The transportation bill — Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, MAP-21 — requires states to set performance goals across several categories. The details of these goals will very likely determine transportation priorities well into the future.

Join our next Advocacy Advance webinar on Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. EDT for the first our series on Understanding and Shaping Transportation Performance Measures.

This webinar series will explore the implications of the new performance measure requirements in MAP-21. How will performance measures impact bicycling and walking investments? Can they work in favor for active transportation? What should be measured? What can be measured? Join the discussion with national experts on the topic.

First up on Tuesday, we’ll find out the latest on federal performance measure policy from two experts from the U.S. Department of Transportation and our own Caron Whitaker, the League’s Vice President of Government Relation.

Part I: Federal Context and Perspectives
Tuesday, April 23 @ 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EDT -Register here

Presenters:

• Rebecca Higgins, Transportation and Environmental Policy Analyst, Office of the Secretary of Transportation
• Robert Ritter, Acting Safety Team Leader, Office of the Secretary of Transportation
• Caron Whitaker, Vice President of Government Relations, League of American Bicyclists

Part II: Current Data Collection Methods and Exploring What’s Possible
Tuesday, May 14 @ 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EDT – Register here

Presenters:

• Charles Denney, Alta Planning + Design
• Jean-Francois Rheault, Director, Eco-Counter
• Tony Hull, Senior Planner, Toole Design Group
• David Patton, Bicycle & Pedestrian Planner, Arlington County Division of Transportation

Advocacy Advance is a partnership of the League of American Bicyclists and the Alliance for Biking & Walking.

Darren Flusche
League Policy Director

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

New laws to combat distracted driving are proposed frequently, including laws against new technologies that are not even on sale yet. Despite a high level of awareness, 49 percent of commuters and 43 percent of teenagers admitted to texting or sending emails while driving,according to a recent poll conducted by AT&T.

Sharing the road is much harder when people are not looking at the road. Effective distracted driving laws and enforcement are key to discouraging this dangerous behavior.

What are they?

Generally, distracted driving can be caused by any activity that can divert a person’s attention away from the primary task of driving. Although distracted driving can take many forms, distracted driving laws are primarily a response to the spread of mobile communications devices into our vehicles. The most common distracted driving laws include bans on text messaging, bans on cell-phone use, and the required use of a hands-free device while operating a mobile communications device in a vehicle. These laws can either be primary enforcement laws, which means a driver can be pulled over solely for violating the distracted driving law, or secondary enforcement laws, which means that the distracted driving law can only be enforced if another traffic offense also takes place.

Why should you care?

In 2010, 18 percent of injury crashes were reported as distraction-affected crashes. The prevalence and use of mobile communications devices has increased dramatically in the last decade and is likely to continue to increase. Safe bicycling and safe driving requires an awareness of your surroundings that is made more difficult by the use of mobile communications devices in vehicles. Distracted driving laws are important because they encourage people to stay focused on the task of driving and can be used in legal actions resulting from collisions or other incidents between road users.

If you would like to know more about the dangers of distracted driving, particularly distracted driving caused by the use of mobile communications devices, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the US Department of Transportation (DOT) have a great site with links to research and reports on the issue. For some information about how MAP-21 provides incentive grants for distracted driving programs please see this report put together by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety or this press release from NHTSA.

Who has them?

Thirty-nine states ban text messaging for all drivers, and 33 states ban all cell phone use by novice drivers. Ten states prohibit all drivers from using handheld cell phones while driving. To learn more about the various laws targeting distracted driving please see the excellent information put together by the Governors Highway Safety Association.

Click on image for full chart. Credit: GHSA.

