position, and the absence of the danger that many imagined.
A month after I bought the camera it was seized by Mitchell Kuc, and I was made to feel insecure traveling alone. The camera did come in handy in documenting the encounter. (Eli Damon, On-Bike Video Project, June 23, 2012)
Eli wants to prove a point? At great expense to himself, he is not seeking monetary damages for the harassment, humiliation, unwarranted confiscation of his property or curtailment of his ability to travel—a violation of his civil rights. He is simply seeking the ability for himself and other bicyclists to travel safely on public roadways without continued threat of police interference and harassment. That’s quite a point.
Common Ignorance of Bicycle Safety
Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat. — Stuart Chase
It may not be commonly understood, but as many of our educated and informed readers know, Lane Control is a vital safety skill that cyclists use to improve vantage and visibility and significantly reduce conflicts. Unfortunately, the editor did not see fit to look into why Eli might believe so fully in riding in a visible and predictable manner. Instead, the assumptions and bizarre conclusions set in: “If [Neiman’s ruling] had supported Damon’s claim riders can use the middle of a travel lane, people would get hurt. Even if lawful, it wouldn’t be safe.”
Sadly, the media platform allows the writer to set an authoritative tone to common ignorance and misconception. Since the editor could not be bothered to search out these claims of safety, I’ve collected a few pieces to bring the editor up to speed:
The editor’s conclusion that the ruling did not support a bicyclist’s right to use the middle of the lane is wrong. In his ruling, Judge Neiman wrote that “Massachusetts law requires a slower-traveling bicyclist to pull to the right to allow a faster-traveling motorist to pass when it is safe to do so under the circumstances.”
There is not enough space for a car to pass this bicyclist without using a significant portion of the adjacent lane (such that that lane would need to be free of traffic). By riding in this position, the bicyclist is creating the illusion of courtesy while exposing himself to risk of being sideswiped by a motorist who mistakenly tries to squeeze past.
The implication of that statement is that bicyclists are not required to ride right by default: they must only move right under certain conditions. While it is, in a sense, a victory to have a federal judge acknowledge the validity of lane control, the editor’s misinterpretation of the ruling demonstrates the same prejudicial misunderstanding that has led to this case in the first place. Therein lies the problem.
In many conditions it is unsafe, or impossible, for a bicyclist to move far enough right so that a motorist does not have to use a significant portion of the adjacent lane to pass. At that point, there is little difference to the motorist versus just changing lanes. Does the bicyclist still need to move right for show? Does the bicyclist have the autonomy to make that decision? Must he repeatedly defend that decision to the police and courts of law?
Who decides when and what is safe?
Our roadways are a cooperative system. In our daily interactions, most road users cooperate with each other in a civil manner — facilitating each other to enter or leave the roadway, make lane changes and pass more easily if we are considerably slower. We also cooperate by discouraging or mitigating each other’s mistakes to prevent crashes. Actual crashes are a mere fraction of the potential crashes that never happen because one party compensated for the mistake of another.
But what is cooperation? It seems to mean different things to different stakeholders. The law is vague on this matter — as it should be — because cooperation cannot be legislated or mandated, especially when it concerns decisions which affect safety.
The bicycle, because it is both narrow and slow, creates a complex problem for the concept of cooperation. The bicyclist’s vehicle provides no shell or buffered space around him. Therefore, the bicyclist must rely upon, or proactively encourage, the drivers of other vehicles to allow a buffer of space when passing. Lane control is an effective tool for proactively discouraging the common mistake of passing dangerously close. In addition, the narrowness presents the problem of being invisible or irrelevant — often overlooked by drivers making conflicting movements; this is a problem that is common to, and well understood by, motorcycle drivers. Lane control makes bicyclists more visible and provides them with vantage to see potential conflicts and compensate for the mistakes of others. But that same narrowness, coupled with slow speed, leads to the prevailing assumption that bicyclists should, by default, squeeze to the edge to facilitate faster traffic — even when that eliminates their ability to compensate for— and prevent—the mistakes of other drivers.
The Burden of Car-Centric Prejudice
Unlike many states, Massachusetts does not have a bicyclist-specific roadway-position law. However, its slow vehicle law uses vague wording for “safe operation” that leaves room for interpretation. Judge Neiman’s ruling did not clarify what is safe and who is to determine what is safe. Unfortunately, it still implies that a bicyclist can be subjected to a level of scrutiny not applied to the driver of any other vehicle.
