Step one, DO NOT WATCH THESE VIDEOS by the AAA and the LAB!!!
Oooops. You watched them, didn’t you? And after I told you not to.
So, is it clear why theses are bad videos?
Here’s a hint: lane positioning.
It simply cannot be that these videos are a mistake and that Andy Clarke, president of the LAB, isn’t entirely aware of what these videos show. Therefore, it is my entirely reasonable conclusion that he hasn’t a clue about proper, safe lane positioning.
IMO, lane positioning (including following the rules and general traffic awareness) — not bright colors and helmets — is what keeps you safe on the road. But, I suppose wearing bright colors and helmets helps the bicyclists in these videos, seeing as how they have put themselves in danger by riding too far to the right. So yeah, better wear the Day-glo and helmet.
Comments 19
Unfortunately, I believe the lane positioning is not the worst item in that video.
Posted 18 May 2012 at 12:32 pm ¶Not that the lane positioning was anything other than horrible and even apparently illegal in a few spots.
Posted 18 May 2012 at 12:34 pm ¶Steve – What was the worst thing? C’mon, you tease monkey!
Posted 18 May 2012 at 1:11 pm ¶Steve… Inquiring minds want to know
Posted 18 May 2012 at 1:44 pm ¶First. Watch the first video from 2:17 to 2:27. Next, imagine you are the defense lawyer for a motorist who hit a cyclist that was operating safely and legally through your client’s inattention – and you need to find a way out for your client. With this video, you can claim that even the President of LAB knows that a cyclist not wearing a helmet and a high vis outfit is negligent! After all, this is something cyclists NEED to do. Ten seconds of video in front of a motorist jury and the duty to exercise due care is obviated by the clear negligence due to the cyclist not wearing high vis clothing. Had that cyclist been doing what he SHOULD have been doing, no collision would have occurred. Now we’ve got a case for AT LEAST contributory negligence on the part of the cyclist in dark or even regular clothing.
At least the lane position videos didn’t come right out of Andy Clarke’s own mouth the way the “bright and helmet” stuff did.
I do not have a problem if Andy Clarke had said that high vis is a good idea, or even if he had said that it can be helpful. But that isn’t what he said. Basically, in the ears of a jury, I may be considered at fault if I do not have a clown outfit on, regardless of what else I’m doing and regardless of what else the motorist is doing. I think the term John Forester used was “hunting license.”
Yeah, I’m a little irritated. Almost grumpy…
Posted 18 May 2012 at 2:31 pm ¶Unfortunately, my “Grumpy” shirt isn’t high vis…
Posted 18 May 2012 at 2:33 pm ¶Steve… Good catch! Your grumpiness is appropriate. I was so busy watching the gutterbunnying that the yammering went right by me
Posted 18 May 2012 at 2:35 pm ¶Gutter Bunnies and bike clubs! Did I miss the part about commuters?
Posted 18 May 2012 at 3:22 pm ¶Those videos are pretty sad, though I must say I’m not all that surprised. LAB is losing focus on active approaches to cycling safety such as lane positioning and control, and instead choosing to focus on passive defenses such as helmets and bright clothing. In short, they are giving up on teaching people how to ride and hoping that visibility and armor will achieve the same result. I think it’s a short-sighted approach indeed.
Posted 18 May 2012 at 8:04 pm ¶Andy doesn’t even actually wear a helmet when he rides. In fact, he’s rather “anti-helmet” and only wears one in public appearances like this.
Posted 18 May 2012 at 11:29 pm ¶On a possibly related subject, I must say AAA’s Rhonda Shah is a little minx! Maybe Andy Clarke got too distracted by her potentially amazing body (cunningly hidden under the various AAA logos she’s sporting) to notice the gutter bunny.
If I were standing next to her, she’d distract me. I want to protect her… yeah, ‘protect’ – that’s the word.
Posted 19 May 2012 at 4:55 am ¶Ian beat me to the sexist comment, so I’ll leave it to your imagination. Rhonda is very pretty indeed. But come on…Andy is a single minded advocate. You think he even noticed (grin)?
