We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist

Wonder Bar, Asbury Park

A little while ago I was walking home from the gym. It was a pleasant, warm afternoon. As I crossed 19th Street eastbound, walking on the south side of Lombard, the driver of a red SUV headed west on Lombard turned left down 19th without signaling and came directly at me. I was in the crosswalk, smack in the middle of the street. I assumed he would slow down. He didn't slow down. I jumped. He stopped.

In retrospect, I don't think I was ever in danger. My jump got me clear of the SUV's path, and the driver stopped before he got to where I had been. Still, there were two or three seconds when I didn't know any of this.

As I said, it was a warm day. The driver had his window down. An older fellow, white hair. Maybe two arm's lengths from me. We had a brief conversation - not cordial, perhaps, but at least civil.

He said he hadn't seen me because the sun had been in his eyes. I suggested that, if he couldn't see where he was going, it might be more appropriate to touch the brake than the accelerator.

He said he had a green light. I said I also had a green light and that, in addition, I had the right of way. He actually looked a little puzzled when I said that. Then he said he was sorry. I thanked him for his apology, and we both moved on.

I tell this story because I think it illustrates several common shortcomings of Philadelphia drivers. I'm going to classify these idiosyncrasies into four groups.

Astounding Ignorance of the Rules of the Road
Did my driver actually not understand the concept of the pedestrian right-of-way? Was it perhaps a term he hadn't heard in a long time - maybe since high school? I don't know. I'm just glad he stopped, even if it was only out of the goodness of his heart. I can almost hear him saying to himself on the way home, "Me and my two tons of fun almost killed someone." And shaking his head in disbelief.

Amazingly Deficient Driving Technique
Many Philadelphians do love to barrel around turns at speed. It's a much better idea to brake before you initiate a turn, and then accelerate slightly as you're pulling out of the turn. If you find you have to brake during the turn, you'll notice that the steering gets mushy. Brake in a straight line; then a slight acceleration will optimize your control of the car as you come out of the turn. This strategy also means you'll be better prepared to stop if a pedestrian pops up out of the pavement in the middle of a crosswalk. They sprout like mushrooms, you know.

Non-Existent Coping Mechanisms
Who knew? The sun gets low in the sky before it actually goes down. It can get in a driver's eyes. Dark glasses? A baseball cap? The visor that the car's manufacturer so thoughtfully provides? My driver's defenses against the sun were entirely undeployed.

Driver's Trance
This is more commonly called highway hypnosis, and even more commonly called "going along with the traffic." After all, if you just follow the bumper of the car ahead of you, what can possibly go wrong?

I remember talking to a lady who was in a T-bone crash at 17th and Lombard. She was unhurt, but pretty shaken up. All she could say was, "I never saw the light."

Okay. Situational awareness, folks. Stay alert. Look around - people used to call this circumspection.

I told the lady not to beat herself up. We're all human. We miss things. But at least we can all try to stay alert.

It strikes me that we have a ways to go on this Vision Zero stuff.

See also Rugged Individualism, The Semiotics of Parking on the Street, and Vision Zero in Philadelphia.

Vision Zero in Philadelphia

Boardwalk, Asbury Park

Well, Labor Day has come and gone, and I think it's fair to say that Jim Kenney is not Michael Bloomberg.

I think many of us were willing to wait until the soda tax fight was over. But then the summer came and went, and there has been remarkably little progress on Vision Zero and Complete Streets.

Yes, we have the bike lane on Ryan Avenue, and progress appears to have been made on the South Street bridge. Philly Free Streets proved to be a lovely and very crowded event. Its chief innovation was to close South Street on a Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. (actually well past 1 p.m.).

But we are a long way from where I had expected to be at this point. Where is the city's Vision Zero task force? Where is the Complete Streets commissioner or director (I gather the effort is no longer worth a commissioner).

