Bicyclists face many risks when they take to the roads, but perhaps one of the most dangerous comes from parked cars. “Dooring” is cyclist lingo for when passengers or drivers open their car doors into a bike lane, causing an unsuspecting and unprepared cyclist to smack right into it. According to the Boston Cyclist Safety Report, among 1,700 accidents and injuries in a recent three year period in Boston, 22 percent involved a driver or passenger opening a vehicle door into the path of an oncoming cyclist.
“Dooring” is very much preventable, says the Healthy Community Champion (HCC) team at Neponset Health Center. This group of four works with the Let’s Get Healthy Boston Initiative through the Boston Alliance for Community Health and the Boston Public Health Commission. Their goal is to encourage people to walk and bike throughout Dorchester as a way of getting from place to place instead of using cars or public transportation. Since last October, the Neponset team has been working with a new ally to promote cycling safety: the ride-sharing service Uber.
For the past two years, the Let’s Get Healthy Boston Team at Neponset has been talking to members of the community about their experiences with biking. They discovered that many people in Dorchester simply do not feel safe cycling in the neighborhood due to traffic concerns. After hearing this, the Neponset team decided to try something different to improve the sense of safety cyclists will feel in traffic while riding though Dorchester.
“When you are trying to educate people about cycling safety, you usually start with the cyclist,” says Kerry Cameron, a Healthy Community Champion working with the Neponset Health Center. “Instead, we are started to reach out to the drivers. Uber has a large presence in Boston and lots of area drivers spend their extra time earning by providing rides. Working directly with Uber to connect with Uber partners and get the cycling safety message out only makes sense. We also know that Boston is a difficult city to drive in and many of our drivers aren’t from here originally. The team at Neponset feels it’s helpful to educate more drivers about how to share the road. Uber was able to help here, partnering with the Neponset team to share educational information in both their Dorchester and Downtown Boston Greenlight Hubs.”
Added Brianna MacDonald, another Healthy Community Champion with Neponset and a Dorchester resident: “We worked closely with the Dorchester Bike Coalition to come up with messages that we thought drivers had to know.”
For the record, the Dorchester Bike Coalition decided that drivers should know to give cyclists a minimum of three feet around them, they need to be clear about their intentions by using their signals, and they have to avoid parking in bike lanes whenever possible. Now drivers can go in and see this information when they go into these offices.
The Neponset Health Center and Uber will also be prompting passengers of the service to do their part as well. You can keep your eyes out for stickers on the driver’s side back window reminding passengers to look out for cyclists. “These stickers are just friendly reminders to glance back down the road before you open your door.” MacDonald says. “It could save someone’s life, and someone’s door!”
In all, the Neponset Health Center understands drivers may not always be looking for cyclists. “When I’m going through Dorchester, it seems like some drivers lack awareness of where the bike lane is,” says MacDonald. She describes family and friends who visit from outside the city and simply aren’t aware of how to share the road, and can’t help but believe that the same thing is happening with others in the city. Bicycles are just not something you have to deal with outside the city, and this lack of awareness and preparedness can be concerning for cyclists who want to ride safely.
The Neponset Health Center believes that their efforts to provide education and friendly reminders to Uber drivers will be very helpful to the community. The sticker campaign alone has already been so successful that Uber plans to produce its own.
As for the future, the Neponset Health Center hopes to reach out to more ride-sharing and taxi services. This will likely mean not only developing more relationships, but also coming up with more creative places to make the stickers available, like at the RMV or driving schools. In the meantime, the Neponset Health Center hopes to make sure even more Uber drivers hand out their stickers. So look out for those stickers, and for cyclists!
To learn more information about citywide efforts to improve bike safety and infrastructure in Boston, see the Boston Bikes website at boston.gov/departments/boston-bikes.