Spotlight State –New Jersey

New Jersey has some of the strongest laws in the country to combat distracted driving. It is one of only two states — the other is Delaware — that has primary enforcement laws against all cell phone use by school bus and novice drivers, text messaging by all drivers, handheld use by all drivers, and includes a category for cell phone/electronic equipment distraction on police accident forms, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.  Every year since 2008 New Jersey drivers have been issued about 100,000 summons based upon illegal talking or texting while driving. Recent studies have shown that strong texting bans can reduce fatal single-occupancy, single-vehicle crashes but that vigilant enforcement is needed and concurrent handheld bans increase the effectiveness of texting bans.

Where did they come from?

Distracted driving is a relatively new issue and has been addressed in a variety of ways by states. In 2000, only three states had laws related to cell phones in cars. Oregon was the first state to make distracted driving a priority by incorporating it into their Strategic Highway Safety Plan in 1999. Since 2000, every state has considered legislation related to cell phone use in cars or distracted driving, and almost 200 bills were considered in 2009 alone

As of the last revision to the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC) in 2000, there are no UVC sections relevant to distracted driving.

You can learn more about distracted driving in this report: http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/reports/pdfs/distracted_driving_league_report.pdf

(Photo Credit: Alliance for Biking & Walking Photo Library)

Ken McLeod
Legal Specialist, Advocacy Advance

Ken joined the League in 2012 after graduating from William & Mary School of Law. He is a licensed attorney in the state of Virginia. During law school he worked for a private law firm in Cambodia and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Prior to that, Ken worked at a law firm in Orange County and a legal services provider in Seattle. He graduated from Pomona College in 2007 with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He began using his bike regularly after college and has been car-free since February 2012.

Guest post by the Griffin Bicycle Coalition.

Congratulations to the Griffin Bicycle Coalition and Georgia Bikes! for a successful ‘Show me event’. We believe this is the first follow up district event since the National Bike Summit. At the Summit, the League encouraged advocates to urge their lawmakers to visit a bicycle project or event to see the positive effects of bicycling in their communities.

Griffin, Georgia, held a Bike to City Hall event in chilly weather with occasional snow flurries last month to mimic the Atlanta-based “Ride to the Capitol” led by Georgia Bikes! earlier that day.

Tracie Sanchez, Michelle Cannon, Ian Flitcroft, and Bruce Reid of the Griffin Bicycle Coalition organized bike trains from four points across the city: a university, church, high school, and city park — and invited citizens to ride along, including Matt Brass from Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s (R) office — who all joined a regularly scheduled City Commission meeting.  At the meeting, the following recently approved resolution was read out loud and presented to the more than 30 cyclists. The cyclists stated their names and addresses as part of the permanent record of support for the resolution.

2013 COG Bike-Ped Resolution

The Griffin-Spalding Area Transportation Committee Bicycle and Pedestrian Subcommittee is working in collaboration with the Griffin Bicycle Coalition to increase and enhance infrastructure, including the installation of sidewalks, bicycle lanes, multi-use paths, routes, signage, bicycle parking, and storage facilities. In addition, they are working to encourage walking and bicycling as viable modes of transportation, in order to reduce the dependence on the use of automobiles and improve air quality.

This is a great example of involving your Congressional office. Not only did the Congressman’s staff come out to a bike ride, but he witnessed the local government voicing their support of biking and walking!

“We are going to address bike safety head on… and we are going to pull from all our resources to do it.”

At the National Bike Summit earlier this month, Secretary Ray LaHood announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation would focus on bike safety by holding two Bike Safety Summits — and today DOT announced the dates and locations:

• April 11: Tampa, Florida
• April 29: Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Safety Summits will feature an expo in the morning with resources on bike safety, education, Safe Routes to School, and creating Bicycle Friendly Communities, Universities and Businesses, as well as hands-on safety training. The afternoons will include policy discussions on the built environment and planning, enforcement and education.

In announcing these Summits, Secretary LaHood said DOT would bring to bear all of its resources — including policy experts from DOT, research experts from the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration and engineering experts from Federal Highway Administration.

So what would we like to see as results?

