Making cycling mandatory
A radically (sensible) proposal here from the UK’s Guardian: Make getting cycling experience a mandatory part of getting a driver’s license.
If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
- It’s not particularly onerous to add, say, 3-4 hours of practical bike use / training to the license requirements.
- It provides a great reality check to those who consider they “know all they need to know” from a few scattered cyclist-related questions in the theory test.
- Most of all – as CAA found out from helping organise “bus driver/cyclist” workshops – it provides important empathy for a motorist to know what it is like to ride a bike in traffic.
Some would argue that it makes little sense to include it, whatever the safety benefits. After all, we don’t require someone who takes a test in French to also take a few hours of Spanish instruction beforehand, don’t we?
But that really misses the fact that cyclists are an everyday part of our traffic environment. We all know how it feels to walk in traffic. But too many these days don’t know how it feels to cycle in traffic. Making basic cycling knowledge a mandatory part of driving lessons* would be no more unfair to motorists than requring them to learn other safety behaviour.
* Instead of constantly trying to remove the elephant from the room by solely training cyclists.
Heck, the safety benefits in reduced death and injury could mean NZTA could subsidise it 100%, and probably find that it gets some of the best-benefit-cost ratios of their safety programs ever (okay, cycle advocate talking here, but worth a look, eh?).
Cycling safety, General News, Media
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cycling, Cycling safety, driver's license, General News, license requirements, Media, safety benefits
Fullers (CAA Sponsor)
Themocracy
Great Idea! after biking in traffic for awhile, you get a feel for whats going on around you. When I drive I take a lot more notice of whats to my left, oh and seem to avoid manhole covers more!
But the same can be said for cyclists who have never driven too. I see all to often people doing stupid things on bikes which to me look as if they have no idea what a motorist sees or cant see! Top of my list is riding at night with no form of lighting!
Fair point, Paul, though the very few cyclists that don’t have a driver’s license (would they be more than 5-10%, once you deduct any children?) at least have car experience as passengers.
Many drivers don’t have even such second-hand cycling experience (not too many tandems around!)
Well, its all a part of ‘consideration for others in your community’. And given that todays community philosophy is me me me and b****r anyone else, its a good idea to raise awareness of the community that you live, work and travel in.
Is this a good way to build empathy? Should aspiring car drivers also have to be full-time/long-distance pedestrians for a while, ride skateboards, use a wheelchair, be temporarily blinded, walk a dog, push a stroller, etc? Perhaps they should briefly operate scooters, motorcycles, trucks, buses, trains, trams and emergency response vehicles too?
(And what about drivers physically unable to cycle? On that note, do “we all know how it feels to walk in traffic”, really? So much for universal accessibility! Where has all that empathy gone?)
So what if most motorists are also pedestrians of some kind at some poin? The shared experience doesn’t seem to have helped much. Even just walking in Auckland isn’t exactly grand.
Nevertheless, if this policy was mandatory, I imagine it would live up to its name — by giving some arrogant motorists a mandate. You know, “I cycled for a day to get my driver’s licence, and I think [insert malodorous opinion here]“, like they already do.
And fine, I accept that cyclists won’t need to learn to drive (perhaps due to having had exposure already, but mainly due to the asymmetrical duty of care to the vulnerable). But will cyclists be required to try their luck as pedestrians, disabled or otherwise, young or old, and so on?
Blaming the individual is a cheap trick, and ignores the real elephant in the room: our collective, institutional over-allocation of public resources towards motoring. It is tangibly expressed in the shape of our urban form atop our perfectly amenable public space — dead roads encouraging deadly speed and mass, where instead living streets should be.
Shake collars, slap wrists, paint lines and put up signs, but nothing bestows privilege with such enduring authority as the geometry and texture of asphalt and concrete.
(And let’s not be distracted by so-called “off-road” garden paths or building novel and intriguing monuments to cycling. We need our existing streets back — what with the front doors, history, culture, commerce and humanity that we already have.)