It is spring and time to prepare
for the summer riding!
But no preparation is complete without a review of bike safety, and road
responsibility. In the past, I published a list of rules to live by, and while many you will recognize as simple common sense,
it never hurts to review the ways we can ride better. And safer.
Automobile drivers sometimes feel
that bikers “interfere” with their driving.
Bikes are slow. They
weave about in traffic. You never know what they are going to do, and when they will do it! They are just a danger to everyone.
Furthermore, drivers don't understand
why bikers are on the road, when there are expensive bike-paths and sidewalks available. Why don’t they ride there?
They may say, "We built that path for them, with hard earned tax-dollars."
I can assure you, bike riders would rather the tax money had
been used for driver education. If drivers exercise minimal care and concern, expensive bike-paths would not be needed. The
bike paths are the result of poor driving habits, more than bike-rider lobbiests in Congress.
The cost of the bike paths could fund driver education programs for many years, and that is the logical solution.
However, people
demanded bike paths because they imagined it would relieve them of the responsibility of driving responsibly.
It doesn’t. Drivers must still be responsible if there is a bike path or not. The existence
of a bike path does not change the law.
And the law says bikes are allowed
on the roads, path or no path.
That is the legal picture. Now I will give
some logical and economical reasons why drivers should do all they can to encourage bikes on the road.
- For every bike on the road, there is one less car. Fewer cars mean less congestion.
- It is easier to pass a slow bike than a slow car. Bikers are usually on the
far right, you can see around them easily, and they don’t speed up when they come to the only safe place you can pass.
Bikes are easy to pass, but crowding them does not improve your ability to pass, it just increase the chance of you being
charged with manslaughter when you pop one of them, like a bug on your bumper.
- Bikers
reduce the demand on gas, and reduced demand translates into cheaper pump price for gas. In fact, nothing reduces gas price
except reduced demand. So think of bikers as good people reducing your gas prices.
- Bikers never take the last parking spot.
- Bikers don’t
wear-out the roads.
- Bikers tend to be
healthier and require less medical attention, and that reduces the overall cost of health insurance. This is a benefit for
everyone, driver or not.
- Bikers don’t contribute as much
CO2, unless they eat a lot of bananas.
- Bikers tend to have better figures,
so they are more pleasant to look at.
So next time you are tempted to run over a biker, consider the positive
angles. Plus, there may come a day when you want to be that slim, sexy biker!
