Among all the recent sadness in our community over the deaths of two beloved friends killed while cycling on our city’s streets, there has also been a flood of opinions and ideas about what needs to change so that these tragic events are not repeated. Local blogs, listserves, and op./ed. pages are full of rants and well-reasoned arguments about the engineering, enforcement, education, and overall cultural changes people believe are our collective ticket to each being able to get to our destinations each day safely. I have found the discussion regarding increased education for both drivers and cyclists especially compelling. It is such an obvious need, but the challenge of reaching the masses with good information and skill-building is overwhelming.
Two suggestions I’ve seen pop up frequently are the need for bike education in schools along the same model as driver’s ed, and the need for driver’s education and testing mechanisms to include more on sharing the road with cyclists. Many people have pointed out how cycling education is a fully integrated part of schools’ curriculum in other countries, and that drivers elsewhere are required to complete much more stringent training and testing standards. Why not in Portland?
The BTA has been teaching bike safety in Portland schools for more than 9 years now. The 10-hour, in-school curriculum aimed at 4th and 5th graders teaches students how to be safe, predictable, and legal cyclists. The hope is that these lessons will also make these students better drivers down the road. For instance, I watched one of our instructors give a classroom lesson on right-of-way. He rightly prefaced his lesson with the statement, “This is something a lot of parents don’t understand. You need to learn this, so you can do the right thing on your bike, and so you can go home and teach your parents how to do the right thing when they’re driving.†We know these kinds of lessons help students be safer cyclists, but when most of them also decide to be drivers someday, they will have the advantage of having first learned the rules of the road from the perspective of someone on a bike.
Three years ago, Portland’s Safer Routes to School (SR2S) program adopted the BTA’s bike safety curriculum. This school year though SR2S, BTA instructors are teaching 4th and 5th graders in 25 Portland schools. The city has stated the goal of serving all Portland schools with the SR2S program, but it is currently unclear how long each school will continue to receive services. Making continuing bike safety education for all students a reality will require long term funding and buy-in on the State, or at least local school district policy level. Teaching students bike safety, and doing outreach to parents at schools certainly does not reach all the people using the roads today, but it is an education effort that can be applied systematically and reach far beyond those individuals who actively seek out traffic safety information. If we hope to give the next generation the kind of academic training that will take them places, we also need to provide them with the skills to get there safely.
