“Driving is the most likely way we’ll kill someone else, but we’re not treating cars like the dangerous things that they are.”

100 times worse than we thought: Insights from a Zendrive’s 2018 Distracted Driving Snapshot

I won't say "distracted walking" doesn't happen, because I've seen it and done it a few times myself. The point to remember is that someone like me who is walking "distracted" carries poundage in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Drivers are coddled daily in myriad ways, but the point stays the same: they're capable of wreaking far greater havoc, and their responsibility is greater, and the law enforcement apparatus should prosecute accordingly.

Do YOU see someone like Keith Henderson doing so? I sure don't, although perhaps the politicized prosecutor agrees with me on one point: put down your damn device and pay attention.

Driving? Your Phone Is A Distraction Even If You Aren’t Looking At It, by Christie Aschwanden (Five Thirty Eight)

... You can think of driving’s demands as a three-legged stool, requiring eyes on the road, hands on the wheel (not to mention feet on the pedals), and mind on the task. Anything less than all three, and you’re driving impaired.

Most attempts to mitigate the risk of cellphone use while driving have focused on the first two legs. Texting while driving is banned in 47 states, and 16 states prohibit drivers from handheld phone use. But legislative approaches like these don’t address the third leg of the distraction stool. “You can’t do a drug test for cognitive impairment,” said Kyle Mathewson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alberta.

Anything that takes the eyes off the road or hands off the wheel is clearly dangerous.

Bicycles and sidewalks? As always, New Albany's legal stance is as clear as mud -- and City Hall gazes at the ceiling.

Behold, another Rosenbarger bike lane triumph.

We've all been here before, but the fake factoids never cease, so let's have another look at the question of whether it is legal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in New Albany. Not unexpectedly in a state with its own contradictory laws, sections of the official code of ordinances in New Albany don't jibe.

§ 73.01 OPERATION OF BICYCLES.
(A) Every person riding a bicycle upon a street shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle. Every person riding a bicycle upon a sidewalk shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all of the duties applicable to a pedestrian.

(D) No person 14 years of age or older shall operate a bicycle on the sidewalks located within the geographical incorporated boundary limits of the City of New Albany ("city").

73.01 seems to suggest that since no person 14 years or age or older should be on the sidewalk anywhere within the city limits, everyone else should be riding on the street.

Then it gets weird.

§ 73.03 RIDING ON SIDEWALKS.
(A) Except as provided in division (B) of this section, it shall be legal to operate a bicycle upon a sidewalk when sidewalks are available and are not congested with pedestrian traffic. If the sidewalk is congested with pedestrian traffic, any bicycle operator using the sidewalk shall walk the bicycle.

(B) No person shall ride a bicycle upon a sidewalk in a business district or upon or along which signs have been erected by authority of the Board of Works prohibiting such bicycle riding.

In 73.03, it's legal to ride on the sidewalk with no reference to age, except in a business district, which isn't defined (here or elsewhere in the code), or wherever signs prohibiting bicycling have been erected.

Which is it? Maybe BOW can spin the wheel during its next meeting. In truth, it doesn't matter much because there is no enforcement of any conceivable interpretation.

As for which direction a bicyclist should travel when riding on a street, it should stand to reason that if the code of ordinance explicitly holds bicyclists riding in the street to the same duties of motorists, and it does, then these duties include riding in the same direction as traffic, seeing as a driver wouldn't decide to drive against traffic -- for the very same safety reasons as a bicyclist shouldn't.

You were taught to ride against traffic? Sorry, but you were taught wrong.

DEBUNKING WRONG-WAY RIDING, by Jamie Wine

Lots of us were taught as kids to ride facing traffic ... this sense of safety is tragically false, but that doesn’t stop it from being widely believed – especially if your last lesson in bike safety was when you were seven.

Even closer to the center of the target:

When you see someone riding the wrong way on a bike, the chances are good that they have chosen this as a crummy alternative to an even crummier series of major roads and horrifying intersections.

