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7 Overcoming the Safety Barriers
- Oregon State University Press
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195 7 Overcoming the Safety Barriers I never knew bicycle bells could sound so mournful. Like a funeral dirge, the sound echoed off the buildings as I joined several hundred cyclists for a memorial ride up one of Portland’s busiest boulevards,West Burnside Street. We were marking a cycling death that had shocked even the most hardened riders. On a balmy Thursday afternoon, as the autumn leaves crunched underneath, nineteen-year-old Tracey Sparling rode toward the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She was one of the many young creative people who gravitated to Portland and embraced cycling as a fun, inexpensive way to travel around town. She had grown up in Salem, Oregon, and gone to school back east but, homesick for Oregon, had returned. She was in the bike lane on SW Fourteenth Avenue, stopped for a red light. Seconds later, when the light changed, she was crushed under the wheels of a cement truck turning right. The bad news didn’t end there. Less than two weeks later,an experienced cyclocross racer and bike store employee, Brett Jarolimek, thirty-one, was killed when he collided with a right-turning garbage truck at the bottom of a steep hill. The deaths caused an outpouring of emotion and discussion about bike safety that I had never before seen in Portland. On one of the local cyclist listservs,cyclists expressed anger about the deaths and the inattention of drivers.But they also swapped links about safe bicycling guides and discussed how to do a better job of teaching Pedaling Revolution 196 people to safely cycle around the city.The local news media carried several stories analyzing what kind of bikeway improvements would make cycling safer. Transportation Commissioner Sam Adams quickly announced a plan to install European-style bike boxes at fourteen problematical intersections with high cycling volumes; these would allow cyclists to filter to the front of the intersection, hopefully reducing the danger that they would be hit by a rightturning vehicle.And when another cyclist was injured at the same intersection where Jarolimek had been killed, the city put up a barricade to prevent cars from turning right across the bike lane. Before the memorial ride for Sparling, Scott Bricker, executive director of the Bicycle Transportation Association, held his oneyear -old daughter in his arms and told participants that, statistically, the greatest danger to his daughter’s life for the next thirty-four years would come from traffic—whether she ever rode a bicycle or not.And, he added,“the more cyclists ride, research shows, the safer we will be.” In many ways, those two horrible tragedies and their immediate aftermath captured the safety issues swirling around cycling in the United States. Survey after survey shows that safety fears are the biggest factor keeping people off of bikes.As long ago as 1996, the U.S. surgeon general, in a landmark report on physical activity, said that 53 percent of people who had cycled in the previous year said they would commute to work by bike if they could do so on “safe, separated designated paths.” Even if there’s a certain amount of telling pollsters what they want to hear,it also tells you that millions of additional people would like to make cycling a part of their daily life if they felt safe.This fear of traffic is not just an inchoate worry: riding in the U.S. is far more dangerous than in countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark where the road authorities treat the bicycle as a serious form of transportation. And in some ways it is a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy: so many Americans regard bicycling on the road as so intrinsically dangerous that they almost think cyclists have it coming if they are injured or killed.And the [34.238.143.70] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:09 GMT) CHAPTER 7: Overcoming the Safety Barriers 197 more people are discouraged from riding, the more that attitude persists. However, Portland has advanced far enough as a bike town that I didn’t hear any serious discussion about trying to remove cyclists from the road, although there were the usual complaints about the bad behavior of the many cyclists who ignore traffic laws. Instead, there was at least the beginning of a public discussion about facility improvements and about providing more education for both cyclists and motorists.And finally, in Bricker’s comments, I saw what many cyclists hope for the future...