Bicycling Equality, Here, Now

#233, September 10, 2008

It looked like a tragic obituary waiting to be written.

She was an attractive young woman, riding her retro fat-tire bicycle in the bike lane past the Line and Twine, down Lakeville. It was a fair summer day, the wind at her back. But wait – she was on the wrong side, facing the rush hour traffic. Wearing earbuds, but no helmet. One hand on the handlebars, one holding her iPod, wheeling through the menus, absorbed in a quest for the right road music, entering and exiting the bike lane as the availability of adjacent sidewalk allowed.

I was headed home from work, on Hopper Street by the Shamrock yard. I see a lot of dangerous cycling, more of it lately, as warm weather, high gas prices and news of climate chaos pull more people out of their cars. But this was too much to let pass; I had a vision of reading about her in tomorrow’s hard news. So I turned in pursuit, and caught up with her by McDonalds. She got the short story about riding with traffic, and the shorter story of a former co-worker whose headphones-no-helmet habit replaced her ten-speed with a wheelchair. I hope she got the message.

The City of Petaluma, doing its part, has been issuing citations to bike rule violators. Good intentions, but, like my effort, not well timed. These people need education, not punishment in the form of fines or, worse, hospital visits. The sad and sorry fact is that our approach to safe cycling has been basically this: build a few bike paths, paint stripes on some asphalt, and hope for the best. There seems to be an assumption that bicycling should be unregulated “free la la la”, or that it’s so simple anyone can learn it from anyone else. Sure, if you never leave a lightly traveled bike path removed from car traffic, your training can end when the training wheels come off.

But just as you can’t put a freeway or a monorail from every front door to every destination, you can’t have a car-free bike path everywhere every rider goes. Cyclists need to learn how to ride on streets, with cars. Not just in Critical Mass rides, either. Critical Mass can “empower” bike riders but, absent education on solo riding, they actually retard progress in replacing car traffic with bike traffic, because they set up bike-car encounters that are both abnormal and confrontational.

Do we cyclists want respect and safe behavior from motorists? Do we want them to “share the road”? Then let’s accept the same responsibilities. I propose a State “Bicycling Equality Act” that would require licensing for cycling above a certain age, with mandatory testing. And training! The League of American Bicyclists (www.bikeleague.org) has an excellent curriculum. I took their “Street Skills” class several years ago, and, even after over three decades of everyday street cycling, was amazed what I didn’t know, and how much safer I felt on the road after completing the class. An age-appropriate version of this class should be required for school kids as soon as they start riding, and repeated all the way through high school.

But bike safety needs to be a two-way street. The BEA would require the State Driver Tests to include a question about cyclists’ right to ride in the car lane; missing it results in automatic failure. That will send a message to motorists far more effective than any number of “Share the Road” signs.

If we are the least bit serious about preventing catastrophic climate change, about reaching President Obama’s goal (I love the way that sounds, don’t you?) of eliminating oil imports within a decade, clearing the air, reversing the obesity epidemic, knitting our communities back together… is the teaching and testing of this BEA too much to ask of cyclists and motorists? And I’m confident President Obama would agree that we have to stop thinking about this as cyclists versus motorists. We are all *Americans going somewhere*. Somewhere good, together.

Ignorance is the greatest threat to cyclists and cycling; it’s time to write its obituary. Send this message to state lawmakers, especially Jared Huffman and Mark Leno: BE, here and now!