President's Blog: Bicycles and trucks

MoBikeFed President Rachel Ruhlen is a community blogger for Gatehouse Media. This article appeared Feb 4, 2015.

Blind spot

What I learned in school today

Whew! My second quarter of classes in my Master's Program in Sustainable Transportation through the University of Washington (online) started up at the beginning of January and I'm running fast, like the Red Queen, just to stay in place. You might have noticed the blog posts are suddenly less frequent.

I'm surprised to be learning about freight trucks!

It would never have occurred to me that freight trucks are at all like bicycles. But there are a lot of similarities. Trucks start up slow, and bicycles are slow. Trucks like flat streets, and so do bicycles. Car drivers hate trucks, and car drivers hate bicycles. Trucks benefit everyone by bringing goods to stores, and bicycles benefit everyone by decreasing traffic congestion.

We need trucks. Nearly everything comes to us on a truck. If the trucks come at night, people complain about the noise of loading and unloading. If the trucks come during the day, they double-park and block traffic. Often they have to park in the bike lane.

People love to complain about reckless truck drivers. Bicyclists in particular claim that UPS and FedEx drivers are the worst drivers in the world, but the numbers do not back them up. The larger the truck, the fewer the accidents. In fact, per vehicle, per mile, and in absolute number, trucks have fewer collisions than cars do with bicyclists and pedestrians.

Car drivers receive very little training in how to drive. Truck drivers receive a lot of training. They are more skilled than most drivers. Truck drivers may have more to gain than the average driver from driving fast (time is money), but also more to lose from a collision. They have more incentive than most drivers to avoid a collision.

On a bicycle, I feel safer on a road with heavy truck traffic than on a road with fast cars. Some bicyclists think that if a truck hits them, it will be more serious than if a car hits them. But the impact is a result of both mass and speed. Colliding with a car traveling above 40 mph will seriously mess up a bicyclist. The extra mass an 18-wheeler hardly matters on fast highways.

Pedestrians and bicyclists need to know about the enormous blind spot and wide turning radius of big trucks. Many have been killed in the blind spot of a turning truck.

Bicyclists, trucks, and other drivers benefit from better planning, such as zoning regulations requiring a docking bay or unloading zone offset from the road. Industrial warehouses located in the heart of a city might seem like a terrible idea, but it actually decreases the number of miles big trucks must travel in and out of a city.

I never gave much thought to freight trucks, but they are an interesting and integral part of traffic.

Read more of MoBikeFed President Rachel Ruhlen's blog articles here.