KraneXL

The laws don't make you a perfect driver -- everybody knows that. The pooint is that we have these laws and if you don't read or follow them you'll pay the penalty for your lack of incite. The other point of these laws is, in the event of an accident, to make sure the cyclist get his recompense.

LesterOfPuppets

If you wanna teach kids to be super safe, teach them to imagine stop signs at each driveway, while on sidewalks AND most bike lanes.

Should probably look up local laws, too. In my city all sidewalks are legally bikeable. Across the river in Portland, sidewalks outside the city center are legal to bike. It's just a couple square miles right downtown that are off limits.

CliffordK

Around here, there are many places where aesthetics apparently trump functionality. So, they expect bikes to maneuver around narrow right angle corners which is exceedingly difficult to do at high speeds.

And, say you have a 5 foot lane. Cut around a 90° corner, and try to stay on one's own side of the path becomes even more difficult.

I suppose sharp corners are effective in slowing down the speedsters.

I-Like-To-Bike

18 mph = 29 kph.

CrankyOne

Yep. Not a fan. We have some of those as well but fortunately fewer and fewer. Sadly it's a chore sometimes to convince engineers that bikeways s/b designed for something other than 5 mph.

CrankyOne

Thank you. I'd intended to type 30. Senility in old age does have some positives though :-)

CrankyOne

No. The person who pays, often with life or limb, is the pedestrian or bicycle rider. Further, I'm not sure what good recompense is for someone who's dead nor is any amount usually enough for life changing injuries.

CrankyOne

Expecting them to stop at every driveway is a bit extreme?

Similar here. I know in a couple of suburbs where it is technically illegal to ride on the sidewalk in the central area the cops have openly said that they'll not enforce it unless someone is riding irresponsibly.

Interestingly it's legal in the outer areas. As you move towards the center it becomes illegal yet the roads are quite dangerous to ride on. In the center though the roads become relatively OK to ride on again because cars are usually going much slower.

genec

The sad thing is that neither one of those things that the laws are supposed to do, generally happens. Rarely are motorists cited for failing to use turn signals or stopping before turning right... and rarely do injured or dead cyclists get their recompense.

Atteboy

They automatically do when you live in someplace as anti-bike as Arlington Texas. I don't ride on the road unless I absolutely have to. Arlington is known for being the largest(I think) city in the US with no public transportation. Plus, it's not much of a problem since no one uses the sidewalks for walking. We have great MTB trails though

B. Carfree

Compared to what? I don't deny that there is a perception of danger, particularly for those who don't ride much, but the actual risk of the activity seems pretty negligible, especially when measured against the consequences of being sedentary. There's something like one death per five million miles ridden (I don't remember the exact number or the source, but it was in that range). That's a lot of riding before the grim reaper comes calling.

Even with the risk of a bad outcome being rather low, I would certainly agree that it could and should be lower. However, I remain unconvinced that setting up infrastructure that forces people to ride at near-pedestrian speeds is the best approach. Even youngsters will find the joy of cycling sucked away by many of the designs I have seen.

Jseis 

10' wide, curbed, raised, adjacent to a road and signed for both uses. Stripes optional. That's how we did it.

KraneXL

That's not because the laws aren't in place, rather, because people seldom see it through. That and the fact that few people (including police) even know the laws regarding cyclist. If you point out the infraction to the cops (assuming you are in the right), that usually puts the motorist on the defensive.Yes, cyclist really do need a designated path raised or partitioned away from the flow of normal traffic. When its just marked on the roadway motorist just us the bike lane an extra space, or worse, use it for parking/drop off/delivery. Besides, relocating cyclist to the extreme right just place them in the most debris strewn section of the road. The worse possible place he could be.

Marcus_Ti

Just don't do what my city does downtown:




That is the suicide gauntlet downtown the city spent a crapload of money to setup, and unsurprisingly people are loth to use it. One one side you have motorists backing out of curbside parking straight into the bike "lane", with the cyclists always in a blindspot to the parked motorists due to the idiotic layout. on the otherside...see that city bus on the far side of the photo opposite the parking? To turn left those city buses have to straddle the bike lane and completely impede it (if stopped at a red light when turning), or cross over it. Also every 100meters there's a full traffic light, and even better it is a maze of 1-way streets so it is almost impossible to get where you want by streets.

Fun fact...the local university is renowned for its "Urban Planning" degree program offered....and this city has some of the worst idiotically planned traffic "planning" on Earth.