No one would think to compel the operator of a car, or even a narrow vehicle like a motorcycle, to operate continuously at the right edge of a lane, or to move frequently back and forth to allow faster vehicles to share all or part of the lane for more convenient passing — or, in most cases, the illusion of more convenient passing. Yet, it is “common sense,” according to the Gazette Editor, to compel a bicyclist — who operates the least robust vehicle and is passed with the highest speed differentials — to do just that. This sentiment is nothing less than car-centric bigotry. It is the removal of autonomy and assignment of second-class citizenship to the drivers of a particular class of vehicle.
In reality, the language of MGL 89-2 is very old. It is a vestige of the early days of narrow, unlaned and often unpaved roads. These roads were typically crowned with steep or soft edges, making it prudent to drive in the middle of the road (not lane). As common practice was to drive in the middle, all slower drivers were required to move over to accommodate passing. The current slow vehicle law in most states (based on an updated Uniform Vehicle Code which MA did not adopt) requires the drivers of slow vehicles to operate in the rightmost thru lane (except when passing, avoiding a hazard or preparing for a left turn). This reflects current roadway design, and (absent bicycle-specific discriminatory laws) applies equally to bicycles as to other slow vehicles. Since the parts of Route 9 where Eli was stopped have multiple lanes, there is no rational reason to expect the driver of any slow vehicle to accommodate unsafe same-lane or lane-split passing, nor to operate on an intermittently-unusable, debris-filled and conflict-ridden shoulder.
Deafening Silence
The most disappointing and frustrating part of all of this is that Eli has been almost completely alone in this battle. Despite repeated pleas for assistance and advice to MassBike and the League of American Bicyclists, Eli has been turned down and ignored. The very least that these organizations could have done is publicize his case and situation. If these organizations cannot rally around someone who must use his or her bicycle on a daily basis for their sustenance, what is their basis for existence?
I Am Traffic at the time this article was written was a loose coalition of volunteers and educators. The I am Traffic Web site is now one of three run by the American Bicycling Education Association, which it spawned, and which seeks to provide the resources to support bicyclists like Eli in the effort to allow all bicyclists safe, unhindered travel on our public roads.
Screen shot from video Geoff McMillion shot in Missoula.
I see a future where bicyclists are seen as first class road users, with the same rights and duties (as far as the rules of the road are concerned) as drivers of vehicles . In fact, I see a future where bicyclists who are traveling slower than other traffic are seen as drivers with the same right to use lanes as other drivers.
That doesn’t mean that bicycles and cars are equal, no more than cars and trucks are equal. What I mean is that the people who operate them follow the same rules of the road. For instance, in almost every state, all drivers who are traveling slower than other traffic, regardless of what vehicle they are driving, are required to use the right-hand lane. There is no such rule in those states as “If you can’t keep up, you have to stay at the right edge of the right-hand lane.” (This is not true in Europe.)
I see a future where bicyclists who are traveling at less than the speed of other traffic can use the right-hand lane, turning out occasionally where it is safe to let faster drivers pass, just like other drivers. And bicyclists who are traveling at the same speed as other traffic can use any lane, just like other drivers.
I see a future where a bicyclist using a full lane is seen as normal and reasonable, even if the bicyclist is going slower than other traffic.
I see a future where bicyclists would no longer be afraid of being intimidated, threatened, bullied, buzzed, yelled at, had things thrown at them, forced off the road, accused of being rude and cited for riding in travel lanes. And without these fears, more people would ride bicycles on the public streets and highways.
Vulnerability and risk. Statistics and ethics. Solutions or fixes. Top-down interventions or individual actions. These are the core issues in the long-running bike-lane (or cycle track)-versus-integration argument and in the book Antifragileby Nassim Nicholas Taleb (better known for his previous book, The Black Swan). Antifragile is a long and complex read, but the author managed to summarize it while metaphorically standing on one foot: “Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty.”
