Bike vs. Car
A guide to who owns the road in Ann Arbor
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It was a deceptively cheerful October morning. I mounted my buttercup yellow Schwinn road bike and set off down South Division Street to begin the day. Little did I know, I would soon become a statistic.
I had a lot to do, and my backpack was stuffed; my bike's back tire surely felt the weight. I was pedaling hard, so I was pleased when I saw the familiar white LED lights that meant it was safe for me to cross the upcoming intersection.
I was riding on the sidewalk. I always rode on the sidewalk, despite the frustration of navigating through the tangles of oblivious pedestrians. Some people told me it was easier to ride on the street, but I didn't wear a helmet, and I wasn't comfortable with the idea of sharing a lane with a two-ton hunk of steel.
As I prepared to coast across Catherine Street, I noticed a Jeep approaching the intersection - but I remember feeling perfectly content because of the walk sign.
As I entered the intersection, I realized the Jeep wasn't going to stop. I was going too fast and there was nothing I could do, so I braced myself for impact.
The Jeep's bumper made contact with the left side of my body, and I came down hard on my right elbow. I thought I was a goner when the Jeep kept rolling forward, and I heard my bike crunching beneath its tires. Was the underside of an SUV really the last thing I would ever see?
I frantically tried to scramble out from under the treacherous tires, but my backpack had twisted my body and pinned me to the street. I felt my shoulder ripping as I tried to move, but I had too much adrenaline pumping in my veins to care.
Finally, the driver found the reverse gear and backed up, dragging my poor bike.
There I sat, dazed and confused in the middle of South Division. I remember looking up at the stop lights to see if I had done something wrong, but the white "Walk" sign was only just beginning to change to flashing red. I think I blacked out after that.
On the way to the emergency room, a police officer told me what had happened wasn't my fault. But riding a bike on the sidewalk is illegal in some places, so was I wrong to ride there? Would I have been safer on the street?
Mine wasn't the first bike versus car accident in Ann Arbor. The narrow, quaint lanes here don't exactly lend themselves to easy bike traffic - which might account for the contentious relationship between the city and the city's bikers. Are more bike lanes and wider roads really on the horizon? Cyclists and city planners might hope so, but it's no guarantee.
Later that week, I spoke with Lt. Michael Logghe of the Ann Arbor Police Department. He said most cities in the state of Michigan have ordinances that bicyclists must ride in the street and that it is illegal to ride on the sidewalk, but that's not the case in Ann Arbor.
Logghe said he thought it was relatively safe to ride on the sidewalks here, and that he didn't see a lot of bike-car accidents or bike-pedestrian accidents.
"For the number of bicyclists in this city, accident rates are fairly low," he said.
But Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje said that this policy will likely change to follow suit with the majority of Michigan cities within one or two years.
"Every organization that governs cycling or promotes it acknowledges that cyclists should not be on the sidewalk but should instead be in the street," he said in an e-mail.
"This is recommended by the Michigan Department of Transportation."
Radiation Oncology Graphic Designer Steve Kronenberg, who actively lobbies the city for bikers' rights, said there are a few reasons why this might be a good idea.
In part, it's because of initiatives by the city of Ann Arbor and the University to promote safer and more convenient bicycling.
Hieftje said improving conditions for cycling has been one of his top priorities for Ann Arbor while in office.
In 2002, the Ann Arbor City Council passed a budget amendment sponsored by Hieftje that allocated 5 percent of all state funds the city receives to improve the quality of the roads for "alternative transit," Hieftje said in an e-mail.
"A2 is the only government in the state that does this," he said.
In March 2006, Bicycle Magazine declared Ann Arbor to be the third best city in the country for cycling among cities of 75,000 to 200,000 residents.
The University is currently involved in a project with the city called the Non-motorized Transportation Plan that plans to triple the 18 miles of existing bike lanes in the city in five years and add more bike lockers.
Hieftje noted Packard Street, Liberty Street and Stadium Boulevard as roadways that have recently made room for bike lanes.
University Planner Sue Gott said the Non-motorized Transportation Plan provides insight to the University on how to seamlessly align with the city to improve bicycling conditions on campus.
"We want to make it safe and convenient and accessible and understand what the barriers are for more bicycle use and attempt to minimize those," Gott said.
She said the University is motivated to promote bicycle use by a number of things.
"Certainly if we can reduce auto use we're reducing emissions, and we're not needing to spend as much money on parking structures, and we're able to use land for purposes other than vehicles," she said.
Kronenberg also sees the value of bicycling. "There's health costs, there's social costs, there's planetary costs and there's quality of life issues," he said.
Kronenberg said he is concerned about making the streets a safer place for bicycles to operate because they are public and cars and bicyclists alike should have equal access to them. He said he attended the hearing for the Non-motorized Transportation Plan and has testified in support of bicyclists on many occasions.
"The law makes it clear that bikes do belong," he said. "Although if you asked a question on a drivers' exam that asked if bicyclists have the same right to the road cars do, most people would say false, but it's actually true."
But while drivers have a responsibility to treat bicyclists with respect, bicyclists also have a responsibility to follow the traffic laws. "And not behave like circus monkeys on LSD," Kronenberg said, "which is what you often see on campus. Cyclists don't regard themselves as having to follow the rules of the road and that makes it dangerous for them."
Although he acknowledged that college students aren't the only ones to blame, he ventured that they think of unsafe bicycling as "a counterculture thing," as if not following traffic laws and riding the wrong way down one-way streets is and expression of rugged individualism.
"The net result is it makes it difficult for other people to cycle because it makes an unpredictable and antagonistic environment," Kronenberg said.
LSA junior Anthony Chen, a member of the East Quad Bike Co-Op, said he has lots of experience on riding a bicycle on campus. While he said he's seen a lot of unskilled drivers who cause problems - and unskilled bikers - the recklessness usually lies with the driver, for one reason: "no one on a bike wants to get hit by a car."
"Actually, bad cycling doesn't happen on the roads that often," Chen said. "In an accident, it's fairly obvious which party will lose."
Kronenberg agreed and said that for an auto driver involved in a close call with a bicycle, it's merely a near miss and there are few to no consequences the driver will face. But for the cyclist, "It leaves them traumatized."
According to Hieftje, one of the biggest barriers is the lack of education motorists and bicyclists have about road etiquette.
"I am a regular cyclist myself, and I believe the biggest problem we have is motorists
and cyclists who do not obey traffic laws," he said in the e-mail. "Like others who ride here, I have had to jump off my bike and over curbs."
Kronenberg is no stranger to close calls with cars on his bike. He said he hasn't had an actual collision in quite a while, but he once collided with a car and was flipped over the hood.
"(The driver) got out and said, 'Lucky for you, you didn't wreck my car,' and they drove off," Kronenberg said.
Kronenberg has made it his personal goal to change these kinds of driver attitudes about bicyclists.
"The lanes themselves and all this infrastructure isn't going to have an appreciable difference for the safety of cyclists until the culture changes," he said. "Culture comes about through education, and education is what we do in Ann Arbor."
Hieftje said education is difficult because almost half of the drivers in Ann Arbor at any given time are from somewhere else, and it would take time to change driver behavior.
To help with this, he plans to oversee the installation of more instructional signs.
"We're putting 'Share the Road' signs all over the road," Hieftje said, referring to the mantra he said everyone needs to embrace.
"I often tell motorists who complain to me about cyclists that they should welcome cyclists," he said. "It saves them a parking place, reduces congestion and keeps our air cleaner."