Thomas MacMillan Photo
Biking home on Orange Street, cyclist Alex Chojolan keeps an eye out for car doors opening into his path. To protect cyclists like him, the city is “reeducating” drivers with a new door-opening technique — the Amsterdam method.
Traffic department summer intern Ben Green spent part of a recent afternoon working on that reeducation campaign, distributing flyers to cars parked on Orange Street with instructions on how to safely open car doors using a “reach-across” method popular in European cities.
“Doors Hurt,” the flyers proclaim, in large orange letters. Below is a drawing of a cyclist slamming explosively into an open car door — getting “doored,” as the mishap is known among cyclists.
Dooring happens when a driver getting out of a parallel-parked car opens his or her door just as a cyclist is pealing by. It’s a rare occurrence, but can cause a nasty fall when it happens.
It’s enough of a problem that when the Devil’s Gear Bike Shop put out a call last month on its Facebook page asking for bike infrastructure improvement suggestions, a request for “A car-door-opening reeducation program for all Orange St/East Rock residents” was on the list.
City traffic czar Jim Travers saw the list and recognized the reeducation request as an easy one to meet. Green, a Yale President’s “public service fellow” spending the summer with the traffic and parking department, designed flyers and began sticking them under windshield wipers on cars along Orange Street.
On Thursday afternoon, Green (pictured) arrived by bike to the corner of Orange and Humphrey, where the dedicated bike lane on Orange Street begins. He locked up his Specialized road bike and pulled some flyers out of a leather shoulder bag. As he headed north to begin flyering cars, he talked about the dangers of dooring.
It’s never happened to him, said the 21-year-old rising Yale senior. But someone in the traffic and parking office recently got doored, and suffered a big bruise, Green said.
He called dooring a “rare but serious issue. It seems innocuous until it happens to you.”
A cyclist who gets doored can be knocked or have to swerve into the path of oncoming traffic, Green said. On Orange Street, the bike lanes are narrow, which can cause door-wary cyclists to ride as far away from parked cars as possible, closer to the traffic lane.
Green’s flyers includes several tips for drivers to avoid dooring cyclists, including: “Use your right hand to open the car door. This naturally turns your body, positioning you to easily scan the road for oncoming bicyclists.”
This reach-across door-opening technique is “second nature” in bike-friendly European cities like Amsterdam, said Green. He said the flyers are meant not only to prevent dooring, but to raise general awareness about bike safety and sharing the road with cyclists.
As Green was headed back south on Orange Street, flyering cars on the west side of the street, Chojolan and a friend came by on their bikes. Asked if he worries about being doored, Chojolan said, “That’s why I have this right here.” He slapped his red helmet with an open palm.
“I always try to stay on the left” side of the lane, he said. “And see people inside” the parked cars, getting ready to open a door.
Chojolan said he thinks Green’s flyers are a good idea. “Yeah, for sure,” he said. “A lot of people don’t ride” and aren’t thinking about passing cyclists when they park their car and start opening the door.”
Sometimes our city has good intentions, but focuses on the wrong solution.
By far the primary risk of "dooring" is that riders may be destabilized and fall into the path of another vehicle, such as a passing bus or truck.
If these streets were slowed down to 20 miles an hour or below, like they are in most European cities and increasingly in the United States, this hazard would be much smaller. Trucks and buses, in particular, should be limited to 10 miles per hour on densely-populated streets like Orange or Chapel.
If lights were timed to enable buses traveling at 10 miles per hour and buses equipped with traffic control signal transponders, doing this would actually improve bus service times over what we have now.
There's absolutely no reason why people need to be traveling at more than 15 or 20 miles per hour in New Haven, except on a few main streets such as Whalley, Whitney, and Legion Avenue, which should be 25-30.
Unfortunately, our city engineers have designed virtually every street in New Haven as a wide, high speed highway because they care far more about high speed travel to the suburbs than they care about human life.
The recent widening of Whalley Avenue is a great example. Thanks to the DOT's recent efforts, people can now travel at 50 miles per hour there. Hundreds of people protested, but unfortunately, Senators Looney and Harp didn't do much to step in and the project moved forward. This kind of decision kills jobs, not just people. http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/gabrielle_remembered_whalley_widening/