Some politicians are willing to say anything to win. Check out this reporting about the proposed ban on bicycles on some state highways in St. Charles County:
At a St. Charles County Council meeting last night, Councilman Joe Brazil came prepared with statistics in hand. In his push to ban bikes from certain rural two-lane roads in the county, Brazil cited some alarming numbers: 14 fatalities in the last 16 months, as well as “over a hundred serious vehicle accidents,” owing to the lack of shoulder on the roads.
With those numbers, that would be nearly a death a month and a serious accident a week for nearly the last year and a half. Wouldn’t someone have noticed if bikers in the cyclist-heavy county were being picked off one-by-one?
With that in mind, we gave Brazil a buzz this morning to ask him the names of bikers who had been killed on the roads — if bike fatalities are this much of a problem, maybe the ban shouldn’t have been tabled for another month, as it was at the meeting last night.
As it turns out, exactly NONE of the fatalities Brazil mentioned were bikers. Holy misleading use of statistics, Batman!
Comments 3
But isn’t Brazil’s premise that the presence of cyclists creates a danger to motorists? As I read this situation, it was prompted by the injuries suffered when that teenage girl ran her Lexus SUV off the highway when she took evasive action to avoid a cyclist and lost control of her vehicle.
Now I’d bet that none of the motorist fatalities was related to the presence of cyclists either, and I’d posit that the real problem is the mass delusion here in America that rural road infrastructure can support exurban residential land use and traffic flow.
If slow moving road users are the problem, let’s outlaw farm equipment.
Posted 17 Jul 2010 at 9:36 am ¶JAT… Agreed re: exurban land use and traffic flow.
Posted 17 Jul 2010 at 10:02 am ¶+ 1
That has been a huge source of contention here. Roads cyclists have enjoyed for decades are now over-run with exurban traffic.
Posted 17 Jul 2010 at 6:36 pm ¶