We know what fragile means; the characteristic of being at risk of serious harm or destruction through sudden and extreme shocks. We also have the term robust, which means something is mostly immune to sudden extreme shocks. Taleb noticed there are also things, people, and systems that improve with such shocks, which required the new term, antifragile. There is no hard line between fragile and antifragile; rather it is a continuum. Taleb explores this fragility to antifragility continuum throughout the book.
We bicyclists can’t make ourselves totally antifragile, to the extent that we can benefit from the volatility of traffic, but we can significantly reduce our fragility and become somewhat antifragile by learning to respond effectively to the many small violations we experience. These small violations are often indicators of the actual crash we’re trying to avoid. The close pass indicates the risk for the sideswipe. The right hook close call indicates the potential for a right hook collision. And so on. We cannot and will not become less fragile or more antifragile by putting most of the responsibility for our safety on government or motorists. The best way to achieve it is by changing our own behavior.
Butterflies are very vulnerable, but similar to bicyclists they have the options of movement which reduces their fragility; so much so that they have survived as species for millions of years.
Before we explore how to reduce our fragility as cyclists, it’s important to differentiate between fragility and vulnerability. A china cup is both vulnerable and fragile; we can reduce its vulnerability by protecting it with bubble wrap, but it remains fragile. It’s also useless when wrapped up in the bubble wrap. Butterflies are very vulnerable, but similar to bicyclists they have the options of movement (as well as coloration and chemistry) which reduces their fragility; so much so that they have survived as species for millions of years. (Options is a major theme of Antifragile.)
Bicyclists don’t collide with motorists because they’re vulnerable or slow; but mostly because they’re unpredictable or inconspicuous. (Please don’t misconstrue this as fault; predictability and conspicuity are relative, and of course some motorists are careless. But when we look at the data, it’s clear many — if not most — crashes can be avoided by improving cyclist predictability and conspicuity.) As cyclists, our vulnerability cannot be significantly reduced, but our fragility can. To reduce fragility we must reduce the volatility and uncertainty of our environment, and increase our options.
We must also bear in mind that we’re not in this by ourselves; motorists also need a more predictable environment, because they are also fragile. Yes, motorists are fragile – emotionally and economically. A collision with a cyclist is often damaging to a driver’s psyche or bank account, or both. Well-designed streets and adherence to well-reasoned rules reduce volatility and uncertainty for both cyclists and motorists. As cyclists our options are increased by enhancing (but not violating) the rules of the road with special strategies.
“A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Rules Trump Laws (or at least they should)
Adding more rules will not solve the problem, because adding more rules adds points of failure. Instead of more rules, cyclists need more options to avoid the errors of others.
When it comes to rules it’s essential to understand how they relate to laws and to risk. Rules precede laws; they usually arise out of the culture out of experience and consensus. Laws often have political motives and biases; sometimes they uphold the rules, but other times they usurp them. When it comes to risk, particularly in traffic, we must recognize that rules which are violated become points of failure. (This is not always so with laws, because some laws are frivolous or not intended to reduce risk.)
The vast majority of traffic crashes — regardless of mode — happen because one or more parties violated one or more rules. What’s more, even if one party did not violate any rule, they often failed to take effective action to prevent the crash. I’m reminded of my early auto driving days as a teenager. I was driving along a collector street and another car was approaching from a side street. It was facing a stop sign and I wasn’t. From the passenger seat, my dad mildly chastised me for not covering my brake pedal. If the other driver had pulled out and caused a crash, he would have clearly been at fault and received the citation, but it would have also been because I failed to take appropriate action. I would have failed to take an option available to me.
Adding more rules will not solve the problem, because adding more rules adds points of failure. Instead of more rules, cyclists need more options to avoid the errors of others. Our most important options are sufficient operating space and adequate line of sight. We can also learn ways to give motorists more options to avoid unnecessary conflicts with us.
So we need a traffic system with the fewest number of rules (not laws) possible, with street designs that support those rules, with the lowest volatility we can manage, and with the greatest options for all. This means we need a system based on what people do best and most naturally, not on what they do poorly or need to be nagged into doing. Many bicycling advocates are calling for systems that multiply the failure points and reduce options both for cyclists and motorists.
