CA Cyclists Call on Boxer to Respect Right to the Road

Near this Culver City entrance, the Ballona Creek Bike Path is pretty isolated, but other parts of the path run close enough to other streets that cyclists could be forced onto this path, regardless of the time of day. Photo: mo mo foto/flickr
Senator Barbara Boxer is receiving bi-partisan praise for managing to move a transportation policy and funding bill through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in a divided Senate, but she may be facing trouble from a usually supportive constituency back home.
Regardless of how one feels about the new funding formulas proposed in the bill, there is no doubt that a provision in the MAP-21 highway authorization bill entitled “bicycle safety” would dramatically change cyclists’ rights to the road and would force many cyclists to either break the law or put themselves in unsafe situations. The language in question reads:
BICYCLE SAFETY.—The Secretary of the appropriate Federal land management agency shall prohibit the use of bicycles on each federally owned road that has a speed limit of 30 miles per hour or greater and an adjacent paved path for use by bicycles within 100 yards of the road.
“The provision requires no minimum standard of safety or mobility on the sidepath, and experience shows that such paths are often more dangerous or impractical than on-road bicycling,” explains David Snyder, the executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition. ”The provision may have been well-intentioned but its result is to reduce safety and it should be removed.”
Jim Baross, with the California Association of Bicycle Organizations explains further. ”Most of our concern is that adjacent trails, paths or alternative facilities that bicycling might be detoured to do not provide anything near to the efficiency and safety provided by the shoulders of Federal highways,” Baross begins. “At a time when there are significant and important efforts to encourage Americans to use bicycling as a healthy, environmentally appropriate and economic transportation choice, it is ironic that a proposal for prohibiting bicycling, such as this, would be included in a transportation bill.” Read more…












