Bicycling is a good exercise for many who need to train whereas defending the surroundings. Furthermore, it gives an pleasant technique of commuting round city, simply adaptable as a household exercise. Sadly, until you restrict your bike driving to parks or devoted bikeways, sharing the street with automobiles, vehicles, and different motorized automobiles exposes bike riders to harmful situations and may trigger bicycle accidents. It’s no shock that the bicycle rider is the most probably to maintain accidents or fatalities in a collision.
Tampa Bay has been recognized because the deadliest place in Florida for bicycle riders. However, Hillsborough County and the Metropolis of Tampa have taken steps to make bike riders safer. This text examines the causes of bicycle accidents and suggests measures to boost driving security.
What are the advantages of driving a bicycle?
In accordance with the Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the USA Division of Transportation division, spending on bicycles elevated 620% from March 2020 to March 2023. American households have spent $8 billion month-to-month on bicycles and bicycle equipment over the previous 12 months.
One other signal of the recognition of bicycle driving has been the rise within the variety of cities throughout the nation, together with Tampa, with bike-share companies that make bicycle transportation attainable even for individuals who don’t personal bikes. Other than its use as a type of transportation, driving a bicycle offers many health benefits. These embody cardiovascular health, coordination and suppleness, and improved muscle tone. It’s additionally an effective way to trim a few of these undesirable kilos.
Using with pals or discovering a neighborhood group of riders is a superb approach to develop social relationships. As a method of transportation, driving a bicycle offers a approach to eradicate the gas, upkeep, and insurance coverage prices related to automobiles and different forms of motor automobiles. You can too pat your self on the again for doing all of your half to cut back air and noise air pollution. Using a bicycle additionally contributes to decrease site visitors congestion.
Extra individuals would experience bicycles had been it not for the 130,000 riders injured and 1,000 killed yearly all through the U.S. The injury and fatality rates in Florida are simply as dangerous with 8,394 bicyclists injured in 2023 and 224 killed. Thus far this 12 months, there have been 40 fatalities and 1,878 injured.
You may make driving safer by figuring out what causes bicycle accidents, the riskier driving situations, and the strategies and gear to guard you in case of a mishap. Let’s start by wanting on the peak occasions and situations contributing to collisions between riders and motor automobiles.
When do most bicycle accidents happen?
One of many issues confronted by bicycle riders is the tendency of individuals to think about bicycles as youngsters’s toys. Nothing could possibly be farther from the reality. Florida regulation defines a bicycle as a automobile. It has all of the rights and privileges of automobiles, vehicles, bikes, and different automobiles. Together with rights and privileges come tasks.
Bicyclists have the identical proper to occupy a journey lane as any automobile, even when touring at a slower pace. Nevertheless, riders should preserve to the precise aspect of the street to keep away from impeding the movement of site visitors. That is true apart from when making a left flip.
While you experience impacts how protected you’ll be. Information compiled by the Florida Division of Transportation reveals that the flexibility for riders to see and be seen is worse at night time. In the event you should experience a motorcycle when visibility is poor due to mild or climate situations, put on vibrant, light-colored clothes. It’s finest so as to add a reflective vest or jacket to make you extra seen to motorists.
Equip your bicycle with entrance, rear, and aspect reflectors. These stand out when caught within the headlights of motor automobiles and streetlights. State regulation in Florida requires that bicycles operated between sundown and dawn be geared up with a headlight. This have to be able to projecting a white mild 500 toes and a purple mild mounted on the again that’s seen a minimum of 600 toes to the rear.
These are solely minimal necessities to extend your skill to see and be seen when driving underneath poor lighting situations. You may set up further lights and reflectors to make your bicycle extra seen.
Guidelines of the experience that bicycle riders should obey
You’ve undoubtedly been in your automotive and seen individuals on bicycles making turns with out signaling, driving in opposition to the course of site visitors, and ignoring cease indicators or purple lights. Did you marvel: How do they get away with it? The reply is that they don’t.
The foundations of the street controlling the conduct of motorized vehicle drivers additionally apply to bicycle riders. In the event you experience a bicycle and fail to cease at a purple mild, you face a superb. This is similar approach as the driving force of a automotive. You additionally face the next danger of sustaining extreme accidents or fatalities in a collision. That is larger than the driving force of the automobile that struck you.
The next are guidelines of the street that apply particularly to bicycle riders. Just a few relate to how drivers should behave when interacting with individuals on bicycles:
- Bicycles have to be ridden in the identical course as site visitors. Using dealing with oncoming site visitors isn’t safer than driving with it. But, you’ll see individuals driving in opposition to the movement as a result of they suppose it lets them see and react to what’s coming at them. One drawback with driving in opposition to the movement of site visitors is it will increase the danger of being hit by a automotive turning from aspect streets, parking heaps, and driveways by automobiles pushed by motorists who don’t count on or search for a bicycle coming from the other way as different automobiles.
- Sign intent to show proper or left. Bicyclists should use hand alerts to point their intention to make a left or proper flip. As a result of some cyclists want each fingers to manage a bicycle, the hand sign needn’t be given repeatedly all through the flip.
- Listening units, together with headsets and headphones, will not be used whereas working a bicycle. This regulation prevents using any machine that might impede a bicyclist’s skill to listen to surrounding sounds. Nevertheless, hearing-impaired riders could use listening to aids. The regulation permits a rider to make use of a single machine offering sound to just one ear when used with a cellphone.
- Bicycle riders ought to keep to the precise, besides when making left turns. Chances are you’ll experience in the precise lane of site visitors even when you find yourself touring at a pace slower than different automobiles. Nevertheless, it is best to keep as far to the precise as safely attainable to keep away from impeding site visitors. This regulation offers you the precise to make use of as a lot of the lane as you want. When making a left flip, chances are you’ll use the left lane to make the flip.
- Drivers making a proper flip should go away ample house for bicycles. When a driver overtakes and passes a motorcycle getting into the identical course, the driving force can not make a proper flip until the bicycle rider is a minimum of 20 toes from the intersection the place the motorist plans to make a proper flip. It’s the accountability of the motorists to ensure there’s ample time and house to securely make the flip. They need to do that with out interfering with the approaching bicycle.
- When passing a bicycle, drivers should go away a minimum of a three-foot house between their automobiles and the bicycle. Passing too carefully to an individual on a motorcycle may cause them to lose management. This regulation imposes accountability for sustaining a protected distance on drivers of automobiles and different forms of automobiles.
- Bicyclists on sidewalks have the identical rights and duties as pedestrians. A bicyclist driving on a sidewalk should have a whistle, horn, bell, or different machine able to emitting an audible sign and use it earlier than passing pedestrians.
Native governments could enact ordinances relating to bicycle operations. These embody prohibiting their use on sidewalks or limiting them to sidewalk use solely in designated areas.
Florida helmet requirement for bicycle riders
Bicycle riders and passengers youthful than age 16 should put on a helmet. The helmet should meet federal security requirements.
Though the regulation doesn’t require helmets for anybody 16 or older, carrying one might shield you from a extreme head or mind harm. Analysis reveals that wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle reduces head accidents by 48%. It additionally reduces traumatic mind harm by 53% and accidents to the face by 23%.
The place to show when injured in a bicycle accident?
In the event you endure accidents in a bicycle accident attributable to one other individual’s negligence, search recommendation and steering from the private harm attorneys at KFB Regulation. You might have a proper to compensation from the accountable social gathering in your accidents. These embody misplaced wages, medical care bills, and ache and struggling. Contact KFB Law at present for a free session and declare analysis.