Where is the bike lane on 22nd in Fairmount? Where is the two-way cycle track across the MLK bridge at the beginning of MLK Drive? Where are the cycle tracks on Market and JFK west of City Hall? All of these projects have been languishing for years.  All of them could easily have been completed in the construction season that is now drawing to a close. And still no word.

I had hoped that Mayor Kenney, like Mayor Bloomberg, would be an ally and an advocate for Vision Zero and Complete Streets. By now, though, it seems clear that he has opted for a different, perhaps more traditional, role as mayor - that of an arbiter who weighs the competing demands of various constituencies.

Advice from Saul Alinsky
A few months ago I finally got around to reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I found the book very informative and at times hilarious. (Alinsky does tell good stories.)

One thing Alinsky emphasizes is the importance of identifying who your enemy is and then mounting a sustained attack on that enemy.

I think some of my friends may be tempted at this point to see Jim Kenney as the enemy, but he's not. City Council is not the enemy either. Even traffic engineers who are still focused on moving the maximum number of cars through the system at the maximum possible speed are not the enemy.

The enemy is bad drivers. We need to hammer that message home. Yes, lowering the speed of vehicles is very important, but it is not an organizing principle. We need to reorganize our streets to prevent bad drivers from acting on their evil impulses.

False Equivalence
I hear again and again, "Well, bicyclists and pedestrians do bad things too." Or, as a middle-aged woman put it to me at a community meeting, "Bicyclists are evil."

Yes, pedestrians have been known to cross in the midblock - this is called jaywalking. And bicyclists have been known to treat a stop sign as a yield sign - this is known as the Idaho stop, because it's legal in that state.

But I simply reject the false equivalence. Bicyclists and pedestrians do not kill motorists. Meanwhile, motorists kill pedestrians with great regularity. (And they usually get away with it, but that's an issue for another day.)

Where the Rubber Hits the Road
We will also be needing a specific, tangible issue to fight over, and I have one - Pennsylvania's four-foot passing law.

The four-foot passing law has been on the books since 2012, and it requires a motorist passing a bicyclist to leave at least four feet of clear space between the two vehicles. (Billy Penn has a very funny article and video about the four-foot rule.)

As I pointed out in an earlier story on this site, the four-foot law means that it is illegal for a motorist to pass a bicyclist on many of Philly's narrow streets.

Here's the arithmetic. Take 21st at Pemberton, in South Philly. There is one traffic lane, headed south. It is twelve feet wide.

The typical American car is between six and seven feet wide; the handlebars on the typical bike are around two feet wide. That gets you to nine feet. Add four feet of clearance, and you're at thirteen feet.

But wait. The motorist will want clearance on the other side of the car as well. Call it a foot, which gets you to fourteen feet, which is two feet more than the width of the travel lane.

It's illegal for a motorist to pass a bicyclist at 21st and Pemberton.  It's illegal everywhere in Philadelphia where similar conditions exist. And, of course, motorists commit this particular moving violation all the time.

Making the Law Effective
Wouldn't it be nice if the City did a few things to make the four-foot passing law effective? It could put up more of those signs which say that a bicycle "may use full lane." This sign doesn't tell the whole story, but it's been in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices since 2009, which means it has received the traffic engineering equivalent of a papal blessing.

The City could also educate the public on the four-foot passing law. I'm reasonably certain that the vast majority of Philly residents are blissfully unaware of this law.

And the City could enforce the law. A police officer doesn't need any fancy equipment to do this. No radar gun required. If there's one lane, and it's twelve feet wide, and the motorist is passing, he's breaking the law. If the officer wants to whip out her iPhone and take a picture, she will have an open-and-shut case.

If All Else Fails, Sue
Will the City be eager to do this? I rather doubt it. But, if friendly persuasion doesn't work, perhaps a lawsuit will. The City does have a duty to enforce the laws, after all.

A key tool for the NAACP during the Civil Rights movement was its Legal Defense Fund. Perhaps we need a Vision Zero Legal Defense Fund.

