The Citizens for Safety Coalition of Iowa (A.K.A. The We Hate Bicyclists Group)

A group which calls itself the Citizens for Safety Coalition of Iowa has started an online petition, to which I am not linking, that will urge the state legislature to create a ballot initiative allowing Iowans to vote to ban bicyclists from thirty thousand miles of state and county roads in the state. Part of their claim is that "over the past ten years the number of bicyclists using these farm-to-market roads for recreational purposes has increased dramatically as have the number of preventable accidents and fatalities."

One source that I have found certainly does not support this claim. Although I admit that it only lists numbers of fatalities, and not injuries. In addition, it doesn't specify what type of road the deaths occurred on or if they accidents were preventable. It does show an increase of about 0.27 deaths per year for the years listed, but this doesn't seem to be a dramatic increase as the Citizens for Safety Coalition of Iowa claims has happened.

I tried to get the data listed in table format, but Blogger was giving me problems with that, so instead I am listing the information in ordered pair, (year, number of fatalities) format:

{(1998, 7), (1999, 6), (2000, 3), (2001, 3), (2002, 4), (2003, 3), (2004, 7),
(2005, 11), (2006, 5), (2007, 7)}

They continue by claiming that "rural commerce and citizens are significantly impacted when forced to share the farm-to-market roadways with bicyclists. Because of the growth of today's commerce and agricultural business, shared roadways are no longer safe or practical in today's society." First, I would like to see what evidence they have that the number of preventable accidents and fatalities has increased dramatically over the past decade. They also fail to explain how rural commerce is affected by sharing the road. After completing the blog entry, I am going to send an email to the contact email address provided with the petition to see what evidence they have to support their claims.

In the unlikely event that the Citizens For Safety Coalition of Iowa's petition has the effect of getting state legislators to propose banning bicyclists from Iowa's county roads, and if such a ban is eventually enacted, I feel that this would have a great negative impact on the state's economy. Such a ban would effectively end RAGBRAI, taking with it the estimated $24 million that it brings to the state annually. Also, I can only imagine that banning bicycles from so many roads in the state would also hurt those businesses which sell bicycles and bicycling equipment.

Hopefully the legislature as a whole sees the folly in banning bicyclists from county roads in Iowa and refuses to even consider such legislation in the event that this group presents their petition to them.

Apparently I am not the only one who realizes that this petition has absolutely no chance of getting bikes banned from Iowa's roadways as this linked article suggests the same thing.