Yesterday during a conversation at Facebook, some guy living in Harrison County insisted that bicycle licensing is the answer to all these issues: "I believe that it (licensing) should be on the books and enforced. Especially with bike lanes now prevalent like never before."

Bike lanes prevalent? It's hard to believe bicycle lanes in New Albany amount to more than a few single digit percentage points of the street grid's total acreage. Perhaps it seems like more for folks living in mobile homes by a cornfield.

Bizarrely, until recently, the city of New Albany had bicycling laws on the books, dating from the aftermath of the Great Flood.

Rewind: Bicycles, mopeds and the ordinances not governing them.

§ 73.20 LICENSE REQUIRED BEFORE OPERATING BICYCLE.
No person shall ride or propel a bicycle upon any public highway, street, boulevard or other public place in the city, unless the same shall be licensed as herein provided.
('71 Code, §73.28) (Ord. 4120, passed 3-6-39)

In summary, city government's relationship with the street grid is devoted roughly 95% of the time to assuring drivers that car-centrism is king. There are no stated policies v.v. bicycling (or walking), no goals for improving non-automotive access, and no evident will to improve. If you're interested in this changing, then it's time to begin holding feet to the fire -- and next year, when there's a municipal election, you'll have the opportunity.

Rant over.

New Albany, bicycling, road rage and #GahanFail.

Minnesotans seem to be covering these topics sensibly on a regular basis. In this instance: Auto-centrists have almost every advantage, so why do they get so angry?

Drivers' antagonism toward cyclists termed 'classic prejudiced behavior', by Susan Perry (Minn Post)

... Although cycling is much healthier — both for our health and our pocketbooks — than many people realize, it’s also much more perilous than it needs to be, as Walker stresses in his article.

And a big reason for that has to do with the remarkable level of anger that many people harbor toward cyclists, both in Britain and in the United States.

Anger that, frankly, isn’t explained by the occasional bad behavior of a cyclist who, say, weaves between traffic or doesn’t stop at a red light.

As Walker points out, cyclists are rarely to blame for bike-car accidents.

Can pointy-headed disciplines like sociology and psychology help explain the rage of motorists? Yes, they can, but one must be receptive to the findings.

 ... The debate around cycling occasionally bears comparison with the treatment of so-called societal outgroups, according to Dr. Ian Walker, a psychologist at Bath University. One of his experiments to research attitudes towards cyclists involved riding around his home town wearing a long brunette wig with an electronic distance gauge attached to his bike, to see whether drivers gave female cyclists more overtaking space than men. They did, even when the “woman” was 6 ft tall and, for the drivers who happened to look in their rearview mirror, surprisingly hairy.

“What you see in discourses about cycling is the absolute classic 1960s and 1970s social psychology of prejudice,” he explains. “It’s exactly those things that used to be done about minority ethnic groups and so on — the overgeneralisation of negative traits, under-representation of negative behaviours by one’s own group, that kind of thing. It’s just textbook prejudiced behaviour.”

Such research suggests that the out-of-proportion antagonism directed at cyclists will only abate when the numbers of cyclists on the road (or, better yet, on dedicated cycling paths) increases to some tipping point, and all those angry drivers realize that the cyclists whose lives they’re imperiling are their family members, friends and neighbors.

Empathy versus the need to gain precious milliseconds while texting and wolfing down some DQ?

As it pertains to New Albany, the real point to me goes something like this: If it is deemed in our best interests to re-adapt streets in a multi-modal way to encourage bikes and enhance the experience for pedestrians, then we won't be able to achieve it on the down-low.

Rather, it will require fact-based vision (the research is abundant in favor of Specking-out New Albany yesterday) and firm resolve on the part of elected and appointed officials.

This naturally must begin at the top, with a mayor who can respond coherently and publicly to the splutterings of the enraged, as in this piece:

Let’s Put Those Tired, Anti-Bike Arguments to Rest, by Lindsey Wallace (Streets MN)

It’s inevitable. Every local news article that mentions biking, no matter how fluffy or non-controversial the article, will incite hordes of angry commenters to bring up the same tired, disproven arguments over and over again. It’s time we put those to rest.

