BIKE: bikes against the world

[Roger Baker]

You got to stand up for your rights or you're gonna get peed on.

With respect to roads, TxDOT pretends that wide shoulders are all that 
bikes need in terms of safety design. Wide shoulders make roads safer 
for cars, and I suspect that this is more the reason that TxDOT likes 
them than the benefits for bikers. The truth is that traffic speed 
differentials cause accidents (even among cars) and bikes are by their 
nature slower than cars.  So the only really safe solution, I think, is 
to segregate the different speed modes with markings or bumps or 
something as I imagine they do in urbanized areas in Europe.

Whether ped/bike trails or roads for both bikes and cars, you can and 
should design intrinsic safety into the facility.  Thus bike advocates 
should demand that planning and spending policy groups, like CAMPO and 
Austin, produce legitimate and documented studies that compare the 
expected numbers of bicycle injuries and deaths expected for the 
various road and trail designs under consideration.

Although they hate to admit it and may try to hide it, the reality is 
that road designers really must calculate the value of a human life for 
every new road in order to determine how much to spend on road safety 
versus how to keep the construction costs down. The same amounts to 
trail design and upkeep.

-- Roger