Editor Note: Eileen Schaubert, Mellow Johnny’s Community Outreach person, took the Austin Police Department’s bicycle training in July and is doing a series of articles for A2W about her experience.

I’ve just spent three days out at the Austin Police Department’s training academy as the first civilian to take their mountain bike patrol class. I was given this opportunity for a variety of reasons, one of which is that a number of the projects I work on locally intersect with APD under both education and enforcement efforts. I’ll be writing a series of posts here about some of these projects. For this piece I want to focus on local education efforts in context of implementing the City of Austin 2009 Bike Plan. Look for more stories of my adventures at summer camp in the August Southwest Cycling News – the Austin Cycling Association newspaper available at all the local bike shops.

First a little background info: Education is one of the main topics addressed by the city’s recently adopted Bike Plan. The plan calls for education efforts targeted to cyclists, motorists and city departments that have an impact on bike safety such as design engineers and APD. I am one of many League Cycling Instructors (LCI) based here in Austin teaching bike skills and safety using a curriculum developed by the League of American Bicyclists. The concept of vehicular cycling is the core of the classes encapsulated by “Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles”. It’s the details of how to actually share the road with cars and pedestrians.

• The 9-hour adult Traffic Skills 101 classes are offered through the ACA twice a month rotating between the different REI locations. (The Austin LCIs are currently working on creating shorter modules to reach cyclists in more appealing segments.) The bike plan benchmark is to educate 1,000 adult cyclists and motorists every year – that’s a pretty ambitious goal considering where we are at today. If all ACA classes currently scheduled filled we would only reach about 200 cyclists a year.
• The City of Austin has also been offering the TS 101 material as part of a 12-week spin & cycling class within their employee PE/Wellness program using both city staff LCIs and the ACA LCIs. This program has actually been our most successful for reaching a large number of students. In 2008, the first year of their program, they had 100 students. Not all the participants will become regular cyclists but they are all drivers!
• Through an ACA scholarship, twelve Yellow Bike Project collective members have recently been certified as LCIs so they can offer classes when the new YBP headquarters is completed. The goal here is to reach a different cycling audience with options offered on a sliding fee basis and with more Spanish-language instructors.
• UT’s Orange Bike Project held 10 1-hour sessions of Urban Cycling during the spring semester thanks to a CAMPO grant. We are hoping to schedule more of these sessions at the start of the fall semester reaching students, staff and faculty. This class was a quick overview of cycling basics and traffic laws – including UT specific laws that apply only on the 40 acres.
• The newest education offering is bike delivery services hiring the LCIs to train their drivers. Whole Foods may roll out a custom program company-wide based on the pilot program here in Austin. YBP will receive a donation from Dynamic Reprographics in exchange for a TS 101 course offered by the YBP LCIs for their delivery and other staff members.
• Bike safety education is a component of many race training programs and clinics for cyclists and triathletes. Generally, these tend to go light on traffic law focusing more on bike handling skills; although, the Austin Flyers brought in attorney Brad Houston for their recent women’s clinic to cover cyclists’ rights and responsibilities including what to do at the scene of an accident.

Back to the Austin Police education efforts, most readers here will have attended or read about the ACA public forum with APD Chief Art Acevedo back in March. At the forum, the Chief acknowledged that he and his officers weren’t fully versed on the intricacies of bike laws and promised to take TS 101. The Chief and a number of his staff took the class during Bike Month thanks to funding through the City of Austin Bike and Pedestrian program. (A second class was taken by high-level city staffers including Public Works Director Howard Lazarus and City Council Member Laura Morrison fulfilling her campaign promise made at last year’s candidate forum.)

The Bike Plan calls for further training of APD patrol officers on bicycle specific traffic laws addressing conflicts that occur when cyclists are stopped or cited for misinterpretations of the law.  The Chief’s suggestion that cyclists carry a copy of the traffic code wasn’t very well received by some in the forum audience. What isn’t well-known is that to address the problem internally Officer Jason Wolf, one of the training academy instructors, has since developed a required training module for all APD officers offered through their online training system. The system can tell which officers have logged into and stepped through the training so the expectation is that all will refresh their knowledge of bike laws. The bike plan goal is to do this on an annual basis.

Recommended reading from Eileen Schaubert.

Bike education efforts are progressing in Austin. The newly adopted bike plan gives us a framework to follow and soon the benchmarking process will begin so the community can gauge our progress. I don’t expect the City of Austin to provide all the education – that will come from different private sources such as local employers and hopefully, from more efforts within the cycling community itself.  Financially supporting or volunteering with ACA and YBP helps to keep these education programs going. Taking one of the classes offered locally or researching online will help your own understanding. Prefer reading on your own schedule? Robert Hurst’s The Art of Cycling is stocked at Easy Street Recumbents and Mellow Johnny’s. It’s an interesting read with a long-time messenger’s view of the LAB material.

Watch for future posts where I’ll cover the APD mountain bike course plus compare the APD online bike law training against what the LCIs are teaching local cyclists.

Related posts:

1. APD Chief Acevedo returns for second forum with the cycling community ...
2. KVUE succeeds in its hit on the cycling community ...
3. Just What is APD Teaching Bike Patrol Officers? ...
4. Massive turnout by cycling community at Third Nueces Street Bike Boulevard Open House ...
5. Careful when you glide through that stop sign, it may cost you over $150 ...