The rules we have are based on the limits of human perception. Our eyes are at the fronts of our heads and we don’t have x-ray vision. They are also based on years of practical experience, first on open waters where boat captains needed to avoid collisions, and then on roads and streets when cart and carriage drivers needed to do the same. It was only when the industrial revolution came that cities got large enough and traffic got thick enough that the rules needed to be formalized into laws. Eventually traffic control devices were created to help manage the movements and reduce delays. For those who think the rules of the road were created for motor vehicles, note that less than 10% of urban traffic was motorized when William Phelps Eno wrote the first formal traffic codes for New York City in 1909. Eno thought cars were a fad and would be gone in a few years. He wrote his code for horse-drawn vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians, with autos, the horse-drawn and bicycles all categorized as vehicles.
The essential fairness of the rules of the road is based on the idea that all people are equal, no matter their mode. That’s why the core rule is:
The basic rules of the road are simple and designed to optimize human capabilities—yield to what’s directly in front of you.
First Come, First Served. You yield to the traffic in front of you because the person ahead of you in the lane was there first, just like at the grocery store check-out. You yield when entering a roadway from a driveway because the people on the road were there first. The same goes when you get to an intersection: you yield to the person who got there before you did. When changing lanes; you yield to the person who is already in that lane. Drivers yield to pedestrians who’ve entered the crosswalk because the pedestrian was there first.
Next comes Keep Right; Pass Left. We have to all agree to keep to the same side of the roadway when going in the same direction, or else it’s chaos. And we want passing to be limited to one side to minimize the amount of scanning we need to do, and because, as I noted earlier, we don’t have x-ray vision. When you pass on the right you can be hidden from view to left-turning drivers approaching from the front.
Intersection Positioning reduces the number of conflicting movements at intersections by eliminating or minimizing converging movements, instead making all movements parallel or diverging.
Yield To the Right at Intersections. If two or more drivers arrive at an intersection at the same time, they yield to the drivers to their right. Why the right? Because . motorists sit at the left side of the vehicle and the line of sight is better to the right. Also, the vehcile on the left has an estra half roadway width in which to stop, in cse of error, (Roundabouts are a special case. Turning traffic yields to through traffic, and the traffic entering a roundabout can only turn right. Roundabouts are a set of T intersections around a circle, and with the bottom of the T yielding to the top.)
Yield To On-coming Traffic When Turning Left. The purpose of this is to minimize delay and increase certainty. And as noted above, the turning driver needs to be able to see the traffic he’s supposed to yield to.
Notice that with the exception of lane changing, drivers are to yield to people who are in front of them or to the side but still ahead. Our eyes are at the fronts of our heads. Lane changing requires a rearward scan, but lane changing is only supposed to be done mid-block, not at intersections.
In earlier times there was no rule requiring slower traffic to yield to faster traffic. That would conflict with the rule of first come, first served. Today minimum-speed laws are in place in many states, but they are intended only to keep drivers of motor vehicles from unnecessarily slowing other motorized traffic. If such laws are applied to bicyclists or other non-motorized users, they are no longer about equality; they are effectively fascist, favoring the powerful over the powerless.
Seeking Order; Gaining Failure Points
Channelizing one type of vehicle on the edge of the road adds complexity, breaks the basic rules of the road and defies human capabilities.
When we add a bike lane or cycle track to a street we effectively add new rules and violate some of the original rules. With such facilities, for bicyclists we now say:
Pass On the Right. The right rear section of a motor vehicle has the worst blind spots, but we expect drivers to check those spots with the same level of effectiveness as when they look forward or into their left side mirror.
Bike lanes discourage proper intersection positioning; cycle tracks often prohibit it. “When do I leave the bike lane to get into the left turn lane? Or should I just turn left directly from the bike lane?”
And for motorists we now say:
When Turning Right, Yield to Through Vehicles Approaching From Your Right Rear (your blind spot), while also scanning ahead for pedestrians in the crosswalk.
When Turning Left, Yield to Vehicles You May Not Be Able to See (because they’re moving toward you while hidden behind other stopped vehicles).
Motorists are often confused as to how to do intersection positioning. “Do I move all the way to the curb as I normally do, or do I stay fully in my current lane?”
So we have added new rules, which means new points of failure. What’s more, these rules are more difficult to obey because they require motorists to look back when they also need to be looking forward, and they require both cyclists and motorists be able to see through stopped vehicles. None of these new rules, or the bikeways that necessitate them, eliminate the need for adherence to any of the original rules, or eliminate the crashes caused by the violations of those rules.
