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SF Weekly's Snitch on running stop signs and equal enforcement
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Bob Shanteau
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Nov 07, 2009 13:13 PST
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This guy first tries to justify bicyclists running stop signs and then
speaks kindly of Marin County's equal enforcement efforts.
It's clear that he's anti-car when he talks about how cars kill and
bicycles don't. His main argument for bicyclists not complying with
traffic laws is that the laws were written for cars. He also argues that
roads are designed for cars and not bicycles.
A question: if roads were designed for cars *and* bicycles, how would
they be designed differently? After all, all travel lanes are wide
enough for bicycles, they're just not for the most part not wide enough
for a bicycle and car side by side. That leaves intersections and
interchanges, which are being addressed by a task force I belong to that
is rewriting Caltrans' guidelines for accommodating nonmotorized traffic
at intersections and interchanges.
CABO is pushing for equal treatment, including enforcement (I don't know
about CBC). Lack of enforcement complicates our efforts by creating a
sense of entitlement, however. Both drivers and bicyclists feel that
it's OK to break the law because everybody does it. The problem is that
the laws that drivers break is different from those that bicyclists
break (speeding vs. pedaling through stop signs, for example), and
neither group is willing to give the other a break.
Bob Shanteau
***
<http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2009/11/new_york_times_youtube_investi.php>
New York Times' YouTube Investigation: Bicyclists Sometimes Run Stop Signs
By Matt Smith in Media, Public Transit
Fri., Nov. 6 2009 @ 3:45PM
The odd media war unfolding in San Francisco -- in which major dailies
establish editions here while local periodicals fade away -- advanced in
a new direction Friday, with a page A-19 story in the New York City
edition of the New York Times titled "San Francisco's Cyclists Facing
Backlash for Flouting Rules of the Road."
The story didn't coincide with the headline. The purported San Francisco
backlash consisted of one guy on a bike who got a ticket for running a
stop sign in Portola Valley. More striking, however, was the question of
what strap-hanging Big Apple readers might find interesting about a San
Mateo County traffic ticket -- even one wrapped in the sort of bogus
Times trend story Slate columnist Jack Shafer has made a steady sideline
of outing. (Ex SF Weekly editor Shafer's latest roundup began with a
story about a phony NYT-reported trend in which men supposedly grew
pot-bellies on purpose because it had become fashionable.)
The real trend outed in the story was that cyclists often run stop
signs. The author set up a video camera to prove this. He referred to
unnamed bicyclists he supposedly interviewed as "venom-spewing bike
bullies." And made the unsubstantiated claim that Marin County residents
refer to cycling tourists as "locusts."
This is all well and good. The writer is entitled to his opinion. But
why is this news in the New York Times' New York City edition A-section?
Having observed San Francisco newspapers' coverage as the number of
cyclists on our city streets have multiplied since the mid 1990s, I may
have some insight. Every time a driver stops using a car and instead
gets around by bike, significant road space is opened to motorists,
pedestrians and bicyclists. Fewer cars are on the road to kill and maim
people. There's less need for parking space and more places to put
parks, stores and apartments. And there's less smog, less noise and a
greater sense of urban peace.
But car-commuting newspaper reporters or columnists driving to work
don't usually see this. Instead, they experience a new crop of
slow-moving vehicles they have to drive around. Former Chron columnist
Ken Garcia used to liken cyclists to a mentally unstable fringe group.
Current columnist C.W. Nevius described accommodations for cyclists as a
usurpation: "the wishes of the few versus the needs of the many." A
Chronicle news story last year misinterpreted statistics to create the
false impression that most bicycle-involved collisions were cyclists'
fault, part of a general theme of coverage that treats bicycling as an
exoticism and a nuisance rather than the transportation solution it is.
New York is currently undergoing the sort of bicycle revolution San
Francisco has been experiencing since the mid-1990s. Mayor Michael
Bloomberg has installed bicycle lanes, racks, and other accommodations
as a central plank in his bid to turn cities into a tool to slow global
warming. Cyclists, as a result, are turning up on the street. And
they're being met with fascination, and sometimes scorn.