I hope it doesn't come to that. But if we want to sway the current administration to our side, we are going to need to fight. We are going to need to fight harder and smarter than our opponents.

The Semiotics of Parking on the Street

City Hall, Philadelphia.

The other day I was walking down 19th Street near Pine. It was a beautiful day, around lunchtime. Sunny, about 80 degrees, low humidity. I'd run some errands and walked through Rittenhouse Square, and now I was walking home, thinking about the subject of this article.

As I crossed Pine there was a loud noise behind me, and to my right. I was startled and actually jumped a bit. It was a car horn, of course.

A middle-aged man, accompanied by a woman who was presumably his wife, was driving a nondescript sedan. He actually had plenty of room to turn onto Pine behind me, which he proved by accelerating dramatically as he passed by.

So, why the honk? Was he concerned for my safety, thinking that I might for some reason start running backwards? If that had been his concern, he could easily have used his brake instead of his horn, and much more certainly avoided the nonexistent danger.

But no, I'm afraid I don't believe that was his motive. I think that he, like a bull elephant, was honking to assert his dominance.

Of course, from a legal point of view he was not in a dominant position. I was in the crosswalk with a green light, and I had the right of way.

Driver's Ed, Philly-Style
Anyone who lives in Philadelphia knows that none of these things matter. I sometimes think there's a class hour in Philly driver's ed courses where the instructor sits his charges down and explains the way things really work.

"Listen, kids, the streets are there for the cars. It's always been that way, and it always will be. Pedestrians tend to forget, though, so you need to remind them. Otherwise they might start insisting on their rights, and that would be bad."

The instructor looks around the class and, noticing that there are no girls, shifts his language into a rougher gear. The message, though, is always the same:  Assert dominance, discomfit other occupants of the street, and make sure you are the focus of attention.

The instructor then summarizes with the same words for all audiences: "Remember, kids, when you're sitting behind the wheel, just keep repeating to yourself, 'It's all about me.'"

And at the end, if the audience is right, the instructor will channel Sean Connery in The Untouchables and say, "Look, intimidation doesn't always work. But if you feel it's the right thing to do, you can always put them in the hospital - or the morgue."

On to On-Street Parking
So what does all this have to do with curbside parking? Well, the cars get tired. They can't spend 100 percent of their time cruising and looking for pedestrians to intimidate. In fact, cars spend 95 percent of their time parked. But that doesn't mean they're useless. They can still intimidate.

Here's what the parked cars say: I won't kill you while I'm sitting here. But if my driver comes, and he or she is late for work, or hung over, or pissed at a spouse, I will kill you on orders.

Even the parked cars know that the police and the media will probably blame the victim.

There are other reasons for parking on the street, of course - for one, it's cheap. And, if you're a big shot, you can give yourself a dedicated parking spot in front of the building where you work. (See photo at beginning of story.) Then nobody is likely to accuse you of having a small ego.

But if you want to look at the underlying message that all those lines of parked cars convey - the semiotics of parking on the street - it's not a warm and cuddly message. Those cars are saying, We own the street.

View them as an army of occupation. After all, they're big, they're powerful, and they're everywhere, all the time. They never go away. Walk down a sidewalk, and depending on the time of day, there may not be a lot of cars driving down the street. But the lines of parked cars are always there, always reminding you, always dominating the streetscape.

Think about it. What did you see more of on the street today - cars or people?

Stop Sign, Philly-Style. Corner of Uber and Ringgold Place.

For developments in the street culture of Paris, London, and Amsterdam, click here and here.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Measuring the Health of a Parking System, The Parking Dream, Zombie Arguments in Bike Safety.

Is John Forester a Car Guy?

Traffic arrows, Asbury Park.

John Forester is widely known as the apostle of Vehicular Cycling, and he dearly loves bicycles. But there's another side of him that peeks out occasionally in his 800-page book, Effective Cycling.

