Bicycle to School Day in Ludington

[XLFD]

Today was Bicycle to School Day and it was celebrated with a lot of news coverage in Ludington, with schools, media, and police marketing the concept and being active participants in the event.  Before examining it further, allow me to elaborate on my background in the subject.  Throughout grade school in my hometown of Scottville, I rode my bike from my residence near the river park hill at the southeastern extent of the city to the various MCC Schools in the northwestern section of the town.  I would frequently go the additional two miles or more round trip to have lunch at home.

As an adult living in Ludington, I avidly encouraged my daughters to ride their bikes to school, travelling with them on my own bicycle when I could.  It wouldn't be odd that I would do an extra thirty miles afterwards on the bike.  I have travelled at least 100,000 miles on a bicycle seat during my lifetime; that's equivalent to riding around the world at least four times.  I encourage others to ride bikes, advocating for bicycling and for bike safety.

So one might think I would appreciate or play an active part in the special plans made for today.  Those plans included gathering kids with their bicycles at Oriole Field around 7 AM, riding en masse with a police escort  down the street to the middle and high school, then finishing up at Foster Elementary.  But I just can't get there.  

The exercise is all about symbolism over logic, with the worst part coming when you have to reteach your children safe practices rather than the unsafe lessons they are being taught by school and police officials on this day just so they can get more attention to the cause. 

Nobody earlier this year, and nobody later this year, will pack their children and their bikes in the SUV, head to Oriole Field and drop them off just so their child can then ride to their school.  Even if they did, their kids wouldn't get a police escort, they would just find that Tinkham Avenue and Washington Street have a lot of traffic with a lot of half-asleep moms and dads not paying a lot of attention.

And even if children should decide to ride the sidewalks on Tinkham after this drop off, they will find that there is a lot of those same drivers turning off and on Tinkham making every intersection an adventure in survival.  This May 5th exercise teaches them that they should be taking the same, main streets that the people that drive to school use, that's not a good lesson for safety.  The most impressionable youths (those in 3rd to 6th grade at Foster School) are being shown to use two main streets (Tinkham, Washington) for travel rather than the much safer back street routes such as:

Which allows children to use a stoplight at Harrison to cross Ludington Avenue, much less traveled at that point of the day than the one at Washington.  But as suggested, if you put both your child and bike into your car, you're not going to drop them off at Oriole Field or any other drop off place, you'll be taking them all the way to school.  

So rather than doing that, dust off your own bike and take an actual safe route to school with your children making sure they learn the basics of keeping to the right of the lane, unlike this child riding on the other side of the median (perhaps because he was not used to riding his bike with an event-required mask):

Looking both ways at intersections and yielding to oncoming traffic is something that cannot be learned in an exercise that has police cars running interference for you as a biker.  A parent needs to stress that there are serious consequences if you do not pay attention at intersections and the importance of anticipating what car drivers might do to make it unsafe for you.  An exercise like this can easily teach children bad habits that can get them killed since they are riding in a protected mass, and they will not normally do that every morning they ride to school. 

And back.  Perhaps the most dangerous part of a staged event like this comes at the end of the day.  Unless every adult that dropped off a child with his bicycle at Oriole Field goes to school and picks up both child and bike at the end of the day (creating additional after-school traffic issues at the school), the child is expected to ride back home, and they may be ill-prepared if they rarely or never did that before.  The additional traffic near schools only adds to that issue. 

Rather than have a staged event like this in the future for Bicycle to School Day, which offers additional liability to the school and police while teaching kids improper bicycling habits, I hope they would consider instead an open ended event where they instead count and reward the kids who bike to school and any adults that accompany them by having school personnel outside near the bike racks acknowledging their effort.  It may have less visibility and less pomp, but in the end, it's about safety and learning good riding habits.  

[Willy]

Very good points X. We can all see that not much thought went into kids taking the safest route when this ride was put together. What they should have done is organize a bike ride to the new school money pit. What a nightmare that will be for bike riders to get to.