Item from Ian: "The Scofflaw Bicycle Survey"

From Nebraska Today:
“These results suggest that people are making judgments about appropriate bicycling based on their own experience,” Nebraska researcher Daniel Piatkowski said. “And that’s a problem. It means traffic laws or street design are not working.”

New research co-authored by a transportation expert at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that bicyclists’ behavior, like that of motorists, often is governed by unspoken rules of the road. …

“We know it’s the Wild West out there,” said Daniel P. Piatkowski, assistant professor in the community and regional planning program of the College of Architecture at Nebraska. “There are all these conflicting ideas of how a bike rider should behave — some legal, some illegal. We found that, regardless of how people are riding, most are doing so to avoid being injured or killed by a driver.” …
For the past several years, Piatkowski has worked with civil engineer Wesley Marshall at the University of Colorado, Denver, and sociologist Aaron Johnson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on a massive worldwide survey of bicyclists. “The Scofflaw Bicycling Survey,” conducted online in late winter and spring 2015, attracted more than 18,000 respondents around the world. …
Marshall, Piatkowski and Johnson also co-authored “Scofflaw bicycling: illegal but rational,” published March 8 in the Journal of Transport and Land Use. That article describes the spectrum of illegal behaviors committed by bicyclists and investigates the motivations behind those acts. …
Marshall said he was struck by the significant percentages of respondents who reacted aggressively to each situation. They answered that the actions made them mad or made them want to confront the bicyclist.

“When a perfectly legal bicycling maneuver like taking the middle of the lane elicits an aggressive response from a significant number of drivers, that is a big problem,” Marshall said. “This sort of disconnect helps explain a lot of the behaviors we’re seeing out there.”
Although nearly 65 percent of the respondents were accepting of cyclists’ running a stop sign at a four-way stop, aggressive responses came from drivers who said they followed the rules of the road while cycling and those who said they were comfortable cycling in traffic.
“The more one rides a bike, the less likely they are to respond aggressively to another rider,” Piatkowski said. “Aggressive responses are significantly correlated with how one might behave in a similar situation, suggesting the behavior is guided by an informal norm based on personal experience, rather than the law,” Piatkowski said. …
“These results suggest that people are making judgments about appropriate bicycling based on their own experience,” Piatkowski said. “And that’s a problem. It means traffic laws or street design are not working.”
Full article here.

Adanac
March 13, 2017 at 7:12 pm

Anyone who rides for transportation for awhile learns that the laws pertaining to cycling seem to have been designed to sell cars.
Add to that inconsistencies, where a certain action is illegal in one city but in the next city the same action is legal and encouraged. Then on top of that people who hold myths about what the laws are.

Arnie Carnegie
March 13, 2017 at 9:11 pm

It would be useful to see a copy of this survey – how it was crafted.
The title is disturbing – like ‘Reefer Madness’. What if another survey were devised titled: Bully Motorists; or Car Maniacs; or Redneck Truckers. What would respondents have said about all of these miscreants rolling through stop signs, pulling u-eys; hitting brakes to answer the phone; stopping at no stop zones; squeezing past cyclists (most motorists can’t stand to be behind a bicycle for even a few seconds); double parking; speeding; smoking; eating; blasting music; flinging open doors without looking, bullying their way through crosswalks …
The car industry is threatened by bicycles. When was the last time you checked YouTube and saw an ad for bicycles. There’s no money in it. Cars and trucks?
Motorists are jealous of cyclists. I am when stuck behind the wheel.