[Believe it or not, I agree with you that there should be more posts directly relating to bicycling in Austin, but until then... onto the blog post.]

A TV news story from the Twin Cities in Minnesota: SAWKAR: The safe bicyclist

The following is my e-mail to them:

Subject: “SAWKAR: The safe bicyclist”
Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 22:20:27 -0500
To: KSTP Investigative Team <investigative@kstp.com>

Regarding:
“SAWKAR: The safe bicyclist”
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S429050.shtml?cat=118
– both video and web story

I hope that someone in your office will take the time to read this. I have been a long-time advocate and student of bicycling and road safety so I suspect that my comments will be worth your while.

* Running another vehicle off of the road is a dangerous act for the victim. Oftentimes, the level of negligence in running another vehicle off of the road is criminal. Going through a stop sign without stopping on a bicycle is not necessarily dangerous to anyone (aside from the bicyclist), though if it is dangerous to others. In the latter case, it is the danger created that is an issue, not merely the fact the bicyclist went through a stop sign.

* Your investigative reporter was likely breaking at least two laws when interviewing the bicyclists while driving on the street:
When passing, a vehicle must generally complete the pass and not drive side-by-side with the vehicle being passed. In Minnesota, a motor vehicle must only pass a bicyclist at a safe margin (the video indicated an unsafe margin) and explicitly never less than three feet (the video possibly indicated this as well). Having a conversation between a motor vehicle and a bicyclist while in motion, should a collision occur, is likely to be cited as a traffic violation.

* Check the speed of motor vehicles when they have no reason to slow down other than the posted legal speed limit. (This is *not* the same as checking MnDOT data of a street for what the 85th-percentile motorist does.) You will find that motorists habitually break the law in this regard.

* Watch where motorists stop when approaching stop signs (or traffic lights) if they indeed come to a complete, legal stop at all. Many, perhaps most, motorists will stop ahead of the legal stop line. Numerous collisions with pedestrians and bicyclists have occurred because motorists often (or typically) fail to stop *at* stop signs. The only bicycle-car *traffic* collision that I have been involved in in my twenty-five years (and tens of thousands of miles) of bicycling resulted from a motorist failing to stop at the proper place at a stop light.
Note that the last on-street video clip in your segment shows a motorist failing to stop at a stop sign (while the bicyclist stops), yet your commentator fails to mention the motorist’s violation. Is a bias of yours against bicyclists showing through in this case?

* The implication for why bicyclists failing to stop at stop signs is a moral issue rather than just a legal issue was not addressed in your story, yet it was assumed that it is a moral issue. Indeed one could say that breaking any traffic law is a moral issue, but then the suggestion that bicyclists stand out in breaking laws when compared to motorists would need to be addressed if the suggestion is that bicyclists are doing something wrong while motorists are not. Aside from the much greater danger to others created when a motorist breaks a traffic law as opposed to a bicyclists breaking a traffic law, the general frequency of law breaking between bicyclists and motorists has never been compared scientifically (to my knowledge and to the knowledge of many prominent figures in bicycle or motor law).

* Indeed, Idaho has an existing law that permits bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, just as the bicyclists shown in your story have done. In addition, other jurisdictions are currently considering similar laws. The fact that other communities, similar to Minnesota’s, do not consider a bicyclist treating a stop sign as a yield to be a traffic infraction gives a strong indication that it is not inherently an immoral act.
Motor vehicle laws were essentially written for and because of the nature of motor vehicles. There are some existing laws in every state that differentiate bicyclists from the main class of motorists, essentially because of the difference in nature of the two modes of transportation. Those laws are growing in number, including in Minnesota.
Maritime “traffic” laws have a significant dependency on the size and propulsion method of the boat vehicle to which the laws apply. There is little reason to prevent such differentiation in laws for urban street traffic.

* You imply in a paragraph that obeying the law means wearing a helmet. What are the laws in Minnesota and/or the Twin Cities requiring helmet use on bicycles? There are none. You also suggest that a bicyclist not wearing a helmet gives bicyclists in general a bad name. Keep in mind that helmets do nothing to prevent a collision with a motor vehicle, nor do their use in themselves indicate an adherence to law.

* While the fault of the bicyclist may be indicated in half of the collisions in Minnesota, what is left out of that statistic is that in the cases where the fault goes to the bicyclist, the at-fault bicyclist is on average much younger than the cases where the bicyclist was not at fault. Furthermore, many of the collisions between motorists and bicyclists are with bicyclists of an age less than twelve. The idea that adult bicyclists are at fault in about half of the collisions is simply incorrect.

* Bicyclist safety and bicyclist behavior are indeed important. I am not disagreeing with you about the need to address both of those. However, your exhibition of bigotry(?) by exaggerating the significance of the misbehavior of bicyclists is not a healthy way to go.

* Do I follow the traffic laws?
As a bicyclist, I follow the traffic laws as or more closely than nearly(?) every motorist in Austin. I am still threatened with violence by motorists and at least daily put in danger by a negligent motorist breaking the law.

Tom Wald
Native Minneapolitan (23 years)
Austin, Texas resident
Austin Bicycle Advisory Council, councilmember
League of Bicycling Voters (Austin), board director
University of Texas Orange Bike Project, co-chair