Last year the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) and my office teamed up to present our fourth year of free bicycle legal clinics for riders wanting to know more about their legal rights. We also presented bike law classes to particular groups such as bike messengers, middle school students and the driving teachers for Tri-Met bus drivers. Finally, I was a guest for several call in radio shows on “talk radio”. As I look back over these contacts with riders and the public I have to admit that I will remember 1997 as the year of the backlash. I say “backlash” because it seems like bicyclists endured lots of angry criticism in the press last year. To a large degree this was a response to the tremendous strides forward we have made over the last ten years in successfully promoting bicycling as a healthy and legitimate alternative to travel by car.
It is not too hard to figure out what things about bicyclists most irritate drivers. Foremost is our disregard of traffic laws, and second, the perception that we receive special treatment that is out of proportion to our numbers. Motorist irritation and confusion about how to navigate around bicyclists and bike lanes are the main areas in this second category.
Op ed pieces in the newspapers and letters to the editor frequently contain outraged diatribes about the special privileges accorded to bicycle riders. Our own responses are usually measured, logical and contain the usual points in our favor such as that we don’t pollute, cause deterioration to the roads, or great suffering to others when we collide with something. Our bicycling is healthy and fun for us, and it is a laudable goal for our transportation planners to create a road system that encourages people to get out of their cars and ride a bike. Many of the attacks on us are similar to the mean spirited attacks on affirmative action of a few years ago. It is distressing to see that so many people are taking a narrow minded view about the positive directions in which bicycling has led us. Nevertheless, we need to take these attacks seriously, and deal in an honest way with the things we have control over that have moved our detractors to criticize us.
As a person frequently placed in a position of representing and defending bicyclists I find it is much easier to defend our right to the road than it is to justify bicyclist’s failure to follow the rules of the road. Several times I have experienced a feeling that I was asked to speak to a particular group because the host wanted to give the attenders an opportunity to pillory a symbolic representative of a despised group. These challenges usually get my lawyerly blood up and I enjoy the opportunity to debate the attackers. However, between us riders, I would like to take a different tack and discuss what I see as a real problem for us.
We are never going to convince the general motorist public to embrace bicyclists as friends on the roadway so long as so many riders completely ignore the traffic laws. Blowing through stop signs, passing pedestrians without giving an audible signal, and making sudden lane changes or turns without signaling all combine to make people afraid of what we will do next, and then after we disappear they are usually left with irritation about our apparent belief that the law does not apply to us. After being in an “out front” position so many times when criticism is laid on us by motorists I have categorized some of the reasons we fail to follow the law. You may recognize some of these attitudes.
1. Plain ignorance. Many kids and occasional riders have no clue about the law. Young riders are not exposed to any formal training about the rules of the road until drivers’ education classes, yet they are expected to know and follow the rules of the road on their bicycles. Older inexperienced riders usually know the rules of the road from a motorist’s perspective but do not understand the way the laws apply to bicyclists, or tend to look at bicycles as toys and do not take their riding seriously. We see people in this latter category riding at night without lights or on the wrong side of the street. If they were educated about riding and the law they probably wouldn’t behave that way but they don’t take it seriously enough to do anything more than keep enough air in the tires to ride once in awhile.
2. Moral Superiority. Many more experienced riders fall in this category. They figure that since they climbed a hill with their own muscle power they deserve to blow through the stop sign at the bottom. Or, these riders will rationalize failing to stop for a light because they reason that if they pull in front of a car by mistake and get hit they will certainly not hurt anyone in the car and so the risk is theirs to take, and they’ll accept the consequences.
3. Feeling too Good to Follow the Law. The endorphine crowd belongs in this category. After a few hard pulls and some competitive juices start to flow some riders get into a euphoric state that makes them behave differently. I have seen highly skilled riders take chances they would never take under normal circumstances when under the influence of the excitement of a good hard ride.
4. The Law is an Ass. This is an elitist approach that works fairly well for people who choose it. The thinking is that the rules of the road were designed for people in cars, not on bikes. Proponents believe that laws such as the prohibitions against passing on the right or riding at faster than a walk speed in a crosswalk, are wrong to apply to bicyclists, and, therefore, all vehicle laws are equally absurd. They reason that there would be no need for rules of the road if there were no cars, and until that time, to hell with the laws that do exist.
5. We Won’t Get a Ticket Anyway. This one has not been working so well lately because police have been issuing tickets to bicyclists. In fact this winter a Southeast Portland business association actually persuaded the Portland Police to conduct a special enforcement crackdown on offending riders. The thinking behind this excuse is that even if a police officer sees a rider violate a traffic law there is little chance that the police officer will actually ticket the rider. While it’s true that most of the time police have better things to do than ticket bicyclists, on the other hand if we do get tagged the conviction will most likely go on our permanent driving record as a moving violation. This one also doesn’t work well in court because the Oregon Vehicle Code specifically states that the rules of the road applies to bicycles.
6. Piecework. This is a favorite with bike messengers who get paid by the delivery. If all bike messengers had to follow every law then they would never make enough deliveries to earn a living wage, and there would be no colorful bike messengers downtown. Instead messengers would walk or drive cars. Since we are the ones who use the bike messengers then those of us who call ourselves law abiding are really benefiting from and buying into the system that creates the need for the traffic lawlessness of the wage slaves who carry the weight of the system on their backs.
If you recognize some of your own thinking in the list of reasons people break the law, or the thinking of your riding companions, you might want to give some attention to the importance of following the bicycle laws. My firm has posted a number of these laws on our web site. If we are indeed in the age of the backlash against bicycling then we have to work together to blunt the attacks against us. An easy way to start is to learn and follow the law.