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by Dave Zornow
Pascack Valley Community Life newspaper, November 2005
The last thing cyclist Mike Stevens remembers hearing was the biker behind him yelling “watch out!” Before he could react, a white SUV made a sharp right turn from River Vale Road into the Town Hall and library parking lot cutting off Stevens and throwing him from his bike. And despite the sound a 140 pound cyclist makes when hitting the passenger side door of a moving vehicle, the driver didn’t stop.
Stevens always wears a helmet and considers himself lucky to have survived the October 12th hit and run with only minor scrapes and bruises. “As cyclists, we need to be extremely aware of ourselves and our surroundings – and I hope that drivers share the same feeling,” says the 29-year old Web content manager at Hertz in Park Ridge. But he knows from experience that riding on narrow roads that haven’t kept pace with the growing girth of SUVs, cars and trucks can be dangerous. “I am amazed and horrified to watch cars pass bikes and joggers,” he says. “The ten seconds of patience it takes to wait for a safe place to pass is time well spent to avoid a potentially fatal accident. It’s such a no brainier.”
Ridgewood resident Brian Bernstein’s bike accident involved a limo driver who clipped the 50 year-old North Arlington math teacher while biking through an intersection. Bernstein recalls that the limo driver looked him in the eye and then made a left turn directly in front of Bernstein’s bike. “I had the right of way but he cut me off. My bike and I flipped off the back of the car.” The driver sped off without stopping. Bernstein fractured his elbow in three places.
The experience has made him leery of riding on roads and he questions the training and testing NJ drivers receive regarding sharing the road. “Drivers often don’t treat bicyclists as another moving vehicle. There should be more info on the NJ driving test,” Bernstein says. “There is something wrong with a certification process that lets motorists cause serious accidents without concern for the victim.”
Given the size of vehicles and the width of roads never designed to accommodate today’s traffic, its surprising that more accidents don’t occur. At the place where Steven’s accident happened, River Vale Road is only 39 feet wide and is without a shoulder. Typically, many of the main county roads that pass through Pascack Valley aren’t wide enough for cars, trucks and SUVs to safely pass cyclists, joggers and walkers without swerving into the other lane. Accidents are more likely to occur when two of these oversized vehicles pass each other and neither slows down to accommodate the slower, non-motorized traffic.
Larger cars and distracted motorists don’t deserve all of the blame, though. “My first major accident on River Vale Road as an officer was a bike/car incident where the bike lost,” says River Vale Police Chief Aaron Back. That first on-the-job fatality for Back in 1978 led to River Vale developing a town bike route the following year. But Back says cyclists need to do a better job sharing the road. “We have problems on weekends when groups of 25 to 50 cyclists pass though town and take up the whole road, he says.” But motor vehicles can do more to make the streets safer. “We have many areas in town where cars do not yield to bikes or even to motorcycles.”
“Communities have used a variety of techniques to make it safer for bikes,” says Jennifer Toole, president of Toole Design Group, a Laurel, Maryland planning and engineering firm that specializes in bicycle and pedestrian projects. Toole, an on-call consultant for the NJ Department of Transportation, says it’s a problem that doesn’t need expensive fixes and it offers lots of benefits to communities. Popular approaches include dedicated bike lanes along the side of busy roads, “share the road” signs to remind motorist and cyclist of their joint responsibility and community outreach programs to train drivers to be more aware pedestrians and bicycles.
Rockville, MD, a Washington DC suburb, has embraced this concept with fervor adding more than 40 miles of bike paths and bike lanes in their 13 square mile community. Familiar local NJ concerns about congestion and future development motivated Rockville to promote transportation alternatives. “We are trying to create a more balanced system to create choices,” says Larry Marcus, Rockville’s Chief of Transportation and Traffic. “We aren’t trying to slight automobiles, but to improve access to other ways to get around. Our community is substantially developed and we are out of options.”
To doubters, Marcus notes that “build it and they will come” often applies. Adding “share the road” signs to streets and painting a bike and pedestrian lane stripe on the road raises awareness and encourages people to try walking and biking instead of driving. Bikeway consultant Toole adds that it offers other benefits, too. “Almost half of all car trips are less than three miles in length,” she says. Communities that build mixed use paths for walking and biking can improve access to the town’s business district promoting commerce and health at the same time. Towns with these amenities are often hot real estate locations which raise property values. Toole says this can be both a healthy and cost-effective decision. “Not providing ways for people to exercise is much more expensive than the cost of adding a bike lane or a sidewalk,” she says.
Bergen County may not share the same commitment to alternative transportation as some communities, but it boasts one of the most popular bike paths in the region. The Saddle River Bike Path is an 11 mile route which runs from Ridgewood to Saddle Brook. Bergen County Executive Dennis McNerney, a jogger and an occasional cyclist, is working with surrounding communities hoping to add to the path. The Hackensack River Walk, another “greenway” initiative, is envisaged to run from the Oradell Reservoir to the Meadowlands supporting both pedestrian and bicycle use. McNerney says negotiations with the Palisades Interstate Parkway commission are under way about building a half mile extension to the GWB bike path helping cyclists bike south to Englewood Cliffs without riding on a dangerous stretch of River Road.
River Vale’s soon to be adopted new Master Plan also includes a vision for automotive alternatives. Mayor George Paschalis says it includes the goal of promoting “ease and convenience of non-motorized transportation, including the expanded provisions of sidewalks, walking paths, bicycle paths, lanes and routes, to interconnect residential neighborhoods with public facilities.” Paschalis points to the new Popular Road nature trail and the redevelopment plans for Four Corners in River Vale which include allowances for bike paths and pedestrian walk ways as two examples of this direction. ##