“The city is a boneyard of broken cyclists, all hit by drivers…”

I think Porter does more harm than good with this article. I’m not saying she’s making things up but at the same time it is quite a skewed view filled with fear mongering. I could write the same article from the point of view of a pedestrian or even a motorist talking about street racing or DUI. She tells of about 2 fatalities per year – that’s two too many, of course, but there were days earlier this year where we had that many pedestrians killed in a day.

Meanwhile, most interactions I have with drivers are neutral, many are positive. The smallest percentage are negative. The problem is that no matter what you’re doing, the negative ones, whether caused by your mistake or the other motorist have much more dire consequences when you’re not wearing a 3000 lb metal exoskeleton. And what we need to do is work, through enforcement, education, and infrastructure, on engineering out as many of those negative interactions as possible. *That* would’ve been a better way to write that article. After all, there’s even more safety in numbers and an article like this gives the impression that the streets are a war zone when really, IMO, there’s no more risk to riding to work than there is to my walking to the subway and taking transit. Or, for that matter, commuting on a 400 series highway. As my mother in law said in a song she wrote: “Life’s a dangerous business – everyone who goes into it dies.”

@JD – I don’t think it’s a cyclist issue, I think it’s a human issue. The difference is, if you do something dumb in a car you’re likely to be OK. If you do something dumb on a bike, you may not. As for licensing/enforcement. Folks have tried that all over North America with little success – hell the police in LA even asked to get rid of it because it was so cumbersome. It’s not as if we’re not accountable after all. The same laws apply. Are you really suggesting that if bikes had license plates they could be used to report folks who run a red light or have a near miss? I think it’s a rare occasion where it would be used anything but frivolously. After all, think about when you call a plate in on a car. It’s rare that it’s for a guy who blew a stop sign. It’s for the guy who fled the scene after mowing down a pedestrian or using it as a getaway car after an armed robbery. On occasion if someone appears to be driving drunk or racing (or both) and risking others’ lives you will do it. But it’s not as if Duncan and I will be racing by you on the QEW at 220 km/hr.

Not that I don’t think enforcement – even *more* enforcement than is already there is a bad thing. I just don’t think a piece of metal is required to do it. More tickets, on the other hand (as long as they’re fairly handed out) can only do good.