Consider the following tidbit: "Whether America (and large parts of the rest of the Western world) was wise in adopting urban designs that rely on personal mechanized transportation is a very serious question. Whether it would be wise to try to return to the mass transportation city is an even more difficult question. However you may answer these questions, our present cities that rely on personal mechanized transportation will be with us for a long time, probably as long as you, dear reader, are likely to be interested in cycling." (John Forester, Effective Cycling, 7th ed., MIT Press, 2012, p. 498.)

In other words, the war is over, the cars have won, and you need to find a way to fit into the new order. Henry Ford couldn't have said it better.

Actually, Aldous Huxley did say it better, in Brave New World: "Ford's in his flivver.... All's well with the world."

So is John Forester actually a car guy? Can a bike guy also be a car guy?

A Special Kind of Bike Guy
It's important to remember that Forester is a very special kind of a bike guy, and his views are very closely linked to a place (California) and a time (the 1950s). In this experience, bicycling was an activity carried out by a select few. As he puts it, "In Northern California I could ride all weekend without seeing another adult on a bicycle. If, by chance, I did see one, I knew him." (Pp. 711-712.)

For Forester, the threat to his happy little world came with America's second bicycling boom, which got started in the 1960s and took off in the 1970s. (The first bicycling boom came in the 1890s. For more information on that boom see James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road, University of Washington Press, 2015, and Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s, University of Chicago Press,  2015.)

In the second bicycling boom, cycling increased "from substantially zero to considerably less than 1 percent of traffic," as Forester puts it (p. 712), but that was enough to get people talking about creating separate bicycle lanes.

In case you don't know it, I'll let you in on a little secret. John Forester hates bicycle lanes. As an advocate for vehicular cycling, he feels that bicycles should always travel in the same lanes as motorized traffic. Not just some of the time. All the time. He liked things just the way they were in northern California in the 1950s.

This picture includes no bike lanes and almost no bicyclists.

Forester's History of the American City
Forester makes some remarkably peculiar statements about the shape of American cities and the ways people get around. Remembering his frame of reference, we can more easily understand sentences like the following: "In modern cities, the only reasonable and available transportation modes are motoring and cycling; walking takes too long for the distances required and mass transit is ineffective." (P. 712.)

A few pages later, Forester takes on the advocates of bike lanes. Although he concedes that European cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen have been very successful at encouraging bicycling, he claims that the example of "old walking cities" is irrelevant  to modern cities that "developed in the automotive era." (Pp. 737-738.)

And apparently old walking cities - like the central parts of Philadelphia - require no further consideration.

Bicycle advocates also like to talk about Portland, Oregon. Forester calls Portland a city "with very strong antigrowth and antimotoring policies" and refers approvingly to unnamed experts in urban affairs who "consider Portland a failed city." (P. 738.)

Effectively, in Forester's argument, the city based on the automobile (and its attendant urban sprawl) is the inevitable city of the present and the future. (For a more insightful analysis of the rise of the automobile city, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, MIT Press, 2011.)

Forester even takes a swipe at what he calls "the induced traffic argument. That says that building new roads always increases traffic, so the anti-motoring person should oppose road building so that congestion will limit motoring." Based on his experience over the years, "the reasonable conclusion appears to be that the induced traffic effect is rather small." (P. 766.)

I'll give you one final paragraph from Mr. Forester. "Bicycle advocates argue for returning cities to the shape they had in 1920 when bicycle transportation was quite useful. However, over the space of my memory - say, 1940 to the present - the proportion of trips that are suited to bicycle transportation has steadily decreased. That's a fact of present life, and no bikeway system is going to alter it." (P. 739.)

A Few Points in Rebuttal
I could expend several reams of paper - or the electronic equivalent - rebutting Forester's oddly ahistorical historical analysis, but I am going to confine myself to a few highlights.

