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The Daily News' Stu Bykofsky and I have a little back-and-forth going over the bike lanes on Spruce and Pine, and today I invited (okay, challenged) Stu to take a bike ride with me and CP's Isaiah Thompson first down a city street without a dedicated bike lane and a city street with one.
Last week, in my editor's letter, I accused Stu of being a bully. And this morning, Stu sent me an e-mail that read:
"Stu bullies motorists today. Don't miss it!"
And I'll hand it to Stu for sticking it to the maniacs who find it acceptable to operate their two-ton steel, glass and vinyl weapons on residential city streets while texting, dialing and/or talking on cell phone.
And though I take issue with his use of statistics in some of his bike lane pieces, he's got good numerical backup in this morning's piece:
That cellphone use creates deadly distracted driving is disputed by no (sane) person I could find - and I even looked on the Internet, the corkscrew colony for crackpot contrarians.
Cell-phone use quadruples the risk of an auto accident, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It causes 636,000 crashes, 330,000 injuries and 2,600 deaths annually, according to the Harvard Center of Risk Analysis, which estimates the cost at $43 billion.
All age groups use cell phones while driving, but it creates an unusual effect among the young - the least experienced drivers and the most cell-addicted:
"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," says University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."
Is it an easy target? Sure. But a very worthwhile one nonetheless. In the piece, Byko makes enforcement suggestions that would be well applied to cyclists as well.
Drivers have been warned, but many continue to roam with phones in hand. Does this come from a misplaced sense of entitlement - or no sense at all?
Why do they persist? Not enough enforcement.
Solution? Blanket enforcement.
For a week, police should stop and ticket every violator they see. They are not hard to find.
Skip a few weeks, then repeat as often as necessary to drive the fear of enforcement - and the $75 fine - through their gooney-bird skulls.
To all the people who complain about scofflaw cyclists — yes, there are cyclists who bend and snap the law. And the reason they do is that there's next to zero enforcement (and that cyclists are regularly treated as non-entities by the police and drivers).
I tend to agree on the downside of bike lanes. Also the mentality of 20 year olds driving while texting (in my opinion) is far more dangerous than an 80 year old driver with limited vision. On the other side.. cyclists need to adhere to the same laws and they need to be strictly enforced. Things would be much simpler if that were to happen. Myself, I don't see it happening in the near future. It's going to take a major catastrophe before something is done. Same as everything else in our lovely city. I rest my case!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Philly News Now, Yancey @YanceyG. Yancey @YanceyG said: Stu sticks it to drivers: The Daily News‘ Stu Bykofsky and I have a little back-and-forth going over the bike lane... http://bit.ly/cxIiLY [...]
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