City governments continuously readjust their transportation to create a consistent and easy way to get around town for their citizens. New York owns a complex underground subway, Boston and Chicago control advanced rail systems, and Atlanta leans more favorably towards cars. However in more recent years, people have been switching to bicycles as their primary transportation because it offers reliability and energy efficiency. Unfortunately, cyclists and drivers are forced to share the same roads, even though both vehicles demand an entirely different infrastructure for safe travelling. As a result of such problems, 726 bicyclists were killed in 2012 plus an additional 49,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes, and the number of cyclists killed in 2012 was 6 percent higher than the previous year (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Citizens deserve …show more content…
There’s a build up of cars, people turn all sorts of directions, and drivers become more impatient as the light stays red. The main difficulty for bikers lies with slow acceleration; once the light turns green drivers become anxious to get moving as fast as possible, but the biker slowly starts off. Before cities can incorporate completely separate paths for bikes, the most immediate solution is to let bikers go through red lights if the road is clear.
Although there remains a lot of controversy over this topic in today’s world, Idaho created a law in 1982 affectionately named “The Idaho Stop”. The law allows bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs, and ultimately gives the rider more responsibility for their own safety. Unsurprisingly, “bike-injury rates declined by 14.5 percent the year after the law was passed, then remained flat” (Citylab). Idaho set a precedent for safe bicycling, and cities need to follow their example if they want to achieve a better harmony between bikes and