John S. Allen's Bicycle Blog

Garmin is a high-end manufacturer of GPS devices for bicycles and motor vehicles.

Garmin has posted an ad for a cycling “radar” (probably actually LEDdar using pulsed infrared light), which warns cyclists of overtaking traffic. There are some serious problems with the product concept and with the ad, so once you’ve viewed the ad, please read on.

The $200 Garmin device, an accessory for a bicycle GPS unit which costs several hundreds of dollars, informs the cyclist that a vehicle is about to overtake. But in order to decide what to do about that, the cyclist needs to know how much clearance the vehicle will give. The Garmin device doesn’t provide that information.

The stilted British voice in the ad conveys an air of authority, I suppose, but how is the cyclist in the ad not going to HEAR the huge truck approaching from behind? Unless the cyclist is listening to something at top volume on headphones — but I didn’t see any. The cyclist never once is shown looking back, and he isn’t using a mirror, and so what is the device supposed to let him know that he wouldn’t know anyway? Granted, the device could give a warning of a quiet car.

The “cyclist’s eye view” clip in the video shows his response to the warning: pulling over to the right edge of the roadway, so far that grass would be brushing his right foot and he risks a fall on the cracked pavement — which could turn a brush-by into a fatal.

Imagine what a nuisance this device would be when being passed by strings of vehicles. It would give a continuous warning, which would provide no useful information. One more good reason to use my $15 rear-view mirror to check on overtaking traffic, and use my cell phone for GPS (no extra cost) and forget Garmin!

The ad repeats the figure from a League of American Bicyclist survey of fatal bicycle crashes, that 40% are in overtaking crashes. That widely publicized number has several problems though:

• First of all,  there are more problems with the numbers. My friend Patricia Kovacs comments:
  
  

  LAB’s Every Bicyclist Counts study found 40% of bike fatalities were hit from behind. I’ve been studying crash data in Ohio and in 2015, 30% of bike fatalities were hit from behind. But not all hit from behind are the motorist’s fault. In Ohio, 15 out of 24 fatal bike crashes were the fault of the cyclist, 6 were the fault of the motorist and 3 were no error, according to the police officers’ reports. What were the circumstances for the cyclists at fault? Improper crossing, not visible, failure to yield, lying or illegally in roadway. Most of these circumstances can be mitigated with education. I do worry about drunk and distracted drivers though, which is why I use a mirror.

  
  
• The LAB study is biased in covering only fatal collisions, which are rare. Just as an example, in the over 100 million miles of travel in the 50-year history of the bicycle club to which I belong, approximately 1000 lifetimes of riding for an avid cyclist, there have been only two fatalities to club members. One was a rear-ender and the other was a head-on collision with an out-of-control vehicle that crossed to the wrong side of the road. Non-fatal crashes are hundreds of times as common and result in far more loss of years of useful life. 3/4 of serious bicycle crashes don’t involve a motor vehicle at all.
• The League puts forward the 40% figure to promote its support for barrier-separated bikeways in urban areas, but fatal overtaking crashes occur mostly on rural roads. Most urban fatalities result from crossing and turning movements.

Half-truths have been used repeatedly to sell cycling infrastructure (as with the League’s study) but Garmin’s is the most sophisticated use of half-truths I’ve seen so far to sell a cycling product, while also being seriously ill-informed.

Seattle poster

The panel at the right is from a poster called The Commuter Toolkit put out by International Sustainable Solutions for an organization called the International Sustainability Institute. You may view it full size by clicking it or view the full poster. This poster shows a scene in downtown, Seattle, Washington, USA and the poster bears the names of various sponsors in the Seattle area.

The comparisons of space used by different travel modes in the poster are misleading. They show the space which people occupy standing still in posed photos, not the space which each mode of transportation actually uses. Cars would not be spaced so closely if in motion, and they also take space to park. Nor would buses be spaced so closely, and they also use bus stops and bus garages. The bicyclists are standing over their bicycles, not riding, etc. Neither does the poster address the throughput and travel times for the different modes or the suitability of different modes for different trips of different distances. I addressed an earlier example of a similar poster on this blog but there’s a twist to this particular version: the bicyclists are shown riding down the middle of Second Avenue in Seattle, but look over to the right side of the picture: that’s a bike lane — also with cars in it in the car picture. Similarly for the bus-only lane at the left side of the photos. No train runs on this street!

The bike lane was more recently replaced by a two-way separated bikeway, into which speed humps are being installed because the bikeway cannot safely support normal downhill bicycle travel speeds on this sloping street, though that’s another story.

The location, in case anyone wants to take a closer look.

A post on the Grind online news site heralds the Blaze, a  laser bicycle light gimmick — not the first to be reviewed on this blog The Blaze hits the market with some rather clever — and deceptive — advertising including the photo below.

The Blaze shown to best advantage

The camera angle in the posed photo is chosen very carefully to create a specular reflection off the wet pavement. That makes the projected bicycle image look much brighter in this night photo. It will be totally invisible in daylight. Cost is 125 British pounds, that’s about $187 in US dollars and there are lights with similar performance (other than the laser feature) for $70. See http://www.sheldonbrown.com/LED-headlights.html

The idea of the light also appears to be to warn motorists who might make hook turns. There is a better way to avoid hook turns: don’t overtake on the curb side of a motor vehicle. And in any case, the bicycle image which the laser casts on the street, if visible at all, isn’t far enough ahead of the bicyclist to be in the field of view of many drivers in time to avoid turning — particularly not the drivers of long vehicles which are involved in the largest number of hook-turn fatal collisions.

I just ran across a post from March 2015 by Angie Schmitt for Streetblog:

The title is “Engineering Establishment Sets Out to Purge Deviant Bikeway Designs”

I quote:

The NCUTCD consists mostly of older engineers from state DOTs. In recent years, its bikeway design orthodoxy has been challenged by a new wave of engineers looking to implement treatments that the American street design establishment has frowned upon, despite a proven track record improving the safety and comfort of bicycling. Most notably, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has released guidance on the design of protected bike lanes that the MUTCD lacks.

NACTO’s guidance is gaining adherents. Dozens of cities have implemented protected bike lanes in the past few years. The Federal Highway Administration endorsed the guide in 2013.

The NACTO Guide is formatted to appear to be an actual design guide to a lay person, but does not serve as one for an engineer who is faced with the actual task of designing anything. That is one of the problems which the NCUTCD task force is attempting to address. The NACTO Guide has stirred up a lot of interest among the general public, politicians and advocates of increased bicycle use, but it does not offer a decision tree, or  specifications, or safety cautions sufficient to guide the design of safe and practical bikeways. I’ve addressed that here.

As to the “proven track record,” search on “Lusk” in this blog for some reviews of studies which purport to overturn the results of decades of research showing an increase in crash risks at driveways and cross streets with sidewalk or sidewalk-like routing of bicycles, and an overall increase in crashes due to this “protection.”

Schmitt’s use of the terms  “purge” and “deviant” — to describe the deliberations of an engineering task force — play on the image of totalitarian states’ placing people who reject party line before a firing squad, and speaks for itself.