A bicyclist was injured in a collision with an automobile at Market and Ellis Streets on Wednesday morning in San Francisco. Credit: Twitpic photo: http://twitpic.com/n9twt
Boston Biker has a great little meditation on trust between bicyclists and motorists:
You can in fact trust people these days! In fact we put more trust in total strangers these days than ever before. If anything our lives are so wrapped up in trusting strangers that I started to get nervous with just how much trust I was putting in complete strangers. First I thought about money (how we just trust that people will take it and that it is worth something). Then I thought about food (how many people touch it before it gets to me and what they could do to it). Finally I started to think about biking, that’s when I really started to freak out.
The writer lists the evidence of trust s/he sees around him--but also notes the ways that trust is undermined when people, bikers and drivers alike, refuse to share the roadways. "So how do we rebuild this trust?" s/he asks.
The same way you build any other kind of trust. Slowly, and deliberately. Stop at that red light, walk with the signal, use your turn signals. It is going to take time, and it is going to happen slowly, and you will not be able to get anyone else to do it with you. You have to set that example. Every time you stop at a red light and you make it clear you are going to follow the rules, the person in a car next to you can see that at least some bikers don’t run reds. Every time you yield to a cyclist when you are making a left hand turn in your car the cyclist gets just a little grain of trust back in drivers. Every time you wait till the walk guy comes on to cross the street you show other walkers how it is done. It is the only way I can think of to make any real kind of steps towards rebuilding the shared trust in Boston. The nice thing about this system is that it is free, and the more you do it the better things get. There are other ways (better infrastructure, better enforcement) but they all cost a lot of money, and can not be implemented tonight on your ride home.
So the next time someone tells you “you can’t trust anyone these days” look them right in the eye and say “I trust you, and thousands of other strangers every day with my life” then smile at them.
Words to live by. Folks interested in trust might also read this essay I published in Utne Reader with sociologist Pamela Paxton, which explores why trust has declined and what we can do to renew it in American society.
Comments
Mike wrote on 10.31.09, 4:19am:
I have to agree with Alex, this will never happen without very strict law enforcement. The fact that big corporations can bribe, er, um, lobby Congress to keep laws from preventing the bad practices Alex mentions is a huge problem which I have no idea how to solve. But until things change drivers will continue to break laws and do things that make them very dangerous to everyone else on the road.
darth_schmoo wrote on 10.31.09, 9:08am:
I recall a study out of San Francisco, which claimed that as the number of bicycles tripled over a certain period, the number of auto-on-cyclist accidents remained steady. You would expect that the number of accidents would rise linearly with the number of cyclists on the road, but as you get more cyclists on the road, drivers get used to seeing them and learn to watch out for them.
It also helps that more cyclists means more people demanding more bike lanes and cyclist-friendly laws.
So take the advice my mom gave me growing up. Go play in traffic.
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.31.09, 11:40am:
I do trust to an extent as a biker, and that makes me a tad uneasy to be honest because of the obliviousness of drivers. We could also design so we don't have to rely on trust. When I worked in Europe, I noticed that in many cities bike lanes were placed between parked cars and the sidewalk instead of between traffic and parked cars. Seems smart to minimize the exposure of bikers to motor traffic. Not sure how viable it would be to retrofit American cities this way.
As a daily Boston bike commuter, I love the sentiment expressed but have serious doubts as to its veracity. Boston drivers, like, unfortunately, drivers in most places these days, are so completely oblivious that I don't think they'd notice one bit that I stopped until the green light or walk signal.
I am amazed at the increasing # of drivers who seem to be permanently on their cellphones, or texting, or even listening to headphones!
So, thank you very much, but I'll continue to run red lights when it increases the distance between me and nearby cars rather than stop at them in the hopes that it'll in some unverifiable and drop-in-an-enormous bucket fashion increase motorists' trust in cyclists. I guess you could say that my distrust in them exceeds my faith in their ability to change.