Types of bicyclists and types of bicyclist behaviors.
Bicycle planners are fond of systems that attempt to categorize bicyclists into “types.” The most commonly used type system uses “A” for “experienced” adults, “B” for “novice” adults, and “C” for children. The problem with this system is it assumes certain types of behaviors and preferences for each group, but with no data to support those assumptions. A far better approach is to categorize basic types of behaviors. Some behaviors are more successful at mitigating conflicts and crashes, and some are less successful. Whether a cyclist is a 40 year old man on a $2,000 road bike or a 12 year old girl on a bike from Target is beside the point. Successful behaviors work for everyone. Unsuccessful behaviors fail for everyone. (The presumption that successful bicycle driver behavior is not achievable by novice adults or by children in an appropriate environment is demonstrably false. It’s been done.)
On the other hand, the basic behavior types are driver, edge and pedestrian. Pedestrian behavior is bicycling on a sidewalk, a sidepath, or on the roadway against traffic. Edge behavior is cycling close to the roadway edge with the flow of traffic. Driver behavior is using the roadway in the same manner as any other driver of a slower vehicle, usually in the center of a lane. It’s not a matter of whether a behavior is “right” or “wrong,” but whether it’s successful or unsuccessful for a given type of street and situation. The well-trained cyclist understands the pros and cons for each behavior.
For some strange reason, the opinions of the untrained and less experienced cyclists are held in higher regard than those of the trained and experienced ones. I know of no other activity in which that is the case.
A bicyclist whose default behavior is driver sees a bike lane or cycle track as adding volatility and limiting options. A bicyclist whose default behavior is edge or pedestrian sees a bike lane or cycle track as reducing volatility and increasing options. This is partly because he or she has little or no experience using driver behavior, and partly because that is what the majority bicycling culture is saying. It also creates some cognitive dissonance on the part of the edge or pedestrian rider, because he still experiences conflicts while in the bike lane or cycle track.
For some strange reason, the opinions of the untrained and less experienced cyclists are held in higher regard than those of the trained and experienced ones. I know of no other activity in which that is the case.
“What can we say about people who studiously avoid learning from the mistakes of others?” — Taleb
There are better ways to attempt to reduce volatility and improve options that don’t involve violation of the rules of vehicular movement. The best is to reduce motor vehicle speeds in urban and suburban areas, and to limit the number of multi-lane arterials. The faster we travel, the poorer our ability to track multiple conflicts and the more distance we need to react to them. Crash data from Florida shows that crash rates for all road users increase significantly when roads are widened from four lanes to six.
We can accept the superiority of bicycle driver behavior over edge and pedestrian behavior by the simple observation that people who effectively learn bicycle driving do not revert to the other behaviors as their default: driving becomes their default because it clearly works better for them (though bicycle drivers will on occasion use edge or pedestrian behavior when it serves a specific purpose.)
“Suckers try to win the argument; non-suckers try to win.”
– Taleb
This bike-lane-versus-integration argument has been running for 30 years at a stalemate, and statistically speaking it’s unwinnable. The argument is in essence: overtaking crashes versus other crashes. The experienced and trained bicycle driver sees the risk of the overtaking motorist as exceptionally low and the risks of turning and crossing conflicts as significantly higher. (Overtaking crashes are no more than 10% of urban and suburban motor-vehicle-bicycle crashes, while most of the rest involve turning and crossing conflicts.) Based on direct, real world experience, these bicyclists see bikeways that keep cyclists along the edge of the road as increasing their risk for turning and crossing conflicts. Virtually all cyclists who predominantly use driver behavior were once edge or pedestrian riders, so they understand the difference in effectiveness based on real world experience.
Cyclists who predominantly use edge or pedestrian behavior have little to no experience with bicycle driving behavior, so they are unable to compare the effectiveness for themselves.
Advocates of bike lanes, cycle tracks and sidepaths see the risk of overtaking motorists as unacceptably high and believe the turning and crossing conflicts that bikeways create can be mitigated with better design and motorist training and enforcement. They also tie the tenuous safety benefit of bikeways to the desire to get more people on bikes, making the equally tenuous claim that getting more people on bikes will reduce the crash rate (but not the crash numbers). Cyclists who predominantly use edge or pedestrian behavior have little to no experience with bicycle driving behavior, so they are unable to compare the effectiveness for themselves.
