The biggest obstacle to safely riding a bicycle is the inattentiveness of drivers.
This was one of the points I drove home as a panelist at the 2013 Fairfax Bike Summit earlier this month.
While people on bicycles surely need to learn and obey the biking laws where they ride, there are many more of us who drive and we are much more dangerous. We don’t know how to turn across a bike lane. We open car doors into bike lanes without looking.
Public-awareness campaigns like this one from BikeArlington have improved the relationship between bicyclists and drivers on the roads.
The video above was produced by AAA and the League of American Bicyclists.
For older adults riding bicycles, whose balance is often compromised and who may startle easily, these close calls are even riskier. The infrastructure for bicycling, laws about bicycler rights, and interface with cars have all changed dramatically since most of us got our licenses. And as one audience member pointed out, “We mail in our renewal payments and there is no regard for new features that drivers need to learn about.”
Yet, perhaps one of the best ways for drivers to learn about safe interface with bicyclists is to hop on bikes. First of all, simply getting more bicycles on the road would increase their visibility and hence people’s awareness of their prevalence and the need to look out for them (in addition to the other social, health, and environmental benefits that are beyond the scope of this blog). But more specifically, and as I have learned firsthand, once you are a bicyclist, you are much more aware of bikers when you are driving.
Let’s take a lesson from the fields that sensitize people to the needs and obstacles faced by individuals with different abilities and older adults. They have folks navigate unfriendly environments in wheelchairs, find their way around corners blindfolded with the aid of a walking stick, and try arthritic writing by attaching rubber bands to their fingers.
The consequences of unsafe driver-bicycler interface are severe, and almost all of us drive at some point – often for most of our lives. As circumstances and rules of the road change, it is our responsibility to learn how to do both safely.
For more on the rules of how bicyclists and drivers interact on our roads, please see this excellent article by automotive site Edmunds.com on the 10 rules to help drivers coexist with bicyclists and a great section with many perspectives on rules of the road for drivers and bicyclists at the New York Times.
Photo by Paul Krueger