What is Critical Mass?

Critical Mass is a mass bicycle ride that takes place on the last Friday of each month in cities around the world. Everyone is invited! No one is in charge! Bring your bike!

Next San Francisco Critical Mass: May 31st, 2024, 5:30pm, at Embarcadero Plaza (foot of Market Street).

SF Cops Refuse to Pursue Hit-And-Run Case

December 16th, 2009 by hughillustration

hit-and-run-license

A couple months ago, blogger JWZ witnessed a hit-and-run:

Monday around 6pm, netik and I were biking West on Harrison on the right side when a car passed me on the left, within a few inches. I had enough time to think, “Hey, that was close”, look forward, and yell “Look out!” before the car’s mirror hit netik’s handle bar from behind and sent him tumbling. The guy kept driving. I chased after the car, pulled up to his window and said, “Hey! You just hit that guy!” He look at me and said, in a calm deadpan, “Really? That’s just terrible.” And then he drove off.

JWZ collected witness testimony, grabbed a photo of the driver’s license plate, and filed a complaint with the police. Standard operating procedure which should have led to, as JWZ noted, loss of “driver’s license, loss of insurance, $1,000 to $10,000 fine, and possible jail time.”

Well, JWZ has now heard back from the SFPD, and it ain’t pretty:

John called SFPD, went down to the police station in person and filed a report (case 091-062-114), and after several followup phone calls over the next few weeks was told:

“No action has been taken on your case, but you can call the DMV and get the person’s plate if you want to file a civil suit.”

The fact that the SFPD can’t muster the energy to go after a well-documented case of a hit-and-run comes as no surprise to anyone who has experienced the disdain that many SF cops have for bicyclists and bicycling generally. In my experience, the view of many police is that motorized vehicles are the real legitimate traffic on city streets, and that pedestrians and bicyclists are simply interlopers temporarily borrowing access to a scarce resource. Check out this recent post on Streetsblog for further testimony of a police bias against cyclists.

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Do Helmet Laws Make Biking Less Safe?

December 13th, 2009 by hughillustration

With more and more bicyclists hitting the streets every day, we should probably pass some sort of law requiring helmets, right? An article in Next American City Magazine questions this logic, pointing out that helmet laws decrease bike ridership — either because it leads people to think cycling is dangerous or, more likely, because fashion conscious cyclists won’t be seen dead in one — and this decrease in ridership makes things increasingly less safe for bikers.

But the results [of a helmet law in Western Australia] were disastrous. According to the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation, immediately after the law went into effect, the state of Victoria, where cycling rates had been increasing dramatically over the previous 15 years, saw a 36 percent decrease in ridership. For every one teenager who began to wear a helmet, more than 10 others abandoned their bicycles. While 80 percent of Western Australian children walked or biked to school in 1977, that rate has plummeted to a measly 5 percent in 2009.

What’s more, when the Victoria helmet law took such a hefty chunk out of cycling rates, it ended up paradoxically decreasing cyclist safety. This is because one of the biggest determining factors of bicycle safety is not protective wear, but the number of other cyclists out on the road. In 2003 health consultant Peter Jacobsen published a widely read report that tracked this trend across such disparate locales as California, Denmark and the U.K. Even when cities within the same country or state were compared, the results bore out this fact.

One of the primary reasons helmet laws depress ridership is that they seem to imply that cycling is a dangerous activity. But this is not the case. According to a study published in 2006 by the British Medical Journal, cycling is not significantly more dangerous than either walking or driving. The study estimates that on average it takes 8,000 years of normal cycling to produce a serious head injury, and it takes 22,000 years to produce one death.

I definitely see why people wear helmets, though. Imagine if you had to transport a hard-drive full of your entire life’s files and memories — the only copies of all your artwork and photos and music and finances. Wouldn’t you put it in a protective case before bicycling across town? In any case, the argument here is not against helmets per se, but against helmet laws.

I remember reading about the Jacobsen study mentioned here years ago when it came out, which made the incredibly sane argument that the more people walk or bike, the more safe it is to walk or bike. Here’s a link to the abstract of the study, and you can get the PDF version of the whole thing there if you’re interested.

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Brooklyn Hipsters Re-Paint Bike Lane

December 13th, 2009 by hughillustration

After the city removed a section of the bike lane network in Brooklyn, a few renegades took direct action to correct the error:

The totally unreliable New York Post claims the lanes were removed in part because of complaints from the Hasidic community:

Cyclists have decried the removal of the bike lanes, but many Hasidic residents had complained that all the bikers whizzing by posed both safety and spiritual risks to the community.
Many of the hipster cyclists wear too little clothing for the Hasids, who are not supposed to stare at members of the opposite sex and wanted the enticement removed.

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UK study: Women cyclists “risk death” by obeying traffic lights!

December 4th, 2009 by hughillustration

Here’s a refrain I have heard from motorists my entire adult life: “I support bicycling, but bicyclists need to start respecting traffic laws — stopping for red lights, stopping for stop signs, etc.” Most recently, the New York Times ran a piece in their new San Francisco section covering a supposed “backlash” against cyclists brought on by all those pedal-powered scofflaws out there.

Now comes a study from the UK that presents evidence that riding your bike according to the law can get you killed. TimesOnline reports that women cyclists have a higher accident rate in the UK not because they ride illegally, but because they obey the law too much!

Women cyclists are far more likely to be killed by a lorry because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver’s blind spot, according to a study.

The report by Transport for London’s road safety unit was completed last July but has been kept secret. It suggests that some cyclists who break the law by jumping red lights may be safer and that cycle feeder lanes may make the problem worse.

The fact is that when you navigate the city by bicycle, you learn that many of the rules of the road are simply not practical, and as the study shows, can be downright dangerous to your health. With more and more people getting around on bikes every day, eventually the law is going to have to change to reflect this new reality.

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