1. Forester probably doesn't think he's a car guy, but he is. Over the years, he has been quite forceful in presenting his views, even to the extent of initiating litigation, and it seems fair to say that his efforts helped to hold back the development of urban bicycle networks in the U.S. by several decades. And who did that benefit?

I expect that his arguments were music to the ears of the typical state Department of Transportation. They could listen to him and keep building out a monomodal transportation system focused on the private car. And they could ignore those pesky advocates who called for a more balanced transportation system - what we might today call "Complete Streets."

2. While it's certainly possible to criticize Portland for things such as failing to meet affordable housing goals, it seems a bit harsh to call Portland a failed city.

3. Induced demand is a trivial phenomenon. On this point, Forester is just wrong. If you're inclined not to believe me, I've got another 800-page book for you: Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking.

For more than you probably want to know about John Forester, here's an autobiographical essay that he posted on his website. I particularly enjoyed the bit about the German Schwarzkopf track bike from about 1935.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Death as an Acceptable Outcome, Learning to Dance Together, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different? 

Learning to Dance Together

21st and Pemberton

Bicyclists, motorists, pedestrians all have one thing in common - the human body. It has abilities, and it has limitations. As Clint Eastwood said, A man's got to know his limitations.

We can't look back very well. If you drive a car, you know this. All that driver's ed about blind spots etc. Bicyclists can actually see better to the rear, because they don't have the structure of a car in the way, but still.

This limitation is a basic issue as we think about how to get cars and bikes to work better together on the street. And it's a strong argument for a network of protected bike lanes.

But in parts of Philadelphia - for instance, South Philly - there are many streets that are unlikely to see protected bike lanes any time soon. The parking lanes aren't likely to go away, and the remaining space is simply too narrow for a separate bike lane. Cars and bikes are going to have to learn to share.

Vehicular Cycling
So what would this look like? Enter John Forester, the apostle of Vehicular Cycling. I have a number reservations about Mr. Forester's work. But he has, over many decades, studied how cars and bikes can work together on the street. And I think some of his ideas may make life easier for everyone on the narrow streets of South Philadelphia.

The basic precept of Vehicular Cycling is Take the Lane. Don't cower at the curb. It's hard for many bicyclists to accept that riding in the middle of the street is actually safer, and there is a strong ethos in this country that bicycles should stay to the right so cars, which are faster, can pass more easily.

Let's see how this plays out in a town like Philly. First, a look at the real estate. As Forester notes in his 800-page magnum opus, Effective Cycling (7th ed., MIT Press, 2012), "Twelve feet is the width of the standard interstate lane and of many other main highways." (P. 392.) Needless to say, many lanes on the streets of Philadelphia are less than twelve feet wide. On Lombard Street, in front of my house, one traffic lane is ten feet wide, the other is eight feet, eight inches. (The parking lane is seven feet wide.)

Physically speaking, it is just barely possible for a car and a bicycle to ride along side-by-side in a twelve-foot lane. The typical American car is between six and seven feet wide. A bike's handlebars are typically around 24 inches, or two feet, wide. Seven plus two is nine, which leaves three feet for buffer space. The motorist will want some of this to the left of the vehicle - at least a foot. The other two feet can be buffer space for the bicyclist. This doesn't leave very much room for error.

A complicating factor is the law in Pennsylvania, which requires that a motorist passing a bicyclist must provide four feet of clearance. (Here is a link to the law, courtesy of the Bicycle Coalition's website.)

A seven-foot car, a two-foot bike, and four feet of clearance add up to thirteen feet, and the motorist will want clearance to his left as well.

It seems reasonable to conclude that side-by-side sharing of a twelve-foot lane is illegal in Pennsylvania. And this would go in spades for lanes less than twelve feet wide.

What's a cyclist to do? Well, first, don't wait for the motorist to figure it out. In dancing terms, take the lead. In  biking terms, take the lane. You don't necessarily need to ride in the middle of the lane, but you need to be far enough away from the curb to convince even the most fanciful driver that he's not going to be able to squeeze by you in the same lane.