If you’re going to trade off one risk for another, you have to first know which risk is greater. Statistically speaking, that means knowing the absolute risk in a measure such as crashes per mile or per hour of exposure. What’s more, you need to know how those risks change with different environments. For example, the risks of turning and crossing conflicts are relatively low on a high-speed rural road with few cross streets and driveways, but one could reasonably expect overtaking crashes to be a potential problem. Conversely, on a low-speed downtown street with many driveways and cross streets, turning and crossing conflicts are a significant concern and overtaking crashes are exceptionally low. Lane control greatly reduces the predominant type of overtaking crash, the sideswipe, in which motorists attempt to squeeze past cyclists within the lane. Therefore, the only type overtaking crash that lane control might not mitigate is the type in which the motorist is so seriously impaired or distracted that he or she does not see the cyclist directly ahead. Such crashes in the urban context are so rare they could be compared to being struck by lightning.
To measure the risk for a particular type of crash and how it might change by the type of street, you need to measure quite a few variables, and be confident you’ve measured them accurately. To put this information to use, you also need to create a sound mathematical model that reliably predicts the risk for different situations.
Let’s take one type of crash – the right-hook – as an example. In order to predict how many right-hook conflicts per mile or per hour cyclists might expect if traveling along the edge of the roadway, we need to know:
How many cyclists travel along the street
How many motorists travel along the street
The numbers of intersections and driveways (minus the ones where there is a dedicated right-turn-only lane)
The number of signalized intersections
How many motorists make right turns at each intersection
The relative average speeds of the motorists and bicyclists (the closer the relative speeds, the higher the likelihood a cyclist will be in the blind spot of a motorist who’s turning right)
The percentage of motorists who check their right side blind-spots before turning right
And there may be other factors I haven’t thought of. Other turning and crossing conflicts, such as left-crosses and drive-outs, have their own sets of necessary factors.
Similarly, to measure the absolute risk of overtaking crashes for cyclists who control their lanes, we need to know:
How many cyclists travel along the street
How many motorists travel along the street
The relative average speeds of the motorists and bicyclists
The percentage of motorists who are distracted, and how long on-average their attention leaves the road
The percentages of motorists who are intoxicated or sleep-deprived.
Also at issue is the relative injury severity of the two (or more) crash types. Once again, overtaking crashes might have high risk of death or serious injury on a rural road, but not on an urban street, while right hooks involving large trucks in low-speed environments have very high fatality risk. These rates are also unknown and difficult to measure.
If you cannot predict which risk is greater, then you cannot ethically restrict a person’s options for limiting their risk based on their own real-world experience.
This should explain what I mean when I say the argument is unwinnable, as least from a statistical-analysis standpoint. One side can argue that the overtaking risk is higher, but cannot prove it (at least not to anyone looking at the data objectively), and the same is usually true the other way. If you cannot predict which risk is greater, then you cannot ethically restrict a person’s options for limiting their risk based on their own real world experience.
A cyclist who is concerned more about overtaking motorists than about turning or crossing conflicts always has the option of biking along the roadway edge, and often has the option of using a sidewalk. He or she also has the option of controlling the lane, but either chooses not to utilize it or thinks that option is illegal or unsafe. If the lanes on an existing road are narrow and the road has no sidewalks, one could argue that options are limited for this cyclist. He has two options, neither of which he likes. But note that at this point no action has been taken by anyone in authority to change the available options. We could make the lanes wider or add sidewalks; this adds options for this cyclist, and he may or may not prefer these options.
A cyclist who is concerned more about turning and crossing conflicts has the same options as the first cyclist, and will normally choose driver behavior – until a bike lane or cycle track is provided. Now an option has been removed or somewhat restricted. Whether or not there’s a law restricting the bicyclist to the bikeway, the cyclist who avoids the bike lane in order to avoid turning and crossing conflicts gets punished, either socially (through motorist harassment) or legally (through police action). What’s more, the punishment is being doled out to the trained and experienced cyclist who is attempting to avoid a well-documented conflict.
