Last weekend I went on a low carbon footprint vacation. A few friends and I took BART from Berkeley to San Francisco and then rode our bikes from the Embarcadero to Point Reyes National Seashore, a 70,000 acre park encompassing all the best of California coastal beauty. We stayed at a surprisingly nice hostel Friday and Saturday nights and then rode back on Sunday. We weren’t trying to do an eco-friendly vacation, but after the fact it was satisfying to know that we could find a ‘getaway’ without the aid of a car, especially since that part of the Bay Area, the Marin headlands, is overrun with cars on beautiful summer weekends.
Although cars can often be a nuisance and a danger to cyclists, they weren’t the largest source of frustration for us on the trip. Ironically enough, we were most annoyed by other cyclists. Riding in the middle of the road in traffic, blatantly violating reasonable traffic laws, and generally lacking an understanding of proper riding etiquette comprised the most frequent offenses. Why should these inconsiderate and moronic actions bother me? It's quite simple. They make drivers angry and, as the name implies, drivers drive cars. Cars are big and can kill people. Angry drivers are less careful drivers and therefore the roads are less safe for all cyclists. Of course, the errant cyclist who doesn’t move over to the shoulder because he’s listening to his iPod won’t cause every driver he delays to become a homicidal maniac. However, the drivers he comes in contact with loose respect for cyclists and are therefore less likely to be considerate or accommodating to the cyclist who is following the rules. It perpetuates an ‘us versus them’ mentality on both sides which ultimately makes riding a bike more dangerous. In a confrontation between a car and a bike, the car always wins.
So why don’t cyclists follow the rules of the road? These same people wouldn’t run a red light or drive their car in the middle of the road. They comply because those rules were made for cars, they make sense for cars and the driver understands them. While some of those rules, such as the ones listed above, make sense for cyclists, others do not, and in general the laws do not take into account the differences between a bicycle and a car. So cyclists feel that the laws don’t really apply to them because, in a sense, they don’t. They then end up violating laws that do make sense and endangering everyone.
How does this discussion tie into physics? Joel Fajans, Berkeley physics professor and avid cyclist, has turned some musings on the physics of bicycling into arguments for changes in road rules for cyclists. The primary focus is on stop signs, which even law abiding cyclists such as myself roll through on a regular basis. We know that stopping doesn’t make sense because it wastes a lot of effort and we can go through them at a slow enough speed to stop if we need to. Joel has quantified what we know intuitively in this article in the Access Transportation journal. In fact, Idaho figured this out in the early 80s and implemented what is now known as the “Idaho Stop” in which cyclists do not have to stop at stop signs or blinking red lights but must yield to pedestrians or traffic. This column in the Oregonian goes into more detail, but the important points are that bike accidents decreased by 14.5% after the law was implemented and a study by the Berkeley School of Public Policy found that the law made cycling safer and encouraged more people to commute by bike. Sounds good, doesn't it?
Apparently Oregon is contemplating enacting the same law this year and I hope other states will follow. After all, it’s common sense, which is really just physics in this case.
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