Originally Posted by John C. Ratliff
The significance is that we are loosing almost as many people
each year as we lost in the entire Vietnam War, and you feel it should not be a surprise, that it's normal. I'm very curious what number you would find "significant" here for yearly traffic fatalities?
Concerning the stripes, they will help to place responsibility on the driver to keep away from the bicyclist. In Oregon, it is no a means of segregating cyclists, as John Forester claims, but rather a separate lane dedicated to cyclists that they can leave to make turns when that is necessary.
Of greater importance, though, is the City of Portland's strategy for "traffic calming" which is shown on this website:
http://www.portlandonline.com/shared...e.cfm?id=40414
This includes both bike lanes and other enhancements such as bike boulevards, local service bikeways, off-street paths, etc. A strip on a road is just a small part of working toward a solution. The City of San Francisco is actively working at "traffic calming" techniques, and this should help too:
http://www.sfgov.org/site/bac_page.asp?id=11544
From a safety perspective, VC techniques are what we call "administrative controls." Usually, administrative controls do not do as well as engineering controls, as they depend upon the cyclist's and the driver's behavior, and for both to be working by the same set of rules, with the same assumptions, etc. That breaks down fairly easily in industry, and from those stats on fatalities, on the road too.
John
The point is not the absolute number of motor-vehicle crashes, but that, by and large, attempting to reduce motor-vehicle crashes is not a significant task for cyclists. We have plenty to do for our own accidents.
Ratliffe argues that the bike lane stripe is intended to "help to place responsibility on the driver to keep away from the bicyclist. In Oregon, it is no[t] a means of segregating cyclists, as John Forester claims, but rather a separate lane dedicated to cyclists that they can leave to make turns when that is necessary." That's a fine argument, but it does not change the facts at all. Bike lanes were invented to clear the way for motorists, which they do fairly well, without regard to the safety of cyclists. Bicycle advocates now praise bike lanes for doing something else instead, just as Ratliff has done here.
The question is, whether it is worthwhile to put up with the harm that the bike lane was designed to do, and the harm that it does simply because its designers didn't worry too much about harm to cyclists, in the hope that it does something that was not intended by its designers? That's unreasonable. And look at Ratliff's own excuse, that the bike-lane stripe helps keep motorists away from cyclists. That's been debated for years, and recently a series of such tests have been run. The conclusion is that motorists overtake cyclists with less clearance when there is a bike-lane stripe than when there isn't.
The traffic calming bits of the Portland Bicycle Plan are just what should not be imposed on cyclists: curb bulbouts for cyclists to either run into or swerve around.
Now consider Ratliff's argument, as a safety engineer, about vehicular cycling. "From a safety perspective, VC techniques are what we call "administrative controls." Usually, administrative controls do not do as well as engineering controls ... " That is the standard view, but its applicability is limited to situations in which the engineering controls work at least as well as the "administrative controls." While we have many traffic engineering devices, we still have to rely on the rules of the road. If we had engineering devices that worked as well as the rules of the road, we would be using them for motorists, but we have not invented such. Since we have not, with all the effort put into traffic engineering, been able to dismiss the rules of the road, what reason is there to believe that the tiny effort put into bicycle traffic engineering, which has, so far, produced only devices that contradict the rules of the road, has done the job of supplanting the rules of the road? The idea is incredible.