Bike at the Risk of Death

This is a great article/commentary in the Tribune by Seminole Heights Alan Snel (Bike Stories blog). I am publishing in full so this topic gets full expsosure. I agree with Alan.

No Place For Safe Ride

By ALAN SNEL

Published: Mar 18, 2007

I was bicycling home from a meeting recently in Tampa when I heard the rumble of a HARTline bus behind me. Most bus drivers know to give a cyclist at least three feet of law-required buffer space when they pass.

But this bus nearly sideswiped me into oblivion. I felt the whoosh of the bus on my left shoulder and arm. The Route 12 Hartline bus came within a credit card's width of striking me. I was angry, and I could only shake my head at the irony of coaxing the city of Tampa just last year into installing "Share the Road" signs on this particular two-lane road - Rowlett Park Drive. This road had neither a shoulder nor a bike lane.

I asked myself as a bicyclist, what do I have to do to stay alive on the roads around here?

On this particular ride home, there were danger spots all over the place - debris at several intersections where I had to negotiate everything from glass to nails to pieces of metal; bike lanes (I was lucky to find one) that mysteriously end in mid-road; and the drivers who not-so-politely advised me to get off the road.

The bus nearly hit me while I was pedaling home from an afternoon meeting of the Tampa Alcohol Coalition, a group of community leaders and local police who fight drunk driving and underage drinking. The coalition includes a few Department of Transportation folks who also work on a local community traffic safety committee. One of the DOT folks is a pleasant woman who was stunned that I actually biked to this meeting, which was held at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino at Orient Road and Hillsborough Avenue.

You'd think that a local DOT person would say, "Hey, that's great that you're biking to meetings. One less car on the road."

Instead, I got, "That's crazy."

The fact this polite DOT woman told me it was "crazy" to bike to the meeting speaks volumes of how the folks who design and build around here feel about bicyclists.

What this nice DOT lady was actually saying was that it's dangerous to bike on the roads around here - a sad and indicting commentary when you consider she works for the state road agency that designs and builds those same roads.

No Safe Refuge
If you're in your 30s or older, do you remember how you got around when you were a kid? That's right. You hopped on your bike and pedaled to your friend's house or the store or the ball field.

But let me ask you this: Would you let your kids ride a bike on the roads around here? I thought so - you'd say the roads are too dangerous.

That's what people tell me when I meet them on the road while I bike. I bike more than 10,000 miles a year on the roads around the Tampa Bay area - everywhere from downtown Tampa to the rural roads of east Hillsborough County to the busy commercial roads of Pinellas County. You may strap on your car's seat belt and turn on your ignition. But I strap on my helmet and start turning my pedals. That's how I get around a lot of the time.

People who I meet when I'm biking tell me they want to bike, too. And many do bike - they just seek refuge on sidewalks - a place that's actually more dangerous because drivers usually don't expect a bicyclist crossing an intersection on the sidewalk.

But why are our roads here in the Tampa bay area - especially in Tampa and Hillsborough County - so inhospitable to bicyclists? I have lived here in Tampa for three years, and it is my assessment that little has been done on local roads to make me feel safer as a cyclist.

From my vantage point, the vast majority of elected political leaders, the transportation engineers and the officials who call the shots on designing, building and maintaining our roads seem to have an institutional bias against bicycles because their priority is building speedways for cars instead of roads that all forms of transportation can use. What other conclusion can I reach when I see so few bike lanes and Share the Road signs in Hillsborough County and Tampa, for example.

In the city of Tampa, there are obvious roads that would be ideal bike-commuter roads that have no bike lanes. These are wide, one-way roads with at least three car lanes such as Platt Street, Florida Avenue and Armenia Avenue. There's space for a bike lane on the side. Why not paint a bike lane so that the city can encourage bike-commuting into downtown Tampa?

Check out Bayshore Boulevard, the city's so-called signature thoroughfare. On one side of the road, there's not a bike lane. On the other side, there is a bike lane. But like so many bike lanes around here, it just ends in mid-road. In fact, while I was biking home from that recent meeting, I was following a bike lane on Bullard Parkway that mysteriously disappeared in the Temple Terrace area. Bike lanes: Now you see 'em (if you can find one). Now you don't.

Then, there's the Bruce B. Downs corridor in the New Tampa area. The first time I biked this road more than three years ago I asked myself, "What the hell is this?" Some sections of the road have space on the side; other sections of the road have zero space for a bicycle. When Hillsborough County unveiled its original plan to widen this road, the proposal did not even have a bike lane - see what I mean about a local transportation culture that does not protect bicyclists?

Only after protests from cyclists did the county reduce the width of car lanes to come up with three feet for bicyclists on the side. If you get the chance, check out how they want bicyclists to get around the new proposed I-75 interchange area on Bruce B. Downs. Instead of building bike lanes for road cyclists to follow through the interchange area, the road engineers proposed that bicyclists cross I-75 entry and exit ramps where cars are zooming at high speeds.

Last November, I, along with two local Tampa bike stores, put the county and DOT on notice that the proposed I-75 interchange area is dangerous and that a Bruce B. Downs Boulevard that is widened without official bike lanes puts the county at liability because road projects are supposed to have bike lanes where possible in Florida. We asked to meet the county and the DOT. We got blown off.

Indifference to Fatalities
Bicyclists in Florida die at a higher rate than bicyclists in any other state in the country. In fact, Florida earns this dubious distinction on an annual basis. You'd think that transportation engineers would make it a priority to build and maintain safe roads.

But the sad thing is that even when bicyclists die around here it doesn't seem to shake people up. A bicyclist died around the New Year near Bruce B. Downs at the Hillsborough-Pasco county line. No outrage. Just another casualty that helps Florida realize its dreadful distinction of having the highest bicyclist fatality rate in the country.

We have road congestion. We have overweight people. We have warm weather. We have flat terrain. People should be biking around here.

More would if we committed the public resources to make it happen. But we have to be committed to a new attitude - that bicycles make our communities a better place to live.

Not all is gloomy. We have a good example of a local government that has a good attitude about bicycling. Tampa should look at the city of St. Petersburg, which was recognized by the League of American Bicyclists as a bicycle-friendly city last year. Check out St. Pete. There are bike lanes. Even the letter carriers bike around downtown. It's a place where bicyclists are out there because that city decided to make it a more inviting place for cyclists. This spring there are several organized bicycle rides and a bike-to-work campaign in May that are sure to generate interest.

But it's unfair for transportation officials and engineers to tell us there are not enough bicycles on the roads to warrant more space and resources for us bicyclists. They're not out there on the roads because transportation engineers are not building roads that are perceived as safe by people who want to ride two-wheelers.

Fix roads and build better roads for bicyclists. And we shall come.

Alan Snel, a former Tribune reporter, has twice biked solo across the country. He writes a bicycle blog at www.alansnel.com and promotes cycling for six Tampa Bay area bicycle stores.