Davis, CA – This week, the city of Davis put out “Back to School Bicycling Tips” given the start of the K-12 school year. While I think these are important tips for students – and in a few weeks when UC Davis starts – it will probably be important to send out some sort of complementary tips reminding students of the importance of following the laws of the road as well as the risk of bicycle theft, which is omnipresent in Davis – I wonder if the city shouldn’t think more about doing driver tips.
Several times in the last year, I have noted just how dangerous the roads are these days including a satirical piece around Christmas where I suggested we ban driving in Davis.
While some folks did not seem to get the “a modest proposal” reference to Jonathan Swift and understand the headline at least was satire, the actual content was anything but.
Bicyclists in the self-proclaimed biking capital of the US seem to draw a lot of the ire – and sometimes understandably so, I think drivers are a good deal more problematic and more dangerous considering their speed and the weight of automobiles as opposed to bicyclists.
One of my pet peeves is that half the drivers do not seem to be able to navigate either a traffic circle or a merge lane. For the most part these are mere irritants as drivers err on the side of caution by treating both as a stop rather than a yield. But it kind of defeats the point of having either if vehicles do not know how to approach a traffic circle for example.
But as I said, those are mere irritants that I experience every day.
Then there are a whole host of dangers.
For instance, I have noted that drivers are increasingly simply disregarding not only stop signs, which have become a joke in some locations where drivers don’t even bother to slow down at them to make a presentence of a rolling stop, but also increasingly traffic lights.
Most of this occurs in the late hours of the night or the wee hours of the morning depending on your perspective, but even when – or more accurately especially when – there is not a lot of traffic, observing things like stop signs and traffic signals is a huge safety concern. I can’t tell you how many near misses I have when drivers disregard these rules in anticipation that there will be no traffic.
I have also seen an increase of wrongway drivers. Davis doesn’t even have one-way streets, and yet, time and time again, I see vehicles driving on the wrong side of traffic islands. I still recall driving down 5th Street early in the morning near DMA and saw a vehicle driving toward me on the wrong side of the traffic island. Fortunately, I saw them in time and was able to get into the bike lane before a collision took place.
There have also been several times where I have seen vehicles not just run red lights, but completely disregard the traffic light as though it were not there – a few times, narrowly avoiding a collision.
There is also of course the interplay between vehicles and bikes and pedestrians.
During the day, there have been a number of almost comical near misses in the downtown where I still don’t think the city has properly situated the intersections to avoid conflict. While the city has improved the safety by implementing four way stops everywhere, four way stops with multiple modes of transportation, and different observed and formal rules creates confusion at times, especially during hours of high traffic volume.
An under recognized problem however occurs when most people are asleep. I drive to the office these days about 4 a.m. and there is a whole other world operating in the darkness. I see both pedestrians and bicyclists – a lot of them unhoused and unsheltered walking and biking around in the middle of the night.
The problem is most are wearing dark clothing and many do not have lights or do not have lights back and front. I can’t tell you how many times I have nearly hit people crossing in the middle of the block or veering out into the traffic lane.
I’m actually a bit amazed that there aren’t more car on bike and car on pedestrian collisions these days simply due to how many times I have simply not seen a dark figure that is probably not in operating at full capacity until almost too late.
And there are perpetual concerns in the community about speeding and impatient motorists who cause a huge amount of safety problems.
All of this seems to have frankly gotten worse since the pandemic. So while I think the bicycle safety tips are necessary, I would look further into figure out some road safety tips in general, because I think a lot of the problems are actually the vehicle drivers who are impatient and ignoring traffic rules and they have to contend with a world not only with pedestrians and cyclists, but electric scooters and bicycles that are moving a lot faster and just as easy to miss.
Bad drivers won’t heed any driving tips. It’s an exercise in futility. Actual negative consequences like heavy fines and driving license suspensions must be brought to bear upon them.
I largely agree, I just don’t like to see bicyclists singled out when they may not even be the biggest hazard on the road.