I don’t believe disappearing bike lanes at intersections is a such a positive innovation, however, as it appears to me to be a response to the legal liability faced by otherwise responsible municipal authorities.

Let’s keep improving bike lanes to encourage use by bicyclists of all ages and abilities.

I’m interested in finding out if any controlled studies have been done to determine the factors contributing to the increased risk associated with bike lanes and/or trails. It is counter-intuitive to me that they should be more dangerous, although I can see that if many more inexperienced cyclists use them, they may appear so, at least statistically.

Some bicyclists break laws a lot (and often shouldn’t).

Most motorists in Minneapolis drive unsafely.

And then people get upon these message boards and try justifying this stuff. Op- ed pieces are written about how “Bikes should get off the road” and “I’m going to run you over”. Cut it out, damnit. People are dying here (in Minneapolis a biker was killed today May 20; elsewhere in MN a biker was killed May 16, 2009; fatalities happen nearly every month. We who pay attention know people are dying.)

Motorists who take that cavalier attitude are basically homicides waiting to happen. Your cool intellectual analysis doesn’t clear your blame, and your “get off my roads or else” attitude makes people wish you were dead instead of your next victim. You’re going to kill a human being.

You should know by now this is not the way, tsk, tsk. If you want to be killing people you’re, um, wrong.

But who knows, maybe you’re right bicycles don’t belong on the road. Same thing with pedestrians crossing the road, motorcycles, mopeds, subcompact cars, Amish buggies, cops on bikes, joggers, etc. It could be argued that people who might fall to harm or death (ie all people) should be prohibited from being on the road.

Do bicyclists have to start carrying firearms to protect themselves? Motorists are trying to hit us. Really.

The biker should take responsibility for safety. Motorists should too, but many won’t.

– know that some of the cars have “Uninformed Motorists” and watch out for them
– stay off the sidewalk where it is harder to be seen at cross walks, and easy to run over pedestrians.
– have a mirror and watch out for vehicles passing too closely
– stay alert, be prepared to stop if you get cut-off, and slow down at intersections.

When motorists claim that bikes are walking path toys that should stay off the roads they are not selfish. They have not fully considered the benefits of cycling, and don’t realize that bikes are also a practical form of transportation. Bikes are better than cars in some cases. Bikes don’t pollute, are easy to park, are efficient and low cost, and are faster where there is lots of traffic.

If informed motorists can not be convinced that bicycles should be on the road I suppose that their vehicle makes them feel powerful and putting down bikes helps them feel better about their time spent in traffic jams, pollution, fuel costs and/or obesity.

The my-mass-is-bigger-than-your-mass approach to crash dynamics implied by “Selfish Motorist” is also a gross oversimplification. For one thing, a cyclist hit by a car absorbs only a small fraction of the energy originally possessed by the car. The forces and energies involved in two motor vehicles colliding are far higher and mitigate the protective features of the vehicle bodies (which is how you get 35,000 fatalities per year). In addition, the higher mass sometimes works against motorists. Motorists are often crushed between parts of their own vehicle body. Rollovers are a common crash type, and a bicycle rollover is not going to be as serious as a SUV rollover. Although less common, motorists also either burn or drown while trapped in their vehicles.

Crash data indicate that motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians all have roughly similar fatality rates that fall in the general range between 0.1 and 1.0 fatalities per million hours of travel. Motorcyclists, in contrast, are more like 10-15 fatalities per million hours. For reasons that are clearly not understood by “Selfish Motorist”, crash data also show that cyclists who use sidewalks are actually more likely to be hit by a motor vehicle than those using the road.

The real problem here is that motorists think a driver’s license is a deed to the roadway when it really is just a permit to operate a piece of hazardous machinery.