Month: May 2010

A police officer walks by destroyed bicycles in Rougemont, Quebec, south of the Montreal area Friday, May 14, 2010. Six triathletes on their way by bike to a training weekend at the Université de Sherbrooke were struck by a pick-up truck in the village of Rougemont.
Photograph by: John Kenney, The Gazette
Continue reading “3 cyclists killed, 3 injured in Rougemont”

[B’ Spokes: note that sometimes emergency response time is used to to keep residential neighborhoods car centric and bike unfriendly.]

by Tom Vanderbilt

One of the oft-cited complaints about any sort of traffic calming treatment (speed bumps, narrowing streets, etc. etc.) is ‘what about emergency response?’ This has become something of a knee-jerk response, and it’s said with such seeming authority that it seems impolite, at the very least, to question it, even if it means we allow our local streets to become a source of daily unpleasantness and danger to accommodate what are statistically very rare needs (and there has been some good work on so-called “emergency response friendly” traffic calming).

After all, what individual, when questioned, wouldn’t intuitively want to be whisked to the hospital as fast as possible, or have fire crews sent racing to their house with minimal delay? I began thinking differently on this topic after meeting Nadine Levick at a traffic conference last fall. Over lunch, Nadine, a tireless crusader on a subject outside of most people’s purview, noted to me, according to one survey, riding in an ambulance, per mile, was one of the most dangerous things a person can do. And not simply because of, as you might imagine, clueless drivers not noticing an ambulance blazing through an intersection — but often because of unsafe actions by drivers themselves, as well as alarmingly substandard ambulance design (ambulances are not regulated by NHTSA for the crash protection of the occupants in the back; she’s got loads of horrific slides of the “boxes” having flown off the vehicle in a crash, and I’d urge you to otherwise delve into the site). The underlying sense I got from her was that of a sort of macho heroic undertone to emergency response, albeit shot through with the best of intentions, to get to or from the emergency with greatest possible haste — damn the consequences.

In any case, I thought of this again today thanks to an excellent article at Slate, by two medical personnel, that points out something that Levick was getting it: Despite the notion we may have that lives are at stake and a delay of a few minutes will be the crucial difference (isn’t it better for the speeding up to happen at the hospital end, or to work on better preventative and monitoring measures?), it turns out, as the authors note, “not to be backed up by good science’; and, what’s more, as they note, the risks taken in fast transport (to those outside the vehicle as well) may exceed whatever medical benefits are gained.

Continue reading “The Fallacy of Speed and Emergency Response”

by Sarah Goodyear

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Boston Biker takes issue with a recent column in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine about how people on bicycles need to “earn” respect on the road. In the view of the Globe’s Doug Most, it’s essentially the responsibility of bicyclists to stay out of the way of motor vehicles and to ride with the assumption that they’re invisible.

Here’s what Boston Biker writes about the Globe’s piece:

The subheading of the article is, “After a fatal crash, they want more respect on the road. They need to earn it.” (“They” meaning cyclists.) If everyone is breaking the law why do cyclists need to “earn” respect? Why don’t car drivers and pedestrians have to “earn”
respect?…

[T]hat is not how our legal system works. Everyone has the full protection of the law at all times. You don’t lose that protection because you didn’t wear your helmet, you also don’t lose that protection if other people making the same transportation choice you are break the law. Car drivers don’t lose protection and respect because some of them don’t wear seat belts and run red lights, neither do cyclists.

Too often in the mainstream media, cyclists are assumed to be at fault in any conflict between modes. Even when a person on a bike is following all the rules and is hit and killed by a car, frequently the implication in news coverage is that the bicycle rider was somehow “asking for it,” simply because he or she was daring to ride a bike. And riding a bike shouldn’t be something you need to dare to do.

There’s nothing wrong with defensive riding. And there’s no question that many people on bicycles break the law in dangerous ways. But as bicycle use increases around the country, there is a real need for balanced discussion of the ways that pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers interact in traffic. That means recognizing that all road users should respect each other. It’s all well and good for bicyclists to see themselves as ambassadors (that’s how I personally choose to ride). But they should be allowed to be just people, as well, like the members of any minority.

Related: Ditching the Car for 40 Days has a rundown of all the scary ways drivers pass bicyclists on the road.

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Continue reading “The Great Bicyclist Responsibility Debate Continues”