zonatandem

So will they mandate a helmet, knee and elbow pads and safety glasses?

CrankyOne

Some good points.

Drivers in Europe are generally much more considerate than those in the U.S. though more so in northern Europe and less so as you travel south. Wherever you are they are more considerate and more skilled than U.S. drivers however.

In The Netherlands and increasingly elsewhere there is also very little getting along even necessary. Motor traffic and bicycles are two very different modes and are generally separated. As a driver the only times you're likely to encounter a bicycle rider is; at a junction where one of you has very clearly marked right-of-way with sharks teeth, or on a shared roadway with an 18mph or less limit and that is local access only and not a through route. Otherwise bicycle riders and cars have their own separate system to operate in which greatly reduces conflict. Also, at signal controlled junctions cars have completely separate phases from bicycle riders and pedestrians which reduces conflict and increasingly the bicycle phase is simultaneous in all directions which greatly increases efficiency.

European roads are also designed for greater safety rather than speed. There is no right-on-red. Radiuses at junctions are much tighter so motor vehicles have to slow down more. Interestingly this has also resulted in lower travel times. Stop signs are almost non-existent and they have many fewer traffic signals (one estimate is about 10% as many per mile as the U.S.). Instead they utilize roundabouts which are safer and more efficient and they utilize yielding (sharks teeth) quite heavily.

ModeratedUser150120149

Considering how most of our ancestors, including mine, came to the US; to escape tyranny and to gain civil rights I get a kick out of all the lauding of Europe in this thread. "Civilized"? They can't even get along well enough to not frequently engage in armed conflict. Who has and probably will continue to bail them out? The US. Why is biking and a rail system so prevalent? Because the land owners didn't want to waste any more acreage on the people than they had to so they crammed people into small villages. That is the historical heritage that lays the foundation for today's transportation including cycling.

Culturally they are in a whole different, and not better, world.

But, this is a thread about Wyoming laws. I see Wyoming's action as an attempt to improve safety for everyone. At the same time it tells me cycling has become important enough to be considered by the State legislature instead of just palmed off for some future time. All good. Will the issue need to be revisited and tweaked in the future? Most likely yes. But that is the way of life.

dpeters11

Don't forget the gloves. Might as well require saddles that protect citizen's periniums.

JoeyBike

Historically speaking, that didn't work out so great for everyone concerned...


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"Our" ancestors came here to grab whatever they could get their filthy hands on.

Leaving the past in the past...

As I wrote earlier: "When a cyclist gets hit, often the motorist says 'He came from nowhere', or 'I didn't SEE him'. The people doing the killing are TELLING US what is the problem. If everyone is wildly visible, then "I didn't see him/her" holds no water. A judge might decide "You weren't paying attention..." and give out some harsher sentences. Personally, I want to be so visible that the person who kills me gets a murder charge against them.

CrankyOne

Firstly, great post.

I disagree with your last statement however. Allowing the perpetrators to continue to place the blame on the victims is a failed policy. The issue is that drivers need to be held responsible for their actions. It should NOT depend on someone wearing hi-viz, whether walking or riding a bike. I also do not believe hi-viz will make drivers see us any better. Just look at how many people wearing hi-viz get hit by drivers who 'didn't see them.'

I-Like-To-Bike

How many?

I suspect the actual number and/or percentage of bicycle accidents meeting that criteria is somewhere between infinitesimal and insignificant.

JoeyBike

Just for the record, I don't believe that brightly colored clothing is the best solution. I think lighting requirements - just like motorcycles - is the best solution. However, my lighting setup on my bicycle costs pretty close to $500 US to come close to the brightness of motorcycle lights. An orange vest costs $5 to $50 depending on quality. And for cyclists who only bike in daylight hours I believe lighting is STILL the answer - just like motorcycles, but some requirement for "hunter orange" would be cheap (maybe even free), easily accessible to most folks, and more effective than invisibility.

Motorists have attention lapses. Cyclists need something to GRAB their attention. Nothing does this like bright lights. Next in effectiveness would be bright clothing during daylight hours. You want to be considered "equal among vehicles" then there is a price to pay - just like motorcycles. It makes so much sense it hurts. Is it constitutional? Probably.

ModeratedUser150120149

Actually, when compared to the way other conflicts in other parts of the world were handled it worked out very well for indigenous people. Plus, although portrayal is often different indigenous people were often violent and polluting people. Ahh, yes slavery. We often forget that the people rounding up potential slaves were often from competing tribes of the same race. Common at the time and still common in much of the world. Before you slam those who came before us it would help to get some education.

I do agree about the visibility issue. Brain science has established that what we thought was easy, seeing, is, in fact, not so easy. Anything we can do to make us more visible is in our best interests.

JoeyBike

The human race over the past 10,000 years or so has been mostly pretty vile worldwide. Except for a few remote hunter/gatherers (if any are still in existence) all of our hands are dirty. I think about this every time I touch a light switch in my house or turn a water faucet on - I am no better either. I am just not PHYSICALLY poisoning coastlines with oil or neighborhoods with fracking water contamination. I am paying others to do that dirty work, but my hands still look dirty to me. I wish I had a lot less education on the matter.