A bike lane or a cycle track is a traffic-control device. According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices:
“The purpose of traffic control devices, as well as the principles for their use, is to promote highway safety and efficiency by providing for the orderly movement of all road users on streets, highways, bikeways, and private roads open to public travel throughout the Nation.
Traffic control devices notify road users of regulations and provide warning and guidance needed for the uniform and efficient operation of all elements of the traffic stream in a manner intended to minimize the occurrences of crashes.”
Notice it doesn’t say “to make people feel comfortable and encourage them to ride bikes.” Nor does it say “support common behaviors” such as bicyclists passing on the right or riding against traffic. Are there any other traffic-control devices that expert drivers believe add unnecessarily to volatility, reduce predictability, and eliminate defensive driving options?
There may be areas in which the downsides of a bikeway are very minimal and the upside is significant, such as sufficiently wide bike lanes on high-speed suburban roads, or sidepaths along high-speed rural highways. But a blanket “put in a bike lane” attitude is not a wise strategy.
Laws that eliminate or restrict defensive driving options are even worse. Bicyclists are the only vehicle drivers who (at least in most states) are put in the default position of sharing a lane side-by-side with much larger and faster vehicles. By controlling a lane, we get the kind of passing clearance and protection from turning and crossing conflicts that we want, but lane control is framed in our statutes as the exceptional option, not the default option.
How Much Risk Reduction Do You Want?
Would you prefer a 40% reduction or as close to 100% as possible? Published studies comparing streets with and without bikeways vary quite a bit with their claims of crash risk reduction. For the sake of argument, 40% is fair starting point. (I’ll get to the validity of those claims in a bit.) I’ve no doubt you’d rather take the close-to-100% option if it seemed reasonable.
If you go through a Goal Zero process and ignore the most effective strategies for reasons like “people aren’t interested in that” (a common argument against expecting people to seek cycling education), you’re really saying “a 40% reduction is good enough.”
The gold standard of safety programs is the “Goal Zero” approach. With Goal Zero you look at every angle of the system, every point of failure, and strive to understand it as clearly as you can. Then you analyze all the potential strategies to reduce or eliminate those points of failure and determine which strategies are most effective. In bicyclist safety circles that’s called the “3E” approach: engineering, education and enforcement. Enforcement is just trying to ensure people do what they’ve been taught. Too often “education” itself is presented as a countermeasure, but it’s really not. Education is a way to demonstrate to people the types of behaviors that are most effective. It’s the behaviors that are the real crash countermeasures. They don’t work unless the cyclist (or motorist) uses them.
If you go through a Goal Zero process and ignore the most effective strategies for reasons like “people aren’t interested in that” (a common argument against expecting people to seek cycling education), you’re really saying “a 40% reduction is good enough.” Well-designed bicyclist training programs (such as CyclingSavvy) take the Goal Zero approach by addressing each type of conflict and using the most effective countermeasure, not the most popular one.
But I was being charitable to those bikeway studies a few paragraphs back. Their claims of crash rate reductions are highly suspect due to poor methodologies. None of the studies address cyclist or motorist behaviors. They simply look at all the crashes before and after the installation, or compare crashes on streets with and without bikeways. In order for such comparisons to be valid you have to screen out crashes that wouldn’t have been affected by the bikeway presence, such as someone running a red light or a stop sign, or a cyclist entering the roadway from a driveway, or one out at night without lights.
A Canadian study “found” bikeways safer than roadway cycling. This slide demonstrates that authors had no idea what safe roadway behavior is—showing an image of high-risk door-zone cycling and labeling it as “vehicular cycling.”
These studies don’t compare bikeway travel to bicycle driver behavior; they compare bikeway travel to edge and pedestrian behavior without bikeways, because those are the dominant bicycling behaviors. The full range of behavioral strategies has therefore not been studied.
Worse still, some studies have made comparisons between bikeway streets and non-bikeway streets without keeping the other street characteristics consistent. For example, in the Lusk, Furth et al study of Montreal cycle tracks, one-way, one-lane residential streets with cycle tracks were compared to two-way, four-lane commercial streets without bikeways. They also ignored crashes that might have been relevant, but we can’t tell from their paper. (They also omitted a cycle track section that was already known for a high crash rate.) Critiques of that study can be found here and here.