Unfortunately, New Albany's weakest link can be found at the apex of the local political patronage chain.

Neither Jeff Gahan nor the local Democratic Party has proven equal to the task of leading in this matter. Gahan himself has yet to embrace a public position on the Speck study, while continuing to shape his private message to the predisposition of the listener -- if you're for it, he's for it, and if you're against it, so is he.

That's simply not good enough, and it's time for progressives to stop accepting Gahan's perennial excuses (when he even bothers making them), and call him out.

Me?

I'm afraid we'll have to let him go.

Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists? (and for that matter, pedestrians).

An extended excerpt from another must-read.

Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?, by Daniel Duane (New York Times)

... the social and legal culture of the American road, not to mention the road itself, hasn’t caught up. Laws in most states do give bicycles full access to the road, but very few roads are designed to accommodate bicycles, and the speed and mass differentials — bikes sometimes slow traffic, only cyclists have much to fear from a crash — make sharing the road difficult to absorb at an emotional level. Nor does it help that many cyclists do ignore traffic laws. Every time I drive my car through San Francisco, I see cyclists running stop signs like immortal, entitled fools. So I understand the impulse to see cyclists as recreational risk takers who deserve their fate.

But studies performed in Arizona, Minnesota and Hawaii suggest that drivers are at fault in more than half of cycling fatalities. And there is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene. When two cars crash, everybody agrees that one of the two drivers may well be to blame; cops consider it their job to gather evidence toward that determination. But when a car hits a bike, it’s like there’s a collective cultural impulse to say, “Oh, well, accidents happen.” If your 13-year-old daughter bikes to school tomorrow inside a freshly painted bike lane, and a driver runs a stop sign and kills her and then says to the cop, “Gee, I so totally did not mean to do that,” that will most likely be good enough.

“We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run,” Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.

The 'Ville Voice: "Bill the Bike Bully."

I'm glad I don't waste valuable drinking time watching local news broadcasts.

With the topic being "my car as shriveled phallus extension," The 'Ville Voice's Rick Redding comes in right on cue following yesterday's venomous NAC exchange on bicycling, automotive traffic, and which one makes us more American in the eyes of our patriotic countrymen.

Pleasingly, I rode 50 km through the Knobs yesterday. The only problem I had with automotive traffic was on Scottsvile Road, where two Got Junk trucks traveling about 55 m.p.h. in tandem were in a hurry to make their next pickup. They were going too fast for me to catch their "how's my driving" numbers, so I'll say it here: Reckless, but probably just as good as Viagra for what ails ya.

Bill the Bike Bully, by Rick Redding (The Ville Voice blog)

Bill Lamb is always asking for feedback on his on-air editorials. So here’s some.

The other day Lamb was advocating that police start ticketing bicyclists, all because he happens to see some going the wrong way on one-way streets or blowing through stop signs or darting into traffic off sidewalks.

Now, this thinking goes against the general idea of making Louisville a bike-friendly city, but Lamb must have had a near-miss or something that kind of ticked him off about bikers. He claims only to want to do something about the bad bikers, that all of us law-abiding riders would have nothing to worry about. (Just kidding, I’m a dart-into-traffic champ).

Still, Lamb’s anti-biking rant doesn’t sit well with us. But what it really did was give viewers a reason to pop off with some vitriolic anti-bike hatred that shows they’re misinformed, unaware of the law and generally intolerant.

With this kind of mentality, it’s no wonder more people haven’t been killed by cars. The station aired six responses, all exhibiting a deep-seated hatred for bikes in traffic.

Here’s my favorite — “Roads were not designed for bicyclists, they should stay off.”

Then there’s — “Bikes should stay on the sidewalk where they belong (and where it’s illegal to ride)”

Another called wants to require special bike insurance for riders, and one was advocating a required license plate.

Lamb’s little rant elicited the kind of reaction that shows that city leaders — with all their talk about education about bike safety for motorists — have their work cut out for them with the big new safety campaign.

By the way, the Mayor’s Hike & Bike event, which is growing every year, is set for Labor Day morning. This time, we’re off from downtown to Iroquois Park.