Yep. "Seeing" is pretty complicated. It involves not only the eyes of course. The brain must sort through millions of images sent by the eyes, sort them, interpret them, and then act on them. Both eyes have blind spots near the optic nerve but the brain's potential for missing some small detail is huge.

There is good reason why emergency vehicles use flashing red, blue, and amber lights along with white strobes AND loud, piercing noise and yet people STILL manage to get into accidents with those big vehicles all lit up. The unexpected is very hard to see. The unexpected needs to reach out and b!t@h-slap distracted motorists right in the eyeballs best it can to get noticed.

ModeratedUser150120149

You choice of language when describing human activity is a bit strong. Spend a bit of time in the wilderness and you may get a better handle on reality. Reality is that we do exactly what all the rest of the animals/beings on the planet do. We compete for survival of ourselves and the species. Like all other creatures we at our base don't really care about other species. In fact that is what often causes species populations to crash. They overuse their range. At our present course us humans are well along to doing that.

But, all this is a real digression from cycling and visibility.

Sometime drive down a busy main street in AnyCity. With all the lights assaulting the senses it is a wonder that our minds can differentiate anything. Vehicle manufacturers have accordingly increased the size and brilliance of vehicle lights. Regulatory agencies have mandated a third brake light. Driving with lights on is recommended.

That is a lesson for us. Wyoming is on the right track.

spare_wheel

I really don't think that clothing or lighting make as much a difference in a chaotic urban area as you suggest. Moreover, my ~30 years of anecdotal experience tells me that movement is a better visibility aid than the color chartreuse or a flashing light when riding in traffic.

But that's neither here nor there because most of the cyclists in my town do not ride in traffic much at all. IMO, the highway worker vest and the 600 lumen flasher are rooted in an antiquated cage-centric vision of cycling.

JoeyBike

Unfortunately, when a car is approaching a cyclist from behind on a straight stretch of roadway the cyclist appears to be stationary. This makes it much more difficult for the eye/brain to pick up the cue from a safe distance unless there is something extra special happening to grab attention.

I don't think hi-vis wear is necessary on MUPs or neighborhood cul-de-sacs or sidewalks. I would think the laws would pertain to state highways especially with relatively high speed auto traffic. I think we all know the difference between cyclists who mix it up with REAL traffic and pedestrians who occasionally ride a bike around the hood and don't consider themselves "cyclists" any more than my wife who does not cycle at all considers herself a "motorist".

This is not a helmet debate full of conjecture, anecdotes, and testimonials. Very good clinical tests can be run to find out what works and what does not in regard to cyclist/pedestrian visibility under a wide variety of situations. This is fairly old science. We know what works. It is not up for debate any more. Except of course in A&S

spare_wheel

Except that, as we have discussed before, current studies are not always conclusive and some even contradict each other. My main argument against this sort of law is that in cities where cycling has become somewhat normalized the risk of injury or death is very low. Portland has about the same rate of cycling fatalities as Copenhagen, for example. IMO, this sort of legislation is rooted in the "othering" of cyclists. A good illustration of this bias is that the legislation is directed exclusively at cyclists even though the frequency of being injured or killed as a pedestrian is often much higher.

JoeyBike

I agree. Nothing is perfect. If all bicycles came equipped with head lights, tail lights, blinkers, and emergency flashers like motorcycles, then it would be easy to get everyone lit up at least. I believe the orange vest idea came about because it is possible to make it happen for dirt cheap or even free (promotional gear with bike shop names on them, or city organized bike safety classes handing them out).

At least in Wyoming, someone who drives a motor vehicle is tired of the carnage and trying to figure out who the mangled cyclist is with no ID on them. If you get mangled in a car or on a motorcycle, there is a tag number to easily trace. For an unconscious cyclist with no ID it makes it impossible to track down kinfolk actively. Just gotta wait for the family to report them missing.

KraneXL

Did you come up with this on your own or did a government regulation need to do it for you? A rhetorical question.

Gothic Sunshine

Could you please cite your sources on these?

EDIT: I'll elaborate. For the first, while this was true of some ethnic groups, I would object to saying it is true for most European immigrants. You could make the argument for the Puritans, but most European immigrants to America were not Puritans. I wouldn't argue against the claim that, say, the Irish were being oppressed and lacked civil rights and this was a factor in immigration to America, but there is some nuance. While oppression was certainly a big factor where the Irish are concerned, it is not the full picture. The Irish lacked economic opportunities in Ireland do to a mixture of oppression, famine, and lack of industry. You can blame part of that on tyranny (England certainly was pretty cruel to the Irish), but not all of it. When you shift the glass to other major groups such as the English, Germans, Italians, or Eastern Europeans, however, the motivation is mostly economic. America had more jobs that paid more money and had land for the taking. European immigrants wanted a piece of that.

As for the second, I have just plain never seen anyone claim such a thing before, and it doesn't mesh with anything I know about European demographics.

