I’ve covered a couple of ideas separately over the course of this series that I want to briefly bring together today.
First, potholes. A pothole is often the only thing preventing me from having a safe and easy trip home on a bike. These things are hard to see from a bike but can represent a major risk for anyone who goes wheel-first into the pit. If the hole is deep enough, it can cause the front wheel to catch and send the rider over the top of the handlebars.
The bizarre thing about potholes is that the local municipal authorities do not seem to care much for this risk. I read an article about a year ago on the topic that drove this point home. This article reported that Boston’s current pothole ‘response rate’ – some metric that tracks how well the city responds to a report that a pothole must be filled in – is something close to 68%. Apparently, this figure falls far short of the target rate of 88%.
This article’s findings indicate a lot of work is left to do. Although the investments made in safe cycling lanes have been significant, a far more prudent course of action would be to make sure no part of the city’s roads have a life-threatening HOLE in the middle of it. This way, at least a biker who rides safely and follows the laws of the road has a good chance of navigating the streets safely. The current ‘pothole response rate’ implies that there are plenty of holes all around for me to kill myself in no matter my skill level, vigilance, or law-abiding instincts.
This brings me to the second idea – the difference between the auto industry and the bike industry or, perhaps more precisely, the difference between car culture and bike culture. In car culture, the accepted national death toll is just north of thirty thousand road fatalities a year. In bike culture, the accepted death rate is slightly lower – around zero fatalities a year.
This cultural difference helps me understand the city’s priorities as it relates to bike safety. When I think about it, the more revealing figure above is not 68% but rather 88%. This tells us that the city thinks the best it can do is fill in eight out of every nine potholes. It is the logic of car culture that enables 88%. Would we settle for 88% if we considered thirty thousand road fatalities a year unacceptable?
When the city decides mediocrity is no longer enough, it will follow the lead of the local bike culture and set the pothole response target at 100%. This is the only acceptable goal for anyone who agrees with bike culture’s controversial position that the acceptable fatality rate on our city’s streets is zero deaths per year.
