Every few months, I get an e-mail from a reader about how the police are cracking down on cyclists and how unfair it is. Usually, APD has ticketed someone for an actual violation of the law, like running stop sign or more recently failing to have brakes on your bike. Whether you think law enforcement should be spending time on more pressing problems or maybe that the statutes should be changed, these folks inevitably did break a law and sound more upset that they got caught (luckily thanks to ACA and other Austin bike advocates you can get these violations dismissed with bike safety classes.) Rarely are the citations as egregious as in the case of this New York City officer who decided to make up a law to charge a cyclists with:
I’ve been more reserved about responding to claims of disproportional targeting of cyclists after hearing APD stats that indicate while cyclists may make up 1-2% of road users in Austin (and as much as 5% in the center city), they only make up 0.3% of the violations issued. It is easy to string together 2 or 3 ticketings and turn them into a “crackdown.”
One area where it seems that cyclists and pedestrians do get the short end of the stick is in the way wrecks with cars are treated. Take Austinite Brad Harmon who was the victim of a hit and run in April. He received broken bones in his left arm and leg from the crash. Unfortunately, the police decided there was nothing to be done since he could not identify the driver (is this realistic in a hit and run?) Harmon did not give up and did the investigators’ work for them making a pretty compelling case that he had found the prime suspect in the case. APD’s reaction? Do nothing and tell cyclists that is their responsibility to not get hit by someone driving a vehicle over 100 times their mass. The 3 foot safe passing ordinance was supposed to highlight that road users not in cars are vulnerable and deserve special caution from drivers who have such an overwhelming advantage in a wreck. While recently Los Angeles passed anti-harrassment ordinances for cyclists, it seems like the concept of strict liability might be the only thing that will rid of us of the go-cart mentality of drivers.
Sadly, Bill Harmon may had gotten off easy compared to an Atlanta woman who was charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter this year while being a pedestrian. In this heartbreaking case, a mother was crossing a street with her children coming home off the bus when she was hit by a driver who fled the scene and admitted to being under the influence of alcohol and pain killers. One of her children died while she and her two other kids were injured. In their infinite wisdom, the Atlanta DA cut a deal with the driver and went after the victim. Ugh, this case puts a pit in my stomach.
At times, it feels like the justice system is balanced to favor the machines.
We are making real progress towards making Austin a truly bikeable, walkable community for all users, but this progress can easily be lost if people are treated like sub-citizens or criminals when they interact with cars. It’s time to stop giving legal and structural priorities to machines and put human beings back at the top of our legal system and streets. Otherwise, more often than not we won’t be the windshield … we’ll be the bug.
on Aug 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 am
> I’ve been more reserved about responding to claims of disproportional
> targeting of cyclists after hearing APD stats that indicate while
> cyclists may make up 1-2% of road users in Austin (and as much as 5% > in the center city), they only make up 0.3% of the violations issued.
I’ve heard that the Austin “bicycle mode” figure is right at 1% — which is still higher than the national average of 0.55% or so. But of course, that’s difficult to measure.
But violations are pretty easy to count — all the police has to do is some SQL and they’ll even do it for you if you ask them and pay the hourly fee for their programmers to do it.
However, 0.3% vs 1.0% — that’s a factor of three. I don’t know why the discrepancy is there, but I can certainly brainstorm possibilities –
1- cyclists are less likely to get a ticket than a motorist when seen violating the law
2- police are less likely to watch cyclists to see if they’re violating the law
3- often, when a police officer pulls over a car, many tickets are given. The driver may have been pulled over for speeding, but he gets a ticket for speeding, no insurance, expired inspection, expired tags, no license, etc. Since bicycles don’t require insurance, inspection, tags or license, those extra tickets aren’t an issue for a bicycle.
4- since 99.7% of the traffic tickets the police give are for cars, it may very well be that some of them don’t know how to properly track the tickets that are for bicycles — so bicycle tickets might be entered as car tickets.
(Of course, the flip side could be true too — if 1% of car tickets were accidentally entered as bike tickets, that would totally skew things.)
Obviously anybody who says that the police are leaving the cyclists alone would like to believe it’s #1 and #2, but I wonder how much of a factor #3 is. The police could certainly calculate this — just give a break down of how often each violation is gotten for cars and bicycles and then we remove those that aren’t moving violations. (And it’s possible that they’ve already done this.)
#4 is going to be difficult to calculate without auditing the tickets carefully (any ticket without a license plate is a bike violation?)
on Aug 2nd, 2011 at 12:29 pm
Doug,
Those are all likely reasons the numbers are the way they are. Again, this would point towards there not being a crack down on cyclists or cyclists being singled out by APD.