Hello City Council Members,
Thank you all for the excellent discussion and feedback around the Santa Cruz street closure.
There was also some interesting discussion regarding encouraging and ensuring safe biking in that area. While I 100% agree that bike safety is important, I fear that some of the discussion last night might have been misguided around a few elements in particular:
1. Bikers not stopping at stop signs
* It is actually safer for bikers to treat stop signs as a "yield". After passing a law as such, Delaware saw a 23% reduction in crashes involving bicycles at intersections. Idaho as a 14.5% reduction. 11 states have now passed similar bills into law, and there are bills in the California legislature that would allow this as well.
* This primarily works because it decreases exposure for a bicycle in the intersection, where they are at risk to injury by cars entering or turning through the intersection (or even hitting them from behind by drivers who arent paying attention).
2. Safety to bikers overall
* Im super excited about how much interest there is by the council for our kids being able to bike safely, but bike education is not the primary issue with kid and biker safety. The far-and-away primary risk to bikers is cars. Cars injure and kill bikers when they are driving too fast, when they arent paying attention, when there isnt a bike lane so a car squeezes by a biker on a narrow road, and when going in and out of parking spots.
* If there is one thing we can do to help out the safety of our bikers (young, old, and in between) it would be to keep approving and promoting the various complete-street improvements as they come to the City Council.
All that said, I agree that we dont want anyone to be biking recklessly and endangering themselves or pedestrians. But I find those to be secondary to the primary safety issues we face.
Thank you.
-Ross