We also have to consider the unintended consequences scenario. If we build a bikeway that is generally believed to be safe, the proponents say, more people will come out to bike. This may well be true, but will those new cyclists keep only to the bikeways? Of course not. And will they seek out training? Not until we get serious about it as a culture. So we will have more cyclists out on all of our streets, but they are doing so with the less successful edge and pedestrian behaviors. The bikeway designs might partly mitigate the failures of edge and pedestrian behavior, but of course not on the streets without the bikeways. So it’s completely predictable that crashes would go up on non-bikeway streets compared to the bikeway streets because we’ve invited a bunch of untrained people into situations they don’t understand, and have reinforced the types of behaviors that get them into trouble to begin with. But the pro-bikeway study authors take this as validation.
The things we don’t measure are often as important, or more important, than the things we do.
“It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
—William Bruce Cameron, “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking”
Inhibiting people from learning better strategies is also unethical. How does a novice ever learn to reduce his own risks if training is dismissed as irrelevant or impractical and the infrastructure discourages the more successful behavior?
Bicyclists get hit by motorists while traveling in bikeways. They get rear-ended, right-hooked, and left-crossed. They also get hit by motorists driving out from driveways and cross streets. There are also crashes involving wrong-way cyclists in bike lanes. Yes, of course, these crashes also happen to cyclists who are not in bike lanes, but no-one has solid data showing they are less likely with a bike lane. It’s unethical to limit an individual’s attempts to reduce risk if you don’t have strong certainty that you have a better strategy. Bicycle drivers know from direct real-world experience – which includes all the pertinent factors, just not in the form of quantifiable data – that they have far fewer close calls involving such conflict types when they are controlling a lane than when they are in a bike lane or otherwise along the edge.
Inhibiting people from learning better strategies is also unethical. How does a novice ever learn to reduce his own risks if training is dismissed as irrelevant or impractical and the infrastructure discourages the more successful behavior? Some years ago I met a man who’d spent quite a few years living in The Netherlands. Like so many, he loved their bikeway system and raved about it to me. I didn’t argue with him about it, but just reminded him that here in Orlando you have to know how to handle yourself on roads without bikeways. He assured me he knew how to bike safely in mixed traffic. Each time I’ve seen him since he’s been cycling on a sidewalk.
We could liken bike lanes and cycle tracks to placebos. Even placebos have some positive health effect, but we would never give a placebo when the real drug was much more effective. Vaccines on the other hand work very well. They strengthen the immune system rather than attack the malady directly. Training is a vaccine; it shows the cyclist how to address the most common problems wherever she goes — not just where the government has installed a special treatment — and no-one is misleading her into thinking some other agent will handle her problems for her.
A Robust System
While we can’t make individual cyclists robust or entirely antifragile, we can do it for our overall traffic system. Our traffic system is inherently based on cooperation, but too many people are trying to treat it as though it’s a competitive one. Whether it’s the motorists-as-wild-beasts theme, the media pumping up the us-versus-them angle, or some bicycle advocates with their us-versus-them brand of activism, they are all making the system unbalanced and less effective by bolstering the competitive mentality.
Cooperation is what makes our traffic system robust. It’s what gives it safety redundancy; it’s what makes its users smarter and more effective; it’s what makes traffic flow smoothly; it’s what makes us focus on our own responsibility rather than everyone else’s; it’s what rewards successful behaviors.
Confusion (such as when the system is made too complex) confounds cooperation and feeds competition.
Cooperation is strongest within species and cultures, not between them. So “pedestrians and bicyclists as endangered species” and “bike culture versus car culture” are harmful analogies. We are all one species: homo sapiens. We are genetically and culturally guided to protect the vulnerable of our own species. Protection of the vulnerable is a far more effective driver of human cooperation than the law. A motorist who expects to see bicyclists on all roads (except freeways) and on all parts of the roadway will be more diligent in looking for cyclists than one who expects them to only be on paths or bike lanes.
If we want an antifragile system then, we need three key ingredients: simple rules, cooperation and vulnerability.
Simpler rules increase predictability.
Vulnerability combined with predictability increases cooperation.
And cooperation strengthens the rules.
It’s a virtuous cycle.
“You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.”
