When I was in Utrecht last year, bicycles danced and swayed in the morning and evening rush hour. They did not collide. This felt strange to me, because I expected stupidity from other users. Also, I was one of the stupidest road users, being unfamiliar with the “secret rules” of the Dutch fietspad, like holding a straight line. (Image created by DeeVid.)
Somehow, no one hit me. I think it was instinctive on the part of other fietsers. They saw I was an idiot and avoided me. Even on a crowded fietspad (and the pads east of Utrecht Centraal are very crowded) everyone stayed safe.
American bike paths aren’t that way. That’s partly because so many of us aren’t accustomed to seeing other users. If you filled Memorial Drive with bikes as in Utrecht, you’d have more crashes than on I-75.
But there’s a second issue. American paths, unlike their Dutch counterparts, are “shared use.”
It’s the math of relative speed. There are pedestrians on the Beltline. They travel at maybe 3 mph. Sometimes they veer across the path for no reason. That’s walkers behave, or like I did in Utrecht. Then there are bikes. Most are traveling at about 10 mph, and you feel in the saddle like a horse being reined in. A normal biking speed is 12-15.
In any case, you’ve got people going at 3 and others at 15, all on the same path.
It’s a recipe for disaster. This is why I continue to harp on paving the second path along the East Beltline and adding rail when that becomes popular.
Relative speeds demand it. A bike path is not a sidewalk.
Now Add Autonomy
We avoid the worst collisions when we’re in control of ourselves or our vehicles. But what happens when you add autonomous vehicles to the mix?
A friend at Georgia Tech ran into this the other day. He literally ran into it. A delivery robot crossed the path of his e-bike while he was riding to work. He stopped. The robot stopped. He tried to move, then so did the robot. They collided.
They’re both OK, for now. The collision happened at walking speed. On a shared sidewalk, the robot deserves the right of way, assuming of course that the cyclist understands what the robot is doing. But these kinds of things are going to become commonplace, and the relative speeds of these collisions are going to increase.
It’s easy to avoid the robot if you’re walking and it’s moving at a walking pace. It’s much harder if you’re moving at 10 mph on an e-bike and the robot is at 3 mph, a walking pace. Unlike Utrecht cyclists, robots can’t pick up on those delicate cues showing the tourist is an idiot, which keep fietsers safe on the fietspad. Robots can’t read minds, and we can’t read the minds of robots.
Someone is going to be hurt.
A Simple Solution
Separate the walking path from the biking path, even if it’s only with paint. Program the robot to stay in its lane. Then you give the robot and the walkers right of way and expect bikes to respect that.
This is how shared streets work. The slower vehicle, the one that can’t turn, the one that can be hurt most easily, gets the right of way. Pedestrians get right of way on a shared bike path. Robots stay in their lane. On a shared street, the bikes and e-bikes have the right-of-way. Cars are guests. That’s difficult for drivers to understand but it’s vital they be educated on that.
On roads with two car lanes in each direction, you shouldn’t be out on a bike unless you have a safe bike path. This is the infrastructure we need to focus on building. Not just where it’s convenient, but everywhere. I want to ride my e-bike along Buford Highway, along Roswell Road and along South Cobb Drive. I can’t unless I have the necessary infrastructure, because of the slow relative speed of my bike.
Most cyclist deaths in Georgia happen because of this difference in relative speed. They happen on four-lane or five-lane roads, or they happen on two-lane roads in the countryside that drivers treat as four-lane roads. You wouldn’t expect drivers to see someone walking on those roads and you shouldn’t make people bike on them.
Separate users based on speed. A simple solution can be expensive to implement, but everyone deserves access to safety.
