Salt Lake City is swarming with drivers and bicyclists. Bikers are routinely cut off by cars swerving to avoid them. Data from the Utah Department of Health shows there are, on average, more than bicycle accidents every day in Salt Lake County, with a total of 800 reported a year. Fortunately, deaths are rare, but that is small consolation to people on the streets dodging one another.
Joseph Amici, a senior film major who bikes to class five days a week, has had some negative experiences.
“On campus between the stadium and the TRAX line, I was once clipped by someone’s mirror because they thought they could pass me in such a narrow area,” he said.
That street, like many in Salt Lake City, is lacking a bicycle lane, and those traveling on it are put at risk.
The people at City Hall have noticed the problem, but have so far addressed the issue vaguely at best.
Dan Bergenthal, a transport engineer for the city, said the mayor’s office has begun discussing ways to alleviate the problems for bicyclists but has no plans.
“Education is the biggest thing we need to reduce bicycle accidents,” he said, noting most accidents are caused by illegal activity.
Bergenthal said that bike lanes do not, statistically speaking, reduce the rate of accidents. A study by Jerrold Kaplan at the University of Maryland found bike lanes did nothing to prevent accidents. Installing bike lanes causes narrower roads, providing more opportunity for accidents. Education thus seems to be a better and more efficient fix.
However, Kaplan’s study is now more than 30 years old. Since then, there have been several refutations, most notably a 1996 study by former University of Washington professor, William Moritz. His study suggested that bike lanes, far from causing more accidents, decrease them by 38 to 56 percent on major and minor streets respectively.
Education might be an important method for minimizing accidents. The current state driver education system gives drivers little to no direction on what to expect from bicyclists. The argument that education will be a better solution than building bike lanes is predicated on the false hope that education alone will be enough. How education would end the lack of space allotted to bicyclists on city streets is anyone’s guess. The problem of bike lanes narrowing city streets isn’t a large problem in Salt Lake City. With very wide streets, tacking on a bike lane would be much easier here than elsewhere. At the very least, bike lanes will make traffic more convenient and less nerve-racking.
To attempt to solve this problem with education alone, however, sounds like a cost-effective cop-out. Let’s get real. Let’s build more bike lanes.
Aaron Shaddy