If the street has two lanes, like Lombard Street, the motorist will need to swing into the next lane to pass. If the street has one traffic lane, the motorist will need to stay behind you. When you get to a stop sign, you may want to pull over and let the cars behind you go ahead. They are faster vehicles, after all. It's a courtesy.

Down to Pemberton
At the beginning of this story there is a photo of a sign at 21st and Pemberton. There is one traffic lane on 21st, heading south, and it is twelve feet wide. There are two seven-foot parking lanes, one on each side.

Dear Bicyclist, 
The Streets Department doesn't love you. And here even they are telling you to freaking take the lane. Listen to them.

You don't want a car trying to squeeze by you on this street. You can't escape. The parked cars have you caged in.

Vehicular cycling is not without its dangers. A following motorist may simply decide to ram you. This is unlikely, but in Philadelphia it is certainly possible.

You are also likely to have conversations with uncomprehending motorists. Forester recommends that you engage in education rather than invective. Be an ambassador for bicycling. Remind the motorists that, as the sign says, bicyclists may use the full lane. You could even tell them about the four-foot passing law. It's highly unlikely that they will have heard of it before. Finally, as Forester puts it, "Often the best action is a friendly wave and a happy smile - motorists don't expect that." (P. 518.)

Two Hazards
All this conversation may leave you a trifle hoarse, but keep in mind that taking the lane does have its benefits. It may head off two serious hazards, both of which have happened to me: the passing motorist who cuts you off, and the driver who tries to squeeze past you when there isn't enough space.

Both of these maneuvers are particularly dangerous because they engage the motorist's physical limitations. The driver who swings out to pass and then cuts back too soon may well have misjudged your speed and then lost sight of you in his blind spot. In addition, both this motorist and the one who tries to squeeze by in the lane probably have only a vague idea of where the right side of their car is. Particularly the right rear.

If there are two traffic lanes available, as on Lombard Street, even if you've taken the lane, you may well encounter a motorist who swings out to pass and then cuts back too soon. However, you can brake, and you also have room to maneuver to the right. If you start by riding at the curb, you have no escape space.

If you have a lane of parked cars to your right, instead of the curb, taking the lane will also put you out of range of being "doored" - that is, hit by a car door being opened by an occupant who didn't see you. That pesky looking-back thing again.

Vehicular cycling is not a Vision Zero program. It is not as good as a protected bike lane, but it's much better than cowering at the curb.

And we don't need City Council to pass an ordinance. We can just do this. We can do it now.

Zombie Arguments in Bike Safety

Zombie says overtaking crashes are very rare, 
so why build bike lanes? Turns out 40% of fatal 
car-bike crashes are rear-enders. 

Recently I posted a story about Tom Palermo, his death, and the subsequent construction of parking protected bike lanes on Roland Avenue in Baltimore, where Tom died.

Shortly before the new bike lanes went in, there was a contentious community meeting attended by City officials. After the meeting, the officials confirmed that they would proceed with construction of the bike lanes, and they responded to a number of issues that had been raised.

Among the FAQs from the Baltimore DOT (on page 9) was this: "Since rear end crashes are rare for bicyclists, how is the change to cycle track protected by parked cars justified? Please provide statistics and references."

This argument has been around for a while, and it refuses to die. I'm not quite sure how you kill a zombie argument. I'm pretty sure you don't drive a stake through its heart - that's for vampires.

At first, I was going to let this go. After all, the Baltimore officials did a reasonably good job of rebutting it, and it would have been easy enough to let things lie. However, one of the lessons I took away from the story of Tom Palermo's death and the subsequent bike lane controversy was that "specious arguments must be rebutted in detail."

So maybe you can kill a zombie argument by talking it to death. Or burying it in facts.

The FAQs from the Baltimore DOT referred to a data sheet from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which focused on fatal bicycle accidents and found that in 2013 "non-intersection" crashes accounted for 57 percent of fatal bicycle crashes.

