A recent letter to the editor (“E-bike safety starts at home”) questions the use of tax dollars for bike safety for our city’s youngest riders. Since the author saw reckless teen cyclists with her own eyes, she reasons that city investment is a fool’s errand and that it is parents’ responsibility to parent our way out of bike accidents.
The writer has no idea what those particular riders’ parents had or hadn’t done, but she is certain that they are to blame and that municipal attention to this issue is misplaced. By that reasoning, we could tear out every stoplight and just hope that our road’s drivers had great parents who taught them that it’s bad to hit other cars.
When reckless drivers evade authorities, no one clamors to throw in the towel on ongoing municipal investment in car safety. That’s because we get that enforcement is one part of a multi-layered strategy to keep us safe on the roads.
We continue to invest in improving road infrastructure, knowing that licensed adults with training still cause accidents. So why would we expect that children on bikes, with no licensing requirement, need less infrastructure support?
Something about kids on bikes ratchets up emotions in this town. And while those emotions run high, blaming parental neglect is a classic quick dodge out of a complex reality. It’s blinders when what we need is vision. I urge my neighbors to continue to support the course we have been on for decades: Continued strong municipal investment in road safety, which includes bike safety.
We parents clearly have a role here. I routinely tell parents in my neighborhood when I see their kids riding responsibly, as so many do. I never ride without a helmet, for my own good, but also so my children can see me walk the walk (or, sorry, bike the bike). On our morning bike commute, I narrate hazards to my kids as I see them, hoping that some of what I say will take root in their developing minds.
And still, I am clear that what I do is not enough to protect them as they grow up.
Setting cyclists up for safety requires the same layered approach we have for cars: infrastructure, standards, training, campaigns, and enforcement. And parental guidance can shine brighter when a city does the legwork to make frameworks available and locally relevant.
Ironically, the letter to the editor proposes that parents and children should have to pass a test before kids can ride e-bikes. That would, of course, be a taxpayer-funded endeavor if it set any standard.
For Encinitas, I say: Parental guidance, yes. And also: Ongoing strategic infrastructure. Just like drivers have.
Make no mistake, the protected bike lanes, barriers, underpasses, stop signs, and taxpayer-funded programs we’ve invested in as a city in the past 19 years have stopped untold numbers of accidents, and even fatalities. Those efforts have increased safe and responsible bike use. They have mitigated the car congestion that so irritates every Encinitan.
The thing about governance is, we will never know the names of the people whose lives were saved by infrastructure spending. And that is exactly as it should be.
Mary Anne Mendenhall
Leucadia
