Have you ever been biking down a stretch of road, rocking out to some Radiohead, and next thing you know, you’re getting pulled over by a police officer for “obstructing traffic?” If so, then you might want to keep reading. It was my junior year at the College of Charleston and I would bike to classes on my Nishiki road bike I nicknamed Papa Smurf because of its smurf blue color. I tended to follow biking and traffic laws, i.e., stopping at red lights and stop signs, going the right way down a one way road and so forth. Even though I adhered to these traffic laws, I still managed to get pulled over by a police officer while on my commute home from classes. I must admit that I was in disbelief. There were other bikers in front of me that I was following, until I made the turn onto my street, yet I was the one to get pulled over. After a mild discussion pertaining to his reasons for pulling me over, the officer took down my information and sent me on my way without giving me any specific reasons for pulling myself and Papa Smurf over.
Needless to say, that when I came across the article “Police Officers Unaware and Untrained on Bicycle Laws”, in the April edition of Bike Tour News, it caught my attention. The article, written by Peter Wilborn, an Attorney at Law at Derfner, Altman & Wilborn, maintains that the root cause behind many of the tensions between bikers and law enforcement arise from the fact that “many law enforcement officers simply do not know much about bicycling and bicycling laws.” More often than not, police officers are unaware of the laws surrounding biking and simply rely on their commonsense when determining the “rights and obligations of cyclists.” Mr. Wilborn has overseen multiple cycling injury related cases and states that “it is not unusual for police officers to rewrite accident reports where the initial determinations were wrong. I have had many situations in which an officer has cited the cyclist at fault only to change his or her opinion after reviewing the applicable traffic law.” When exasperation leads to formal and informal discussion methods between cyclists, it often becomes easier to place blame on the responding officer, instead of questioning their training requirements. When given the opportunity to enhance their knowledge concerning cycling law, police officers often embrace the opportunity and seek to bridge the divide between ”commonsense” practices and bike law. In December of 2009, NPR released a story highlighting the tensions between drivers and cyclists resulting from a case of road rage that resulted in the injury of two cyclists in Los Angeles-the driver was fully prosecuted. This NPR story is a very suitable example of the results achieved when police officers are aware of cycling laws.