Edit 2: As for the war comment, World War 1 was a very long time ago, and Britain, France, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the like all wanted to avoid a war with Germany. Wasn't doable, and America ended up fighting, too (And good thing we did. Nazi Germany needed to be crushed, and Germany declared war on us, not the other way around [not that we wouldn't have been totally justified if we had].). Since that war, Europe has mostly managed to avoid armed conflict, aside from the breakup of Yugoslavia, the USSR crushing resistance in Hungary and Poland, and the current situation in the Ukraine. Most EU countries don't even have border controls with each other anymore. That seems to suggest that they can in fact get along well enough not to frequently engage in armed conflict, seeing as how Britain, France, Germany, and Italy get along as well as countries can nowadays.

As for bailouts, are we talking about WW2, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War, or the Modern Day? With WW2, everybody put in everything they had, and the brunt of the allied casualties were Russians. American soldiers and equipment were vital, but so were the British and Russians. The Marshall Plan? Yes, we bailed them out, and it was the right decision. Both America and Europe reaped massive benefits. The Cold War? We all considered the Soviets an enemy, and the French and West Germans had more of their population in uniform than the Americans. Again, American soldiers were crucial, but we were not the only ones putting out effort. The Modern Day? Here I agree with you. Western Europe does need to upgrade their military forces and stop expecting America to do as much of the work as we currently do. The modern German military is a shell of what it was in the Cold War (East or West).

Gothic Sunshine

The Indian Removal Act and Indian Wars fit the definition of ethnic cleansing to a T. Yea, they fought wars and made raids on each other, many tribes took slaves, and I can think of at least one group that died out do to self caused environmental catastrophe. None of that justifies what the colonizers did, or negates their responsibility for ethnic cleansing. A couple issues with that comparison. Yes, that is where the initial slaves came from. However, the West Africans were no more united in support of the idea than Europeans were (quite a few didn't like the idea), and West African ideas of slavery were not the same as what the European slavers had in mind. Not to justify West African slave traders, because they were some seriously screwed up people, but chattel slavery was something Europeans came up with. The idea of being born into chains and wearing them for the entirety of a hard life on the plantation comes from the Portuguese and Spanish (If you want to see a true nightmare, look at the early history of Spanish Colonialism. One of the very few things I've seen that can honestly be compared to the Nazis in terms of sheer cruelty level.). Chattel slavery isn't really popular anymore. It's all about wage slavery and sex slavery these days. I don't have a response to that.

KraneXL

Stupid cyclist. How am I suppose to focus on looking out for them and talk on my cell phone at the same time?

Perhaps its time to reevaluate?

SlowNeasy

I agree with what you're saying ...as far as it goes. I believe hi-viz clothing and flashing lights do help drivers see us. IF they are paying attention.
If they are texting while driving they are going to hit something sooner or later . Curbs and vehicles can stand the collision pretty well but it's often fatal to us.
WE on bikes in the roadway are not the problem. Vehicle drivers who can't or won't drive safely are the problem.
To me getting vehicle drivers do drive attentively and safely should be the highest priority of our legislatures .
I was almost involved in an accident on my bike. Someone reported to the police that I had been hit. A Police Officer was waiting and stopped me down the road to make sure I was OK.
She said she liked my clothing and was surprised any motorist couldn't see me as she said she saw me coming down the road a half mile away . But then SHE was looking for me , so yes I was easy to see.


I don't know what it would cost to retrain and educate the vehicle driving public, and enforce it to the point where bicyclist are safe on the streets. But I have an idea that it would be cheaper and more attractive to voters to blame the Bicyclist and use the band aid approach with hi-viz clothing or just remove bicyclist from the roads

unterhausen

mod note: this thread is skirting political subjects that are not allowed in this forum. Please keep the subject away from political subjects except as it has to do with cycling safety and advocacy

KD5NRH

This; I'd be all in favor of some serious modifiers when a rider is using any of a specific list of visibility enhancements for the road conditions and direction, (essentially, hi-viz or at least good contrast in day, proper lights and/or reflectors at night, and in such a way that the driver would have actually seen it from the direction of approach) but there are still a lot of ninjas out there.

I doubt it; look how many pry off the reflectors they do come with. I've barely spotted at least a couple of bikes around here by one pedal reflector, with no wheel or front/rear reflectors visible anywhere. If they'd even had the cheap stock red rear I would have noticed them from at least double the distance and been less likely to initially ignore them as a firefly or other irrelevant source.

AFAIK, every state requires at least front and rear reflectors after dark, and all that I'm aware of require a front light. Some real enforcement of that would help a lot. Not necessarily life in prison on the first offense, but a written warning and reminder that the fine is more than a good set of reflectors and lights just might do the trick. Of course, there's still a big "won't happen to me" mindset, so they might need to re-catch a few of them and hit them with $50-150 fines before word gets around that it's really happening, but especially around the college, it would make for a lot fewer near misses.

SlowNeasy

Hit the Nail right on the head. All the rules and laws mean nothing if there is no enforcement or consequences .
If Police Officers and Judges don't take bicyclist and bike/car laws seriously , No One Else Will.

Siu Blue Wind

Okay since we are going to dismiss a moderator's request, then this thread is now closed.