2008 Bike Light Campaign ends

The BTA’s 2008 Bike Light Campaign, which we ran with the Portland Police as part of Eye to Eye this summer, ended last night with me taking a ride in a police car.

The BTA has long considered riding at night without a front light to be one of the most dangerous things a bicyclist can do; the Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee, years ago, resolved the same; and we’ve asked the Portland Police to focus their enforcement energies on dangerous locations and dangerous behaviors like riding without a light.

So this past spring the BTA approached the Traffic Division (led by Captain O’Dea and Lieutenant Parman) to propose a three-stage campaign: first we’d put up blog posts and send out emails and get media stories written about bike lights; then, the police would stop bicyclists without lights, give them a pair, and tell them to warn all their friends; and then, at the end, they’d give out tickets.

O’Dea and Parman loved the idea so much they even raised the money for the lights. River City Bicycles ran some bike-light ads. Light giveaways happened in September. Citations started going out in October. BTA members seemed happy. I was delighted to be working on one of my top safety concerns.

And then Officer Robert Pickett, the Police Bureau’s official liaison to the bicycling community, offered to take me out to give some tickets to unlit bicyclists. And I blanched.

Why? Because the prospect of handing out bad news over and over sounded heartbreaking. And cop cars can be kind of scary, with the flashing lights and big engines. And I would be the bad guy in the pretty blue coat to a bunch of my bikey peers. And someone might recognize me, or ask me for my name, and I’d be either be very embarrassed or I’d be mad at them for being out without a light and I’d lecture them, and that would be awful.

So as much as I do believe that law enforcement has an important role to play in bike safety, and I know that getting a ticket is far far better than getting into a crash, and I work for 5,000 people who overwhelmingly agree, I was bumping up against some of my own deep-seated biases and fears.

So I accepted. It was, I decided, like killing your own chicken. You eat the chicken, it’s tasty, you’d like to eat another…but are you willing to kill it and gut it yourself? If you’re not, maybe you don’t get to eat another chicken. It was time to kill my own chicken.

In three hours and three different locations we nabbed a whopping FOUR unlit bicyclists, all of them at our first stop on N Williams north of Knott. (If you were biking home and saw a police officer and a woman in a blue coat grinning goofy grins, giving thumbs-up, and yelling battery-replacement suggestions, that was us.)

One had a nice bright light in his bag, but the bracket was broken. He got a warning. One cried – probably from the rude shock of being pulled over, and the discomfort and shame of having to stand in bright lights all alone under scrutiny. I wanted to cry too. One was wry and thankful, despite her bad luck. One was adorable and young and turned out to have an arrest record. That was weird. All of them got the option of paying their fine with a little money and their time (the Share the Road Safety Class and $30) or just with money ($97).

A young man walking a fixed gear bike lurked on the corner while we were talking to one of the bicyclists; in my head I thought “Oh, he’s calling BikePortland!” But I think he was actually calling his friend to see if he could run over to his garage and paint a really great “Police sting ahead” sign. This was no Sharpie-and-cardboard lightweight product; it was bright white paint on a big sheet of pressboard. We found it later, and laughed hard over it. We also wondered what we’d do if we passed such a sign – perhaps we’d be sure to stop completely at the stop signs. But would we ever guess that it was a bike light sting? Doubtful. At least, not yet. Maybe next year.

(This is a dreadful photo, but note how well the white paint shows up in low lighting! A lovely sign. Officer Pickett is invisible except for the highly reflective cuffs on his uniform.)

We threw the sign in the trunk of the cruiser and went to our next stop, NE 28th and Everett. Officer Pickett (who is actually not with the Traffic Division, the division that does the most bicycle enforcement; he helps handle neighborhood liveability issues for Southeast Precinct) had heard from the neighborhood association that unlit bicyclists were scaring people on NE 28th. I was thinking about donuts at Staccato Gelato.

We propped up our new, still-wet “Police sting ahead” sign on a recycling bin in the street, and stood on the corner. (Officer Pickett would like you to know, fixie-guy, that he didn’t steal the sign, he just took it for safekeeping, and that if you want it back you can call him at (503) 823-2143 and he’ll give it back; otherwise, after some official period of time, he’s going to give it to me.)

A few perfect Portland drivers (nicest in the nation in 2007!) mistook us for pedestrians wanting to cross the street, and stopped at the crosswalk, but other than that it was totally boring because we saw only lit bicyclists. After some time we moved to SE Ankeny, “Like shooting fish in a barrel” I thought, and then was a little horrified at my enthusiasm. But no! All the fish had lights. We resigned ourselves to wasting the one citation remaining that we had pre-filled-out (to minimize nerve-wracking waiting-and-crying time), and went home satisfied.

I came away from this experience with renewed appreciation for the resolve of Traffic Division officers, who deliver bad news over and over again, and hear every excuse for every offense, no matter how egregious. I also came away thinking about ways to minimize the bad news – to give out as few tickets as possible to get the behavior change we all want to see. I believe the Eye to Eye Bike Light Campaign did a good job of that this year – the threat of a few dozen tickets at the end lent urgency and seriousness to months worth of outreach and education on one of the BTA’s top safety concerns.

Captain O’Dea and Lieutenant Parman, who together managed the Traffic Division (until O’Dea’s recent promotion), have said that they’d like their officers to be part of a comprehensive approach to traffic safety. One that starts with engineering, is backed up and clarified by education, and, where that doesn’t suffice, is reinforced by police enforcement. Their resources are scarce, just like everyone else’s, and they’d like to save the most lives with the fewest tears.

In our vision of Oregon bicycling, it should be very hard to find a bicyclist out without lights. And last Tuesday night, for three hours in Portland, for whatever reason, it was. For the BTA, this was a nice end to a great campaign. And for me, well, I killed the chicken.