I
wrote last night about a group which calls itself the Citizens for Safety Coalition of Iowa and its petition to pressure legislators in Iowa to let the state's citizens vote to ban bicyclists from 30,000 miles of roads in the state. After posting my blog entry, I sent an email to their contact email address,
cfscofiowa@yahoo.com, asking for evidence to back up their claims. Below is a copy of the email I sent:
Hello. I recently learned about your petition to seek a ban on bicyclists from Iowa's county roads. In the statement of your petition you state 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." Could you supply me with the evidence you have that supports this claim that the number of preventable accidents and fatalities has increased dramatically?
You also claim that "rural commerce and citizens are significantly impacted when forced to share the farm-to-market roadways with bicyclists." Would you please explain to me what this significant impact is?
I look forward to receiving your response to these questions.
I received an unsigned response from someone representing the group. Since it was not signed, I am assuming that it came from the person who is the administrative contact of the Citizens for Safety Coalition of Iowa's domain,
cfscofiowa.com (registered just four days before the start of this past RAGBRAI), Dan Jones of Van Meter, Iowa. I do not know this as a fact however, it's just an assumption and could very well be wrong. Nevertheless, I will be referring to the writer of the response as "he" in the remainder of this blog posting. I would copy his response here, but since emails are technically subject to copyright law, I will paraphrase and summarize what he said instead.
In response to my first inquiry for evidence to support the claim that injuries and fatalities have increased dramatically over the past decade, he simply told me that the Iowa Department of Transportation has that information. I checked IDOT's website and couldn't find much information about bicycle fatalities on county roads in Iowa nor about the causes of such accidents, however
my research, which doesn't specify on what type of road the fatalities occurred or if motor vehicles were even involved, did show that while there is a very slight correlation between the number of bicycle accident fatalities in Iowa over the past decade, if one extends the data back a few more years, any correlation disappears completely as shown in the graph below.
His inability to actually provide me with any data suggests that he doesn't have any of his own. He continued to tell me that when motorists and bicyclists collide, it affects everyone's life who is involved. To me this doesn't seem to be something that would be limited to automobile/bicycle collisions, but to all collisions in general. He also stated that the motorist "seems to always be in the wrong." Once again this is a statement without any factual basis. A review of the
eight bicyclist fatalities in Iowa in 2008 indicates that at most three of them were the fault of the motorist.
As for CFCS of Iowa's contention that "rural commerce and citizens are significantly impacted when forced to share the farm-to-market roadways with bicyclists," he stated that many people have told him that they have to wait for groups of bicyclists to get out of their way while livelihoods depend on it. Yes, I suppose some people who have to drive for a living are slightly inconvenienced by having to wait momentarily to pass a bicyclist of a group of bicyclists, but really, how long is anyone delayed by a bicyclist? It's a lot easier to pass bicyclists under normal circumstances than a car or even farm implements. You don't even have to go entirely into the opposite lane of traffic in most cases. The only time I can think of when it would be challenging to pass bicyclists in Iowa is when encountering them on RAGBRAI. The seemingly endless stream of 10,000 or so bicyclists does cause a disruption to the flow of motor vehicles, but this is at most one or two days out of the entire year for any given part of the state, and it's not like the bicycles just pop up without warning.
In conclusion, the refusal to provide any evidence other than some very non-specific anecdotes by Dan Jones or his associates leads me to believe that this group of people, if they are indeed a group, are simply people who either simply hate having to share the road with anyone they don't understand, or perhaps they are just jealous of how good many of the cyclists look in their tight spandex shorts and cycling jerseys.
The Woodbury Days parade was today, and since the parade route runs right by my sister's condo, Mel, Emma, and I drove over there this morning. We got to my sister's place almost an hour before the parade was scheduled to begin, so we hung around inside for a while. Shortly before the beginning of the parade, my aunt and her grandson arrived at my sister's condo as well. The six of us then all went to the street to stake out a location from which to view the parade. It was a pretty long parade; I think there were one hundred entries.
