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Maryland lawmaker defends mandatory helmet bill

“If the only reason you’re riding a bicycle is to feel the wind in your hair, you should take up another sport.” – Del. Maggie McIntosh

I’m sure Del. Maggie McIntosh has the best intentions but as one commenter noted, no mention of the health benefits of cycling. The CDC recommends combining exercise with your daily activities, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Just one problem with that, building codes, security issues and fire departments insist that most stairwells are inaccessible except in case of fire. Which basically leaves cycling as one of the last remnants of a healthy life style that incorporates exercise with daily activities that gives you an hour or more of exercise for less then a hour extra of your time. (i.e. Replacing a 10 mile car trip with a bike trip is ~ an hour exercise with only a half hour extra in time.)

We need to be encouraging more bicycling to reduce the growing obesity rates (among other things) and not putting up barriers to non-sport cycling. As lets face it, almost all that are into the "sport" of cycling are wearing a helmet. It’s the demographic that is doing practical utility cycling for health or economics that is being targeted by this legislation. There is no "take up another sport" here.

The health benefits of cycling outweigh the safety risks by a factor of 20 to one. – Hillman, M., 1992

This bill is not strong encouragement to wear a helmet, it is designed to prohibit a non-helmet wearing cyclist from recovering any damages from a crash that otherwise is the total fault of the motorist, that’s the problem with laws like this in a contributory negligence state. Bicycle laws need to be confined to purely operational issues that can cause a crash.

My tangent from: https://www.thewashcycle.com/2013/02/maryland-lawmaker-defends-mandatory-helmet-bill.html
Which I recommend reading as well and afterwords if you are inclined to write: maggie.mcintosh@house.state.md.us (Remember be nice, she does mean well.)

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Pedestrian safety concerns persist in Montgomery County

By Ari Ashe, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – Crossing some roads in Montgomery County has proved to be a dangerous task for pedestrians.
Officials have recently cracked down on pedestrian safety and have seen promising results. Montgomery County officials say that since 2009, serious accidents involving pedestrians have dropped by 21 percent. In 2012, six pedestrians died, as compared to 19 in 2008.
However, some residents say more needs to be done to ensure the safety of pedestrians.
Barbara McCann, founder of the National Complete Streets Coalition, says Montgomery County officials are not doing enough to fix the core problems, especially at wide intersections that take a long time for pedestrians to cross.
"It’s a little bit like saying the bailing is working. We’re bailing the boat and we’re not sinking," McCann says. "But there’s still a great big hole at the bottom of the boat and that hole is the failure to think about pedestrians during the initial planning process."
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https://www.wtop.com/52/3216163/Pedestrian-safety-concerns-linger-in-Md

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Why Transpo Bureaucrats Need to Take More Risks

[B’ Spokes: In short if they never fail they are not doing it right.]

by Angie Schmitt, Streets Blog

Last month, Slate wondered how Washington, D.C. ended up with the best bike-sharing system in the country. The answer was, essentially, vision: Local leaders had it, and they were able to win financial support from the federal government.

But that kind of boldness is too a rare thing in public agencies, says Jarrett Walker at Human Transit. He shares the above video with D.C. Planning Director Harriet Tregoning, who urges government officials not to shy away from risk taking. Walker says her advice is highly applicable to transit planning:

Her discussion of Capital Bikeshare, which failed in its first incarnation and succeeded in its second, is an incisive challenge to the bureaucratic mind, and it’s directly related to transit improvements.

Tregoning’s story here is basically that the first bikeshare system failed because it was too small, too hesitant, while the second one succeeded because it was far bigger, bolder, riskier. Many of the government cultures I’ve known would have decided, based on the first round, never to try bikeshare again. It took courage to say that maybe the lesson was that some things just can’t be done as tiny demonstration projects. You have to build the courage to actually do them, at the natural scale at which they start to work.

Transit network redesign is exactly like that. It’s hard to do in hesitant, reversible phases, because it’s all so interconnected, and because a network doesn’t start to work until it’s all there.

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https://streetsblog.net/2013/02/04/why-transpo-bureaucrats-need-to-take-more-risks/

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HB 160 Riding on Sidewalks – Oppose

The change in law as purposed by the bill:
UNLESS PROHIBITED by local ordinance, a person may ride a bicycle, play vehicle, or unicycle on a sidewalk or sidewalk area.
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/bills/hb/hb0160f.pdf

My main concern is study after study shows riding against the flow of traffic on the sidewalk is very dangerous. I do not support making such action legal.

From https://www.bike.cornell.edu/pdfs/Sidewalk_biking_FAQ.pdf
Bicyclists on a sidewalk or bicycle path incur greater risk than those on the roadway (on average 1.8 times as great), most likely because of blind conflicts at intersections. Wrongway sidewalk bicyclists are at even greater risk, and sidewalk bicycling appears to increase the incidence of wrong-way travel.

Main page: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/webmga/frmMain.aspx?pid=billpage&stab=01&id=hb0160&tab=subject3&ys=2013RS