Bridge the Gap: Waiting on a way to keep cyclists safe

Urban cycling is here to stay.

That might seem obvious. But we live in a world where many honestly believe that roads are only meant for motor vehicles. So I reiterate, especially now that more people are choosing to forgo cars in favor of alternative transportation — cycling is here to stay.

But this does not change the fact that we still have progress to make in developing ways for cyclists to coexist with drivers without banning cars from the road.

We have bike lanes, but bike lanes facilitate “doorings” — cyclist/car door collisions that occur when negligent drivers fail to check for oncoming traffic before opening their car’s door.We use green paint to mark bike lanes, but anyone who has ever biked in the rain knows that all that paint becomes extremely slippery when wet. Segregated cycle-tracks are safer, in theory, but they present concerns at intersections because they create the impression that there are no cyclists for drivers to watch for.

In fact, even the very rules of the road are not optimally safe for cyclists: there is strong evidence that an Idaho law that allowed cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs reduced bicycle/car collisions by nearly 15 percent in that state. (On a separate note, the frustration that many drivers claim to experience when witnessing cyclists outside of Idaho use these techniques is incomprehensible to me. Isn’t the fact that so many cyclists routinely ignore the letter of the law simply an indication that the law is broken?)

Certainly, there are ways in which cyclists could ride more safely. Too many cyclists attempt left turns from the right side of the road or blindly enter intersections without approaching the level of care required even by Idaho state law. Further, I know from the thousands of miles that I ride every year that there is no general consensus among cyclists as to how to ride to optimize both safety and efficiency. Where, for example, is the best place for an individual or group of riders to stop when approaching a red light at a busy intersection without a bike lane? Questions such as this as of yet are unanswered within the cycling community. 

But this does not change the fact that too many drivers struggle to share the road that cyclists are legally allowed to use. Many drivers fail to check for cyclists when turning right, drive in bike lanes, fail to pass at a safe distance or will in some other way prioritize their own convenience over cyclists’ safety. Too often, drivers seem to forget that in a collision between a car and a cyclist, the driver will almost certainly emerge unharmed, while the cyclist might suffer a serious injury. And even in Boston, it is sometimes challenging to use the judicial system to hold negligent drivers accountable for their actions when the victim is a cyclist.

If a panacea solution exists for allowing cars and cyclists to coexist safely, it cannot come soon enough.

John Russell is a senior majoring in mathematics. He is also a captain of the Tufts cycling team.