It's possible to take this further. In 2014 the League of American Bicyclists put out a report on a study it had conducted, independent of the federal statistics. For a period of 12 months, it researched in detail every fatal traffic crash involving a bicyclist that it could find on the internet, documenting 628 crashes. The results were, as the report put it, "eye-opening":

"We learned, for example, that a much higher percentage of fatal crashes than expected were 'hit from behind' incidents." Of crashes with reported collision types, 40 percent were rear-end collisions.

Rarity Is a Matter of Perspective
So why do people think 40 percent of deaths is rare? Because rarity depends on perspective. In absolute terms, death on a bicycle is rare.

Currently this particular way of meeting your maker is running around 700 a year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 726 bicyclists died in car-bike crashes in 2014.

Meanwhile, total deaths from traffic accidents involving motor vehicles were 32,675. Even pedestrians died more than bicyclists - 4,884.

And then you can add in all the non-fatal crashes. Good numbers here are hard to find because the reporting criteria vary widely among reporting agencies, but here is one indication of the non-fatal mayhem on our highways: 39.2 percent of spinal cord injuries in the United States result from motor vehicle crashes.

And of course we could add crashes that don't involve cars. Bikes crash into other bikes, pedestrians, immovable objects, the ground. Such crashes are rarely fatal, but they can result in serious injury.

Small Compared to What?
So, yes, in absolute terms, not a lot of people die in bicycle accidents. But the rate at which they die is another issue entirely.

John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra published an article in Transportation Quarterly in 2000 on this subject. They found that, per kilometer traveled, bicyclists in the United States are 11 times more likely to die than motorists. Pedestrians are 36 times more likely to die than motorists, on a per kilometer basis. On a per trip basis, pedestrians and bicyclists are about three times more likely to die than motorists. Think about this the next time you venture out to the grocery store. (See my previous post Death as an Acceptable Outcome.)

A car is the safest place to be on the street. There's a lot of vehicular mayhem, but the vast majority of miles that Americans travel, and trips that they take, are by car, so the shockingly high mortality rates for walkers and bikers get masked. As Pucher and Dijkstra put it, "the dangers of walking and cycling in America are not just perceived, they are real."

The Terror Factor
The idea of being rear-ended by a car while you're riding your bike down the street holds a very special kind of terror. Such an event is very likely to kill you, and you can't in most cases prepare or react, because you don't know it's going to happen. You're utterly powerless. You have no control or even influence in this situation. (Here's a story on a crash in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in June. Five bicyclists died, and four were injured. It was a group ride. The driver has been charged with second degree murder and operating while intoxicated causing death, among other things.)

There are bicyclists who live with this icy thought every time they get in the saddle. What's more, I think it's why many moms won't let their kids ride bikes in the street anymore. They don't care so much that Johnny may fall and skin his knee. It's death from out of the blue that keeps kids inside, playing video games and getting fat.

And if the driver isn't drunk and doesn't leave the scene, he or she is unlikely to get more than a slap on the wrist. It's basically a free kill. Homicide without consequences. At least for the perpetrator.

We need to rethink this. We need to think of protected bike lanes as anti-terror devices.

Drunken Episcopal Bishop Kills Bicyclist

Baltimore Then Moves to Build The City's 
First Parking Protected Bike Lanes
And That's When Things Got Complicated

Two days after Christmas in 2014 the weather was fine, and Tom Palermo decided to go for an afternoon bike ride. He never made it home. As he was riding in a bike lane on Roland Avenue in Baltimore, he was struck from behind by Heather Cook, an Episcopal suffragan bishop who had been drinking and was texting.

This story received coverage in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Cook pled guilty to automobile manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal crash, and driving under the influence and texting while driving. In October 2015 she was sentenced to seven years in prison and immediately taken into custody. She is currently being held at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup.

