My recent article on educating the police has been published in Momentum Magazine. The focus is on Robert Johnson of PedNet in Columbia, Missouri and the efforts there to create an effective partnership with police. From the article:
Robert Johnson, the education coordinator for PedNet in Columbia, Missouri, will look you right in the eye and claim that encouraging police to enforce traffic laws for bicyclists increases ridership.
Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But Johnson has the results to prove it.
Johnson is a Carbon Trace reader and a frequent commenter.
Comments 6
Thank you! I sent this to the rest of the team that’s working on our law enforcement education program.
Posted 18 Nov 2009 at 3:43 pm ¶Keri… Robert’s POST program has recently been certified. You may wish to contact him for details.
Posted 18 Nov 2009 at 4:00 pm ¶Dr. Cline, I have referenced this posting and your article in the comments on a post at CycleDallas:
http://cycledallas.blogspot.com/2009/11/are-you-listening-tbc.html
The comments following the article was spirited over the idea of enforcing bicycle laws.
Thank you for highlighting it or I wouldn’t have seen it!
Tailwinds!
Posted 18 Nov 2009 at 5:04 pm ¶Chip… Cool! I’ll check it out.
Posted 18 Nov 2009 at 11:12 pm ¶I agree that increased (and proper) enforcement can help normalize cycling, and that that would in turn increase it, but the article didn’t actually “prove” it with any sort of data, even anecdotal. And even with data, disentangling enforcement from other factors — new facilities, gas prices, cycling courses, demographic changes — is very difficult.
Posted 19 Nov 2009 at 10:00 am ¶Mighk… The data got cut from the published version. And I agree that disentangling enforcement from other data is difficult. But PedNet makes a compelling case — good enough in my mind to warrant coverage of their work.
Posted 19 Nov 2009 at 10:43 am ¶