PEDALING EDUCATION
By JEFF MAPES
Two years ago, on a visit to Amsterdam, I watched a middle-aged motorist prepare to turn right off a busy highway onto a street bisected by a bicycle path. Both the driver and the woman next to him craned their necks looking over their right shoulders to make sure they would not hit a cyclist.
What struck me as I stood there, only a few feet away, was that there was not a hint of irritation or impatience in their faces as they waited 10 to 15 seconds until the road was clear and they could safely turn.
That simple awareness -- and patience -- on the part of drivers is one reason why it is statistically three times as safe to cycle in the Netherlands as in the United States, despite that virtually no cyclist in Holland wears a helmet.
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Instead, I want the city, and ideally the entire country, to be a lot safer for all of us. The truth is that everyone is far too much at risk in traffic, whether in a vehicle, on a bike or walking.
Last year in the United States, 42,642 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes, including 4,784 pedestrians and 773 cyclists. That's the equivalent of having two fully loaded jumbo jets fall from the sky and kill everyone aboard -- twice a week.
And here's the number that amazes me. Last year, 2.6 million people were injured on American roads. Your odds of being hurt in a crash are nearly one in a hundred, every single year. To me, these are not statistics.
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As a society, we pay a lot more attention and money combating homicide, which causes half as many deaths as motor vehicles.
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One professor, William Lucy at the University of Virginia, has made a cottage industry out of examining the combined death rates for homicide and vehicle crashes. He found that the overall death rate is higher on the suburban fringes of metropolitan areas in Virginia than in the high-crime cities of Richmond and Washington, D.C.
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And this brings me back to that middle-aged Dutch couple, patiently waiting to make their turn. Part of their safety culture is watching out for the weakest among them. "There's a strong political and social interest to save vulnerable road users, to protect children, to protect elderly people," explained Fred Wegman, who runs the country's traffic safety research institute.
And in watching out for others, they are protecting themselves. We can do that here, too.