Cerulean Cordillera

Archive for June 24th, 2009

I used to be an avid biker. Now, I have to drive for at least two hours every day. Toronto, and most of other places, have by-laws that makes it technically illegal for adult cyclists to ride on sidewalks. In Toronto, it’s a $90 fine if you’re caught, though police cars usually have more important things to do than hunt you down even if they see you. The argument for it is that likelihood of cyclists hitting pedestrians on sidewalks is greater than cars hitting cyclists on the road. And of course, there are far more pedestrians than cyclists, so we can guess who democracy sided with.

But if you think about it, it makes no sense. A bicycle by its function is nothing more than a tool that gives a pedestrian the ability to travel up to around 30 kilometers an hour at top speed. Now that I drive, I encounter at least five bicycles a day. I do a speed check on each and every one of them (follow them at the same speed and check my speedometer), and so far only one or two people have reached that speed, so we can conclude that most of the time cyclists ride slower than that.

A bicycle is flexible. You can ride it, you can stroll with two feet pushing against the ground, you can stop a bicycle in less than a second, you can make several sharp turns at small distances, and on top of that, a bicycle is very small thus granting it more possibilities for doing whatever it want. The only thing it doesn’t have is speed. If a cyclist wants to avoid a collision with a pedestrian, it’s very easy. Adjust your biking speed depending on how dense the pedestrians are on the sidewalks. Be courteous, don’t cut in too close to pedestrians. Heck, worst comes to worst, you can ride through a nearby parking lot or grass lawn if you have to in order to pass that pedestrian, or become a pedestrian itself by dismounting in less than a second. If you’re even the least bit careful while on a bike, it’s pretty much impossible for you to not avoid a collision with pedestrians provided that you have a decent IQ and sensory-motor functions.

And even if you hit a pedestrian, it’s never fatal. Very rarely do we hear pedestrians getting killed by cyclists crashing into them. Back in grade ten, I once totally crashed into a 92 year old frail-looking woman because I got distracted by something, the crash was head on, and I was going at a decent speed. Of course, I’m not proud of it, and I have been more careful ever since, but the point is that she merely got back up, complained, checked for injuries, and it seems everything was fine.

The same cannot be said for cars on the road. Unless you’re totally naive about roads, you must know that if the speed limit says 60km/h, then most cars are going to drive in the 65~70 range unless the traffic is extremely dense and crowded, during which drivers will cut corners and force lane changes quite often. Occasionally you see someone abiding by the speed limit, but then you’d see cars trying to pass that person one after another, zooming through either the left or right. Heck, I got horned at this morning for letting cars get in front of me since their lane was closing. I looked into the back mirror which revealed an angry hag muttering curses, to which I merely laughed and mentally labeled an idiot and continued onward. But what can you do? These are the rules of the road, which is a bit different from the rules they taught us in driving school.

Think about it, a bicycle riding at 20 kilometers an hour on a road where everyone else is driving at 60~70 kilometers an hour, and yet they expect the cars to share the lane with the bike? That’s preposterous. If the car stays inside the boundaries of the lane, and the bike stays on the extreme right of the lane, then the distance between the car and bike during the moment of passing would be less than a meter. At that distance and at that speed, any careless mistake on the driver or the bike (say caused by a bump on the road) can very likely get the cyclist killed. Yet, most cyclists don’t seem to realize that. They stay on the right, but not at the extreme right. They expect cars to somehow pass them without hitting them.

So that’s what cars do, in whatever way they can. Some cars immediately change lane to left when they see a cyclist in front of them. This is easy to do when there’s not much traffic, but can be quite a dangerous maneuver when the road is crowded or you get a bunch of other crazy drivers. Changing lanes at rush hour often require you to force cutting into a tiny little spot forcing the latter car to slow down and let you in. You have to somehow do this very quickly, as the bike is going much slower than you are and thus you approach it very quickly.

Some other drivers don’t want to go through the hassle of changing lanes, so they just push left into the left lane a little. This is even more dangerous because the car on the left lane behind wouldn’t know to give you space. Sometimes they’d just push forward and attempt to push you back since technically you’re not changing lanes. The result of course is your car being sandwitched in the middle of a car and a bike, with very little cushion space on both sides – very dangerous.

The only other option of course is to trail behind the bicycle and go at the bike’s speed. This means you will be driving 20 kilometers on a 60 kilometer road, blocking all cars behind you and is very unacceptable and inefficient, and probably illegal too.

Ultimately, it is much safer for bikes to stay on sidewalks as opposed to on the road. On sidewalks, collisions don’t do much damage and can be easily avoided. On roads, the bike’s very presense makes the situation much more dangerous for everybody involved. Collisions are deadly at high speeds and negligible at low speeds, and let’s not forget that cyclists are not much more than just flesh and bones, which makes them much less durable for high speed collisions (i.e. car to car), and unlike motorcyclists, bicyclists don’t have the speed to take advantage of their maneuverability to avoid these things.

And it’s even worse for cyclists who aren’t that good at riding bicycles. Believe it or not, there actually ARE people who are adults who have never learned how to ride a bicycle, or who have rode so little that they can be quite shaky. Are we really so heartless that we want to subject them to the fear of having a huge truck or bus cruising at 60 kilometers an hour brush right by you?

There is only one exception, and that is when a road has bike lanes. If that’s the case, then it would be safest for bikes to stay on bike lanes. Anywhere else, bikes belong on sidewalks, not on the streets.