Peter Rosenfeld
Wed, 17 Jul 2002 06:18:55 -0700
This is the text of the message I plan to send out in the Philadelphia area as I mentioned last week. It will be mostly as a "letter to the editor" and to the Office of Mayor. -Peter Rosenfeld ------ Fatal Bike Lanes Government miseducation an ongoing problem Thirty-six year old Dana Laird was killed recently bicycling in Cambridge, MA. Her death could have been easily avoided. But Cambridge, like Philadelphia, has been promoting a dangerous style of bicycling with tragic consequences. Both cities have been building bike lanes that encourage bicyclists to ride close to the doors of parked cars. Dana was riding in one of these lanes when she struck a suddenly-opening door and fell under a passing bus. Getting hit by an opening car door, called "dooring", is a common bicycling problem in urban areas with parallel parking. Drivers should always check before opening their car doors into a travel lane. But a bike lane in the door zone allows a single brief mistake to cause a serious crash. Traditional traffic engineering tries to develop designs that eliminate these single-point failure modes. Door-zone bike lanes are the antithesis of good traffic engineering. In addition to the dooring problem, they also encourage bicyclists to ride in a position where they can be hard to see by drivers and pedestrians entering or crossing the road. This visibility problem can contribute to intersection collisions between cars and bikes, the most common type of car/bike crash, and also increased bicycle/pedestrian collisions. The message given by these dangerous facilities opposes that of bike safety experts. The official Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Bicycle Driver's Manual says that bicyclists should bike well away from car doors or other hazards. To do this, bicyclists may sometimes need to ride in the normal traffic lane. Auto drivers should understand this need and support the bicyclists by avoiding aggressive actions such as honking. All vehicles have a right to use the road in a safe manner. Not all the bike lanes suffer from these problems. But those that do should be modified or eliminated before a Philadelphian bicyclist is also killed. And we need to ensure that future designs are based on safe bicycling principles. Thank you, Peter Rosenfeld, bike commuter Collingswood, NJ For more information, contact: Peter Rosenfeld, Collingswood, NJ 956/858-9208 John Schubert, Coopersburg, PA 610/282-4246 A press release by the Bicycle Transportation Institute on the Laird fatality is available at http://www.bikexprt.com/massfacil/cambridge/program/pressrls.htm ---- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the Bicycle Coalition of the Delaware Valley list named "bike." To subscribe or unsubscribe or for archive information, see <http://www.purple.com/list.html>.