About a year later, he was involved in a serious bike accident on a multi-use path within a mile of home (no cars involved). He and the other bicyclist (who were riding together) were both hospitalized with significant injuries (both are in their 60s and significantly larger than your average cyclist, which no doubt contributed to the severity of their injuries). Several months later, he began riding again, at which time he was continually confronted by well-meaning neighbors and friends with the question: you’re riding again? Don’t you think it’s too dangerous? Not once had anyone made the same comment to him when he returned to driving his car.

Along the same lines, and with reference to the tandem fatalities, I think child abduction is a good parallel situation. Abduction of children by strangers occurs at the same rate as it did when I was growing up in the 60s, yet parents today won’t let their children walk or bike to school because of this fear (along with the fear of traffic). The difference is publicity. Today, every child abduction in the nation is national news within hours and for weeks. Fourty years ago, you would have only heard about it if it happened in your city, or the abductee was a celebrity. I’m afraid we spread fear in our efforts to memoralize those who have become fatality statistics. I’m not sure how we avoid it, but certainly an overall focus on the positives of cycling would help.

Angie, you’ve got to remember that cycling forums, or any internet forums, are not representative of everything that happens in the real world. The forums are a self-selecting source of statistics, i.e. if somebody is involved in a cycling accident, one of the first things they’ll do (after getting any necessary medical treatment) is jump on a forum and say “I was in a cycling accident today!” However, every time they ride their bike and DON’T get in an accident, they don’t get on the forums and say “I was NOT in a cycling accident today!”

Perhaps it might be more appropriate to say “people who focus on these things are not bike advocates, but bike lane, bike helmet, and special-bike-law advocates.”

I’ve read Fighting Traffic, which explores the auto interests’ efforts to change the frame of public streets in the 1920s (there’s an essay elsewhere on this site reflecting on that book). I’m curious as to what evidence you see that auto interests actively promoted bikeways, helmets and special laws as ways to increase or reinforce the public’s fear of cycling.

Bike advocates do NOT focus on these things. Never have.

People with an agenda to create an aura of danger and isolation around bicycling impose these false “improvements” on the public in order to marginalize an activity that does not generate the personal profits that an exclusivly automobile society does. This has been a strategy by car centric industries started in the 1940’s adopting propaganda and messaging techniques developed by the government’s war effort.
It has been so wildly successful we are imprinted to think of a car centric culture as “normal”. If you actually study and think about our car society and especially juxtapose it against successful non-car societies, it is anything but “normal”.

“It is much more dangerous to walk or cycle in American cities than to travel by car. Per kilometer traveled, pedestrians were 23 times more likely to get killed than car occupants in 2001 (140 vs 6 fatalities per billion kilometers), while bicyclists were 12 times more likely than car occupants to get killed (72 vs 6 fatalities per billion kilometers). Walking and cycling in American cities are much more dangerous than in many other countries. As shown in Figure 3, nonmotorist fatality rates in the United States are much higher than in The Netherlands and Germany.”

This is from the American Journal of Public Health — and the APHA is probably the nation’s most powerful advocate for more attention to walking, cycling and transit use — in a piece that attempts to explain why American cycling and walking rates are so much lower. It doesn’t just have to do with mixed-use development or bicycle facilities. See September 2003, Vol 93, No. 9 | American Journal of Public Health 1509-1516 Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling to Improve Public Health: Lessons From The Netherlands and Germany John Pucher, PhD and Lewis Dijkstra, PhD

“There are 2 problems with proposals to increase walking and cycling: their current danger and inconvenience in most American cities. As documented in this article, walking and cycling in the United States are much more dangerous than car travel, both on a per-trip and per-mile basis. Moreover, the lack of proper pedestrian and bicycling facilities makes walking and cycling not only unsafe but also inconvenient, slow, unpleasant, and unfeasible in most places.”

“The good news presented in this article is that it is indeed possible to achieve safe and convenient walking and cycling conditions, as demonstrated by the experience of Germany and The Netherlands. Those 2 countries have implemented a wide range of policies over the past 2 decades that have simultaneously encouraged walking and cycling while dramatically lowering pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and injuries and keeping auto use at only half the American level. The Netherlands and Germany provide valuable lessons for integrating more physical exercise into the lives of Americans.”

All that said, groups like ours definitely can help change the perceptions about safety (e.g., the widely-held perception, within many neighborhoods, that cycling and walking is simply too dangerous to even consider doing), which will help encourage more people to bike and walk.

That will start a self-reinforcing loop to make it even safer, i.e., by calling for lower speeds on urban roads.

Even though the site is a very new concept, there are already examples of issues reported on SeeClickFix that had 250+ votes to fix, and where legislation was passed as a result.

It’s a way to create a report on any issue, then invite your neighbors, community groups, governments and media to comment and come to a quick solution.

The Hawaii Bicycling League used to publish a ride series in its magazine and web site. These were rides during the week and weekend of varying length and intensity, designed to attract everything from the weekend warrior to someone just getting their feet wet. The beginner rides were especially good to get people riding and in an informal setting, pass on a lot of the Traffic Skills/Effective Cycling ideas and techniques while disguising the tutoring as a bike ride rather than as an eight hour ordeal. These were led by experienced riders, some of whom were LCIs.

Seeing the lack of interest in the formal classroom training up here in Los Alamos, I am also thinking that we need to step outside the box rather than beat our heads against the wall.Cycling is by nature a grassroots activity, and I don’t think it is well served by trying to shoehorn it into a nationally-directed training program.

When I think back to where I picked up my early ideas and experience in bike commuting in the early 1980’s, it was from a guy who lived in a basement apartment underneath my apartment. He was a researcher who worked nights in the Sleep Research Lab at SUNY Stony Brook. He was outfitting his bike, which was his normal way to get to work, with the earliest of the high tech, high powered headlights, fenders, and other goodies. I picked up a lot of pointers from him on commuting and during this time greatly expanded my own confidence and mileage in an informal setting. The social aspect of cycling was important both as encouragement and as a way to pick people’s brains in a non-structured, non-stressful environment.