The Times stop sign article also came on the heels of the conviction
Monday of a Los Angeles physician who was nailed for felony assault
after using his car to injure two cyclists, then tell police he meant to
"teach them a lesson" for taking up what he believed was too much road
space. That story earned national attention. And Friday's Times stop
sign piece provided a sort of counter-narrative.
The fact that cyclists often don't halt at stop signs has long has been
a rallying cry for the scorn-mongers. Cyclists don't deserve rights and
protections, this strain of logic goes, because some of them don't obey
our laws. Hence, a fake trend story positing a backlash against San
Francisco stop sign-blowers just might be of interest to Manhattanites
preoccupied with their own city's bike boom.
Interestingly, two weeks before the /Times/ piece, Christopher Beam, who
like Shafer, writes for /Slate/, made an effort to get to the bottom of
the bikes-blowing-stop-signs phenomenon.
Beam sought to parse the "What's up with that?" question by asking
another one; what purpose is behind modern traffic laws in the first
place? The answer: to accommodate, and protect people from, cars.
"It wasn't until after World War II, when nearly every American
household had an automobile and Eisenhower pushed to build the
interstate highway system, that modern traffic laws evolved," Beam
writes. "In this history, bikes are the American Indians to the car's
Christopher Columbus. Everything about our road system, from the lanes
to the signs to the traffic lights, is designed for the car, often at
the expense of the bike." <http://www.slate.com/id/2232555/pagenum/all/#p2>
A possible solution, Beam suggests, is to write new laws conducive to
multi-modal traffic.
"It would also mean changing car-centric laws that don't make sense for
bikes, like the rule that says you need to come to a complete stop at a
stop sign," he writes.
This, he suggests, creates a virtuous cycle.
"The beauty of this approach," Beam writes, "is that it creates
compliance from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
Bike-friendly pathways encourage more people to bike. More bikes create
peer pressure for bikers to follow the law. (In Copenhagen, for example,
you'll see long lines of bikes stopped at traffic lights.) When more
bikers follow the law, the heavy hand of enforcement becomes less
necessary."
This is less Utopian than it may sound.
In 1982, the Idaho state legislature passed a law, which was updated in
2005, that allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs; if there
are no cars, the cyclists can roll through the stop sign without
violating the law. This rule takes into account the fact that momentum
is a precious commodity when it's produced by leg muscles. And it
acknowledges the quasi-pedestrian, space-efficient quality of cycling:
Two bike-riders in the same intersection can sort things out merely by
looking each other in the eye.
There's a third way -- different from vigilante motorists keen on
teaching cyclists a lesson; distinct from Idaho-style laws that do a
better job accommodating all types of traffic. It's universal,
tough-love enforcement of all traffic laws.
In Marin County during the late 1990s the District Attorney got it into
her head to make streets and roads under her jurisdiction safe for
cyclists and everyone else by negotiating a policy among all law
enforcement agencies to ticket all violators, cyclists included.
During this era, San Francisco stop sign-blowers would change their
manners if they went for a bike ride in Marin County, because they knew
they'd be more likely to get a ticket. Police and Highway Patrol would
make a point of seeking out coffee shops and other places where cyclists
met for weekend morning rides, to have chats informing the riders that
traffic laws were being enforced. And all law enforcement agencies were
put on alert that motorists who harassed or endangered cyclists would
have the book thrown at them. On Highway1 north of Stinson Beach, a
sheriff gave a motorist who swerved and yelled at me citations totaling
$1,500.
Bicycle activists in San Francisco generally scoff at the notion that
stepped-up traffic enforcement involving cyclists would benefit anyone.
But Marin cyclists were impressed.
"When you're out there bicycling on the road every day, there's a
general mood out there,'' Debbie Hubsmith, executive director of the
Marin Bicycle Coalition was quoted as saying. "In general, people have
been more respectful.''
***
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