Change is Always Needed

Change is Always Needed In Saskatoon, we cyclists are lucky to have the things that we have. There seem to be lots of people who ride their bikes and I consistently see bikes chained up at many of the racks around town. We also have a good network of bike paths and lanes to use. Despite the things that we have, we need to keep fighting for an expansion of safety measures. For one, safety education could be a solution to protecting our cycling population. Most people who regularly ride a bicycle haven’t been educated in the ways of properly and legally navigating a city by bike. Dangers, such as being hit by an opening car door, riding against the direction of traffic, or running red lights, are issues that endanger cyclists to a great degree, but many of them don’t realize it. The University of North Carolina conducted a safety research project on cycling and found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic” (Mapes, p. 198). Motorists don’t expect to see a cyclist coming from their right and often don’t look that direction, except to glance for a person coming off the sidewalk. I shudder when I see a person on a bike riding against the flow of traffic. During my many rides around Saskatoon, London, St. Louis, Columbia, Hawaii, and other places, I’ve noticed that, although cycling lanes exist in many places, they are often too filled with debris, and other hazardous waste, for a cyclist to safely navigate without the threat of a flat tire or other bicycle damage. The photographs included in this section show hazards in designated cycle lanes, such as parked vans, dirt, and even rocks as large as my hand. In September, I was amazed at how hazardous the cycle lanes around Saskatoon were, so I wrote a letter to the City Council asking them to make regular cycle lane clearance a priority for the road crews. They responded that they would discuss it at their next meeting in NOVEMBER, two months later. I wrote them back and informed them that this was unacceptable because we would likely have a foot of snow on the ground by then, which would make clearing bike lanes of gravel, glass, and other debris pointless. I never heard another response. In our schools, we have courses that teach young people how to be safe drivers, yet countless 16-19 year olds get into accidents and endanger others. When I was in my driving education class, a mere comment was made for me to watch out for cyclists. It wasn’t until I actually started cycling that I realized how important it is for drivers to see us as legitimate users of the road and to be patient with our presence on our self-propelled, two-wheeled machines. David Glowacz, the education director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, has written a safety course curriculum for bicyclists. I wonder how many of our youth in the coming generations could be turned onto riding their bikes again. We need to make them feel safe and give them the training necessary. We know that many people would cycle to work if only they didn’t feel as if they were taking their lives into their hands everyday when they rode. The U.S. Surgeon General published a report on physical activity in 1996, which stated that “53 percent of people who had cycled in the previous year said they would commute to work by bike if they could do so on ‘safe, separated designated paths’” (Mapes, p. 196). The logic behind this is simple: “motorists have their space, pedestrians have their space on the sidewalk, and cyclists need their space too” (p. 197). A government that truly looks out for the interests of their citizens in this world will heed the call of helping to make their cities as safe for cyclists as possible. Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Portland, New York, Paris, and Vancouver are cities leading the charge for mass-cycling. Our world is changing and “the bike offers a non-polluting, non-congesting, physically active form of transportation…in a world that increasingly seems to need such options” (Mapes. P. 13)