So I wrote a letter to the editor of The Standard, our MSU student newspaper:
It’s great to see so many bicycles filling the racks around MSU and to see so many students on the streets around campus and downtown.
I know you’re used to hearing yourselves referred to as “kids” by your fellow adults in power at the university. You are, however, adults.
I’d like to persuade you not ride your bicycles like children.
Children are selfish riders – riding where they please and how they please no matter how it may inconvenience or endanger others. Adults generally put up with childish riding behavior because, well, kids are kids and deserve a little tolerance while they learn.
Those days are over for you.
It’s time to learn to drive your bicycle in traffic as a legal and legitimate part of traffic. It is clearly the safest way to ride.
I want to help. You can begin your journey to bicycle adulthood by reading carbontrace.net – my blog about burning calories instead of carbon. Also be sure to check out the “Drive Less, Live More” booklet.
It was published by Ozark Greenways, and it is linked on the sidebar. And I’m happy to help you in any way that I can. Feel free to drop by my office in Craig Hall 384 to chat.
Springfield recently earned a well-deserved, bronze-level Bicycle Friendly City award from the League of American Bicyclists. You’ve come to the right place to enjoy the pleasures of riding for basic transportation. Welcome!
Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Journalism
This idea also occurred to Robert Johnson of PedNet in Columbia, Missouri. He wrote a column for the Columbia Daily Tribune (in part):
Dear College Students,
Welcome to Columbia! I see many of you brought your bicycles, and that is fantastic. It’s a great way to ward off the Freshman 15, be environmentally friendly and avoid the parking hassle. I’d like to give you a few tips that should help make bicycling easier for you and for the rest of the bicyclists and motorists in Columbia.
First, your bicycle is a vehicle, and you will be safer if you keep that in mind. Before taking off down the wrong side of the street, at night, without lights and running stop signs, ask yourself whether you would do this if you were driving a car.
The answer, I hope, is no. Think about “driving” your bike like you would drive a car, and you will be a better rider than most of your fellow students.
Johnson goes on to point out that college students who ride like children make his job as a bicycle advocate more difficult. I’ll add that bicyclists who ride like children make the lives of adult riders more difficult. How? By providing motorists a salient exemplar with which to create negative assumptions about all bicyclists. That’s a fancy way of saying that by acting like a jerk you allow motorists to assume all of us are jerks.
Here’s an easy, although not exhaustive, way to know what kind of rider you are:
- If you blow through stop signs and red lights because you think riding a bicycle gives you that right, you’re riding like a child.
- If you ride on the wrong side of the road because you think it’s safer, you’re riding like a child.
- If you ride on the sidewalks downtown, you’re riding like a child.
- If you ride at night without lights, you’re riding like a child.
Comments 8
Great work. Let us know how many students come by your office.
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 12:05 pm ¶What is the correct way to ride? I have a short attention span… Oh, look a girl in short-shorts!!! Hey, dude, chug… chug… chug…
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 12:23 pm ¶Keith…
Robert… None yet.
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 1:19 pm ¶That last paragraph is like an odd bit from Jeff Foxworthy.
Am I riding like a child if I stop at stop signs, but I have baseball cards in my spokes?
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 2:13 pm ¶I wonder if the issue isn’t that they’re riding like children but that they’re riding like pedestrians.
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 3:07 pm ¶A.J. … Yes, I was channeling my inner Foxworthy
Matthew… Interesting article. Thanks for the link.
Posted 08 Sep 2010 at 7:53 pm ¶I think this approach is brilliant. It seems particularly well suited to the college newspaper in a medium sized city. A) medium sized cities have traffic, B) college students tend to read the college paper, and C) as a professor you are part of their immediate community.
Consider the transition from pre-motorist to fully fledged motorist – there’s training, examination and licensing, that is to say an indoctrination to the rules and culture (ugh – sorry) of traffic; similarly I think there are rites of passage (I maybe am stretching things here…) the transition from Missouri high school senior to Missouri college student – you pack your stuff into the back of the family station wagon and go to a new place with new people and places to go and routes to get there; if you’re a motorist or if you’re using public transit you need to learn the way around – where the one-way streets are and so forth.
On the other hand we don’t (well, before your letter to the editor) have similar formal transitions from child-cyclist to adult cyclist. If you rode like a child until you got your license and didn’t really ride again until you arrive in Springfield or Columbia, you’re likely to ride like a child again.
Now I’m not advocating licensing for cyclists (I’m not opposed to it other than on sheer financial inefficiency reasons; I’m just not advocating it…) but perhaps we need to point out that the time for riding like an adult starts much earlier. Before the usefulness of a bicycle is obliterated by the availability of a learners permit, we as a culture (there’s that painfully amorphous word again) should create a universal, shared and recognized transition from child cyclist to adult cyclist.
Posted 09 Sep 2010 at 6:25 pm ¶The transition might be easier if a child was taught to be a bicycle driver when s/he was capable of the judgment to leave the driveway or playground on the bike. Heck, this would make them better car drivers, and it might even reduce the urgency to get a car.
The great fallacy that children should ride on sidewalks leads people to ride like children for too long. If a child doesn’t have the judgment and skill to ride properly on the street, they sure don’t have the superior judgment and skill to handle the conflicts of sidewalk riding.
Posted 10 Sep 2010 at 10:06 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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