Seriously, though. The helmet and visibility stuff is promoted by motorcycle safety organizations, too. I don’t know how many people have put auxiliary driving lights on their MCs to make the bike look “bigger”. Mandatory MC helmet and daytime headlight laws were passed where I grew up back in the seventies, long before cars started coming off the line with daytime running lights.
The problem is with contributory negligence laws (something I know little about but that Steve Magas and John Allen have written about copiously.)
The lousy lane positioning encourages in-lane passing and telegraphs to motorists that we should be riding AFRA-POSSIBLE. Bad,bad, bad. I have gotten tired of trying to be “nice” to motorists by shading right to help them pass and then watching while they do something incredibly dumb. Its better to raise the bar and take, at minimum, the old “right tire track” location. I’d rather watch while they play chicken with oncoming traffic than be sideswiped by one who is trying to pass without changing or encroaching on another lane.
What also worried me was the tri-bars (and did anyone notice that rider taking off without seeming to look for traffic?). I have watched some pretty amazing crashes caused by people uncritically tucked onto their time trialing bars in traffic and therefore unable to either brake, steer, or take evasive action effectively. Dork bars were meant to do one thing–ride a relatively straight, flat course with minimum aerodynamic drag. Watch a pro in a TT–he often gets onto the regular bars when shit gets weird.
Riding around a curve on the fog line while being passed, or riding through urban intersections, on the dork bars is incredibly lame. I had to sit by the side of the road in Honolulu while we waited for one of our grad students to be patched up after he tried to take a corner on dork bars, drifted over the center line, and almost hit an oncoming SUV head on. That was prevented by an alert motorist going overland, so the rider only bounced off the side of the Chevy and broke his fancy Kestrel bike in pieces. Why someone would put that stuff in a LAB/AAA safety video is troubling. Did these guys pay attention?
My solution for Rhonda’s lack of knowledge about this would be to spend some…quality time with her. That would get rid of the grumpy in most of us old coots.
Posted 20 May 2012 at 8:57 am ¶Oh, in response to Ian:
Posted 20 May 2012 at 9:19 am ¶Sorry. I blame the copious quantities of sherry I drank before posting.
Posted 20 May 2012 at 7:26 pm ¶I did notice the rider taking off apparently without looking. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed his prior checks for traffic ended up on the cutting room floor.
Posted 20 May 2012 at 7:30 pm ¶Help me, Rhonda….
Posted 20 May 2012 at 9:22 pm ¶In my last job before staring my own business (eons ago), I worked for a company that developed training programs, educational videos and print PSAs. Most of our work was boating-related. We produced material for the personal watercraft industry, the Coast Guard, National Association of State Boating Law Administrators, Miller Brewing (designated driver) and a few others. We never, ever produced a video without a content expert involved in the shoot and the editing process.
These videos are amateur. They have no professional integrity. But they are like so many other things in bicycling, from half-assed infrastructure to useless bike racks.
When I encounter this stuff, it demonstrates to me that the people promoting bicycling don’t give a shit about the people who use bicycles. They just do symbolic things so they can congratulate themselves for doing them.
Posted 21 May 2012 at 11:45 am ¶Keri… Another way to put this: There is very real lack of knowledge caused by willful ignorance. I’m talking something that is operationally very similar to stupidity — not exactly the same because there’s a large element of ideology at work interrupting the ability to understand. Ideologically-driven willful ignorance is what allows the lips to say one thing while the video says something else with no cognitive dissonance suffered.
Posted 21 May 2012 at 12:35 pm ¶Well-said, Andy. The ideology is definitely an interfering agent.
As if it wasn’t hard enough to implement change strategies to fix the dysfunctional beliefs and misguided behavior, we have to contend with ideologues undermining those efforts with policies and propaganda that reinforce the root cause.
I’ve read of many examples of successful initiatives to fix intractable problems (guinea worm in Asia and Africa, AIDs in Thailand, illiteracy in Mexico, spouse abuse in Africa, etc.). Most of those problems had strong cultural challenges to overcome (which is why the problems are intractable). But I haven’t come across one in which there was an active and dominant culture of advocates working directly against the carefully-considered change strategies, or feeding the root cause so thoroughly as we have in bicycling.
Posted 21 May 2012 at 1:06 pm ¶