for maximum safety, bicycle riders should ride against the flow of traffic. true false

I’m sorry, but your gas taxes don’t cover the cost of roads and highways. Drivers pay for roads so they should get priority I understand we can’t engineer away all collisions, and some people will still die on our roads, but that’s not really a good excuse for not trying to reducing their harm.Ħ. In places with high numbers of pedestrians and cyclists, speed limits can be reduced in the name of safety, something that New York City has recently done. At 40 mph that risk increases to 50 percent. One of the things we can do to avoid so much carnage is redesign streets to slow down the automobiles.Ī 2013 study from the AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety found that a person struck by a car at 25 miles per hour has a 10 percent risk of dying. If planes were crashing once per week, would you consider it safe to fly? While we call these things accidents, the truth is our roads are far deadlier than they need to be. That’s equivalent to a Boeing 747 crashing and killing everyone on board every single week, year after year. The US ranks behind many developed countries in traffic safety, with automobiles killing nearly 34,000 people a year. And if there’s anything Spiderman’s Uncle Ben taught me, it’s that great power comes with great responsibility. But drivers are operating much more powerful, much heavier vehicles at high speeds. Look, cyclists have a responsibility to stay safe and look out for others. I know it’s hard to be wrong, especially on the internet, but here are a few sentences I hope we see less of in the future. But beyond my personal judgments lie a great many studies and data showing most of the pro-motorist arguments just don’t hold up.

Though I drive and bike, my allegiances skew toward cyclists (feel free to scroll straight the comments and yell at me). So, before the next big wave of internet arguing, I propose we retire a few overused and underwhelming opinions in the bikes vs. And in the comments section of each, people rehashed the same tired arguments over and over. Nothing seems to bring out the angry caps lock and personal attacks faster than transportation issues.Ī recent report showing more cyclists are dying on US streets prompted a remarkable number of stories about cyclist safety. And you can, especially in recent years, piss off a whole bunch of people simply by writing about bikes and cars. Talk about climate change, mention Monsanto, or bring up the treatment of women in video games. There are certain things guaranteed to set off an internet firestorm.

For maximum safety, bicycle riders should ride against the flow of traffic. true false