{"id":5362,"date":"2013-10-09T07:21:56","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T14:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wabikes.org\/?p=5362"},"modified":"2013-10-09T08:56:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T15:56:31","slug":"message-to-senate-trasportation-committee-saftey-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wabikes.org\/index.php\/2013\/10\/09\/message-to-senate-trasportation-committee-saftey-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Message to Senate Transportation Committee: Safety First!"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday evening, October 2, I testified at a state Transportation\u00a0Committee Hearing at Central Valley High School in Spokane Valley. Two minutes proved to be too\u00a0short to say what I’d intended. I told an abbreviated version of this story\u00a0without really getting to the point I meant it to convey.<\/p>\n

The location of the hearing was particularly fitting\u2014the nexus of my entry\u00a0into bicycle advocacy.<\/p>\n

All three of my children graduated from Central Valley High School. The street\u00a0that runs in front of the school is Sullivan Road. Every Wednesday evening\u00a0from March to November with rare exception, I ride on Sullivan Road past the\u00a0school to my local bike shop, Wheel Sport East, where I meet a group of 20-50\u00a0other cyclists for a weekly group road ride\u2014a ride I missed in order to\u00a0testify.<\/p>\n

\"truck-crash\"<\/a>

The vehicle I collided with in front of Central Valley High School<\/p><\/div>\n

On a September morning some years ago, while my oldest son was sitting down to\u00a0his first class of the day, I was riding my bike past Central Valley High\u00a0School on my way to work. A fellow student of his, a young man with a drivers\u00a0license barely 2 weeks old, made an unexpected and illegal left turn in front of\u00a0me. I made a bone crushing impact into the side of his vehicle and landed in a\u00a0heap in the middle of Sullivan Road. With sirens in the distance growing\u00a0closer, the young man stood briefly over me as a small crowd gathered and a\u00a0kind stranger held my head and the one hand that still looked anatomically\u00a0correct. Then he turned and left\u2014off to class.<\/p>\n

My wife had dropped my son off at school and noticed the traffic back-up, but\u00a0hadn’t seen me laying in the road and my crumpled bike tossed aside. She got\u00a0the call shortly after she returned home. My son met her in front of the high\u00a0school and they gathered the rest of the family to meet me at the hospital.<\/p>\n

Weeks later, still in a surgical cast, bones repaired with plates and screws,\u00a0I sat in a traffic court witness box where the young man had contested\u00a0his citation for failure to yield.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t hit him. He hit me!” he argued, father at his side, coaching him.<\/p>\n

“Why did you leave the scene and go to class?” the judge asked.<\/p>\n

“He was on a bike. He wasn’t in a car. He shouldn’t have been there! It had\u00a0nothing to do with me.”<\/p>\n

I’ve endured shouts, had things thrown at me, been run off the road, spit on,\u00a0even pepper-sprayed by a motorist at a stoplight irate that I was occupying\u00a0a traffic lane\u2014no matter that there were 2 lanes each way and we were the\u00a0only two vehicles on the road at the time. To be severely injured, however,\u00a0nearly killed by another human being who felt no remorse or responsibly\u00a0because he assumed I just simply didn’t belong is his way was unbearable.<\/p>\n

I began advocating for bicycling shortly afterwards\u2014responding to anti-bike\u00a0letters to the editor, commenting at city council meetings on issues of\u00a0transportation safety, and eventually accepting a volunteer position on the\u00a0board of directors at Washington Bikes.<\/p>\n

\"sullivan-rd-w-trail-a-bike\"<\/a>

On the way to Spokefest with my 4-year-old granddaughter.<\/p><\/div>\n

A lot has changed since that accident. Spokane Valley is a safer place to ride.\u00a0We have bike lanes and designated bike routes that didn’t exist then. On a\u00a0Sunday morning last month, had you been up early, you might have seen me riding\u00a0past Central Valley High School with my four-year-old granddaughter on a\u00a0Trail-a-Bike behind me. We rode a section of Sullivan road with a bike\u00a0lane\u2014new since the accident. We also road the same, narrower section without\u00a0a bike lane directly in front of the school, past the very spot where I laid\u00a0in the road while her father-to-be was arriving for classes.<\/p>\n

I passed that spot, as I usually do, without even a thought to the past\u2014happy\u00a0at that moment to be sharing my love of cycling with my granddaughter. Happy to\u00a0join some other cyclists at my local bike shop on Sullivan Road and ride with\u00a0them downtown to Spokefest, an annual event, also new since that accident. We\u00a0joined nearly two-thousand other cyclists\u2014two thousand!\u2014for a celebration\u00a0of our favorite form of transportation\u2014cycling!<\/p>\n

Much has changed. Much has not. Although fewer, I still endure shouts from\u00a0passing cars ordering me off the road. “Idiot! You’re not a car!” one young man\u00a0shouted recently from a car on the other side of the road. I laughed out loud.\u00a0Indeed. I’m not a car. I’m a human being, a fellow traveller on the road, a\u00a0father, a grandfather, a husband\u2014happy to be enjoying the ability to ride and\u00a0the community I live in.<\/p>\n

I was accompanied to the hearing by a good friend, his arm in a sling, fresh\u00a0scars from surgery to repair a shattered collar bone. Three weeks prior, he\u00a0and I were on a group ride together. Coming down a hill from a neighborhood at\u00a0the south end of Sullivan Road he caught a wheel in a construction cut in the\u00a0pavement in the low light of dusk. It grabbed the wheel and pitched him over\u00a0the handlebars.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t a car. If the hole in the road had been big enough to damage a car,\u00a0there would have been barricades and flashing lights. But a bike? Why worry\u00a0about at hole in the road that’s only a danger to bicyclists?<\/p>\n

When revenue for transportation projects is tight and budgets constrained, bike\u00a0and pedestrian projects are often the first to go. The most vulnerable road\u00a0users\u2014bicyclists and pedestrians\u2014pay a disproportionate cost for those\u00a0cuts. They pay with broken bones and lives. And unnecessarily.<\/p>\n

Bicyclists and pedestrians help stretch our vital transportation funds. They\u00a0relieve pressure on roads with limited capacity. Every bike on the road leaves\u00a0more room for the remaining automobile traffic, and more parking space at their\u00a0destinations. They cause less wear and tear. There are a long list of benefits\u00a0to both the motorists and the individuals who choose to walk or bike.<\/p>\n

When budgets are tight, our first concern should still be safety.<\/p>\n

So, the hearing at Central Valley High School was very close to home,\u00a0literally and metaphorically. I sat there wondering if my granddaughter\u00a0would some day sit in the same theater as a student. And I wondered if\u00a0she’d be able ride her bike to school safely past the spot where I laid\u00a0in the road, broken. I hope so. I intend to do all I can to ensure it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday evening, October 2, I testified at a state Transportation\u00a0Committee Hearing at Central Valley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[18,49,45,13,29,53,15,23,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocacy","category-attitudes","category-bike-funding-policy-wa","category-bike-infrastructure-wa","category-wa-bikes-news","category-politics","category-safety","category-spokane-county-wa","category-transportation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMessage to Senate Transportation Committee: Safety First! 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