And then, earlier this year, Roland Avenue got two protected bike lanes, one on each side of the street, heading in opposite directions. Essentially, the existing bike lanes were moved to the curb, and the lanes of parked cars were moved away from the curb, so they would protect bicyclists from moving cars in the traffic lanes, including people like Heather Cook.

I hope that's clear. The parking lanes were on the right, by the curb. They moved to the left. The bike lanes had been on the left. They moved to the right, by the curb.

So, a fitting memorial. Community and government working together to improve the safety of the built environment. Right? Well, not quite.

Everyone is quick to point out that the new bike lanes had been in the works before Tom Palermo died. They were part of a larger repaving project for Roland Avenue. The bike lanes had been included in the city's bicycle master plan, the local civic organization supported them, and the principal of the 1,200-student Roland Park Elementary/Middle School supported them, along with many teachers and parents.

There are quite a few schools in this area, including the Gilman School, Roland Park Country School, and the nearby Bryn Mawr School. I'm thinking protected bike lanes might increase the number of children riding their bikes to school. And that might actually put a small dent in the car traffic. Call me a dreamer.

However, this being about bicycle lanes, you will not be surprised that opposition arose. You will also not be surprised that it arose very late in the process. And so the city and the local civic organization held yet another meeting. It was standing-room-only at the Roland Park Presbyterian Church, with the Baltimore Sun reporting that the audience of 200 seemed about evenly split between the pros and the cons.

It was a contentious meeting, so much so that a few days later a local bicycle advocacy group called Bikemore issued a white paper entitled "Mythbusting: Roland Avenue Cycletrack."

A basic claim from the opposition was that there had been inadequate communication about the project. It just wasn't true in the case of the Roland Avenue bike lanes, and the white paper runs through a litany of the communications efforts, which I won't bore you with. Bottom line: "Whether or not one chooses to attend neighborhood meetings or read neighborhood communications is ultimately a choice." However, "one's choice to remain ignorant to the details of a road project shouldn't be used as the basis to call the communication inadequate."

The opposition also claimed that the new bike lanes were making the road less safe. My favorite objection comes from the lady who said she had been using the old bike lane as a buffer when she pulled her child out of the driver's side of the car, and therefore moving the bike lane removed that buffer and made her less safe. It was suggested in response that the typical street in Baltimore does not have a bike lane that motorists can use as a buffer, and that perhaps it would be a better idea to remove the child from the other side of the car. As the white paper says, "We believe it is always best to load and unload your children and elderly passengers on the side of the vehicle away from traffic."

The white paper also addressed the concept that the objecting neighbors had a right to veto the project: "But in the end, while community input should be carefully considered, transportation projects that have the direct aim of improving safety of all road users on a public roadway should not be allowed to be derailed simply by public opposition of residents."

The City of Baltimore stuck to its guns and built the bike lanes. More than that, there are other bike lanes that are in the pipeline and on track.

I take away several lessons from the story of this battle. First, Tom Palermo's death clearly had no effect on the neighbors who objected to the bike lanes. Second, bike lane proponents should always be prepared for late-arriving opposition. Third, specious arguments must be rebutted in detail. Fourth, near neighbors have no right to veto transportation projects affecting much larger areas; it's important to make that argument clearly, forcefully, and repeatedly. And finally, people in favor of a bike lane need to attend the public meetings in force.

I've been wondering about the effect of Tom Palermo's death on the various city officials who were involved in the Roland Avenue bike lanes. After all, I'm from Philadelphia, and I've watched shovel-ready bike projects languish for years. Did Tom Palermo's death stiffen the administration's spine enough to overcome bureaucratic inertia and near-neighbor tantrums?

I spoke about this with Liz Cornish. She's the executive director of Bikemore, the Baltimore bike advocacy group that produced the white paper I've been quoting from. She didn't want to speak for the city administration, but for Bikemore, she said, "It certainly stiffened our spines."