Saving Hawaii

My city has been doing this recently. It's bizarre. One of their newer projects featured a redone and wide sidewalk crossing a bridge into downtown. On the north end (outside of downtown) it looks very much like a sidewalk but the south end has a special ramp down to street level where it immediately turns into a bike path. The pedestrians go right and continue on the sidewalk past the no bicycles sign, the bicycles go left and continue on the street in the bike lane. That bike lane is terribly designed but that's a separate issue.

howeeee

The top 5 recreational activities that cause a trip to the emergency room are riding ATV, baseball, football, basket ball and bike riding being number one. If you take just deaths I am sure biking is still number one.

I am 61 ride at least 4 days a week even in the stunning cold of Michigan winters. I agree being sedentary is no way to live. I have 2 close friends that are partially paralyzed at 65 years old from being sedentary and over weight. They are both so bad looks like their health will not improve much. Not a way I want to live.

I search for safe routes, side streets and streets that have lots of room. Riding into the city of Detroit is rather safe cause the city was built for 2 million and now only has a population of about 650,000. so you have these wide streets with many lanes, a bicyclist can just about have his own lane almost anywhere in the city. I am just saying when allowed , nothing wrong with riding sidewalks. I ride with my 7 year old grandson, I make him ride the sidewalks, sometimes we have gone as far as 15 miles on sidewalks lol.

All I am saying is do the safest thing possible, we just lost a major bicycle advocate Jeff Surnow 63, here in Michigan when he was killed riding in Hawaii, his very sad funeral will be tomorrow.

RIDE but ride safe.

howsteepisit

All I can find about emergency room visits is total number, but the data I find does not account of the number of people participating. SO some 517,000 emergency room visits were recorded in some recent study year, but in another thread we see some 40 or 50 % of the population rides a bike once or more per year, so the rate of injury for cycling look pretty low to me. The article I fond relating to recreation activity risk was clearly a scare-um type article designed to strike fear - IF I recall it was on the how things work website.

CliffordK

That may be high. But even so, the percent of the population that rides 100+ miles a year is quite low (a distance that some people do in a day).

howsteepisit

Your are right, I looks ant the correct number is Thirty-four percent of Americans ages 3+ rode a bicycle at least one day in the past year. This is from the Denominator post by MR Bill. Its true that few ride as much as 100 miles a year but that's not very martial to my point, which is there are likely over 1 billion bike rides in the US annually (this would take just 5-6 rides per year times 3000+ million over 3 year olds. There are just over 517,000 resultant emergency room visits. I like my odds, and this does not support that bicycling is particulars risky in my mind. I could look up more accurate numbers, but round numbers are just fine for me.

B. Carfree

As howsteepisit noted, the number of people engaging in the activity is rather critical to assessing its relative dangers. Also, the number of hours participated is a key number, which is frightfully hard to find, particularly for cycling. Someone here will surely dig up the estimates that purport to show that on a per-hour basis, cycling is about as risky as driving a car, and driving is the appropriate thing to compare cycling to since both driving and cycling are transportation and recreation activities.

As far as those emergency room visits: Yes, children tend to fall down and go boom on bikes. Many of us had our turn in ER's with broken collar bones, wrist damage, broken arms and various needs for stitches from cycling activities as children. I would tend to discount those since, at least in my experience, many kids who get nicked riding bikes were off-road and would have just substituted some other activity with an even worse track record, like barrelling down a hillside inside a tractor tire (yes, we did that) and swinging on ropes over thirty foot drops.

jputnam

One of the most bogus transportation statistics out there -- it assumes all bicycling is recreational, and no driving is recreational.

In the real world, we know millions of people routinely bicycle for transportation, not for recreation. We also know fewer than half of car trips are for commuting, and a significant fraction are recreational.

The essentially arbitrary definition of "recreational activities" used for this statistic make it meaningless.

CrankyOne

Here's the report I'd mentioned earlier and couldn't find.

New Report: Every Bicyclist Counts | League of American Bicyclists

From the report:

CliffordK

Well,
I think I'm not going to bicycle in Florida.
Put a bunch of Octogenarians behind the wheel.
And the bike fatalities go off the charts!!!

CrankyOne

I don't know how much is that and how much is poor road engineering and lax enforcement. Florida is full of long straight roads w/ multiple 12' wide lanes, lots of turn lanes to keep turning cars from slowing people down, wide radius corners at intersections, and a long list of other things that encourage excessive speed at all times in all places. A few places like Marco Island have been reducing numbers of lanes, narrowing them, and making it more pleasant to walk/bike which encourages people to walk/bike rather than drive 1/2 mile to dinner. They still have a long way to go, but it's getting better.