Policy: A non-motorized safety performance measure (a national goal to reduce bicyclist deaths)

Engineering: Innovative bike design standards endorsed by US DOT

Research: Better data overall bicycling data- including data on the what, where, why, when and who of bicycling crashes and best practices on buidling safe, accessbile bike friendly infrastructure.

Beyond that, though, we hope the Summit in Tampa shines the national spotlight on the spate of tragic fatal crashes involving bicyclists in the area over the past several months and helps to identify some solid, practical suggestions to improve traffic safety for all road users in the region. In Minneapolis, we expect the leading efforts of local officials, advocates and Mayor R.T. Rybak to turn their city into a Gold-level Bicycle Friendly Community will clearly showcase the many benefits of making biking a safe and enjoyable means of transportation and recreation.

We thank Secretary LaHood for his continued leadership on biking and on safety — and we look forward to seeing what the Bike Safety Summit brings. Learn more, including how to register, on the Fast Lane Blog.

Photo: Secretary Ray LaHood at the 2013 National Bike Summit, credit Brian Palmer

Caron Whitaker
Vice President of Government Relations

Prior to joining the League of American Bicyclists in 2012, Ms. Whitaker served as the Campaign Director for America Bikes where she coordinated and implemented America Bikes federal policy agenda. Before that, she worked for the National Wildlife Federation on smart growth, international policy, and community engagement. In addition, Caron served as a Community Land Use Planner for the State of North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, providing technical assistance to local governments and staffing a stakeholders’ council responsible for revising state planning regulations. She has a Masters in Environmental Management for Duke University, Nicolas School of the Environment and a Bachelors of Arts from Williams College.

Recent legislative successes include the “Access to Justice for Bicyclists Act of 2012” in Washington D.C., the recent endorsement of a vulnerable user ordinance by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors (read more about that campaign here) and a statewide law in Utah. While VRU protections have proliferated in the past five years, they continue to take many shapes.

So, in this edition of Bike Law University, we explore the current laws and the concept behind them.

What are they?

Automobiles provide a shell of protection for their users — creating a safety disparity between cars and other road users. This is not to say non-automobile forms of transportation aren’t safe, but simply that there is a difference between what occurs when a car is hit at 25 miles-per-hour and what occurs when a pedestrian is hit at 25 mph. While the percentage of motorist deaths has fallen, the percentage of road fatalities that are bicyclists and pedestrians has grown in recent years (from 12 percent to 16 percent).

Vulnerable Road User laws increase protection for bicyclists and other road users who are not in cars. They are relatively new and states have chosen to protect vulnerable road users in a variety of ways. This includes usually involves 1) harsher penalties for the violation of existing laws when that violation impacts a defined set of road users or 2) the creation of new laws that prohibit certain actions directed at a defined set of road users.

Click the image above for the full chart.

Why should you care?

Safety: The vast majority of VRU laws provide for increased fines or civil liability in cases where a vulnerable road user is injured or killed because of negligence or as the result of a traffic violation. These laws increase the cost of unsafe practices that impact bicyclists and provide an incentive for safer driving practices, especially around cyclists and pedestrians. In this way the laws are much like increased fines in work zones, which promote construction worker safety. VRU laws recognize that the type of simple negligence or traffic violations that may result in minor collisions between cars can have disproportionately severe results when a vulnerable road user is involved and provide ways to address those divergent results.

Justice: In some states VRU laws include the option or mandate that a person convicted of injuring or killing a vulnerable road user attend a hearing. Without these laws, a driver who injures or kills a bicyclist may simply pay a fine through the mail — despite the severity of the impact of his or her actions. These hearings can provide a chance for both sides to meet and tell their stories, similar to victim impact panels that are a feature of DUI offenses. The League believes the experience of a hearing is a valuable tool for addressing the separateness between motorists and bicyclists — and endorses requiring a hearing as part of our Model Legislation (http://www.bikeleague.org/action/bikelaws/modellaws.php).

Messaging: VRU laws may be an important and effective part of messaging about road safety. The VRU concept is inclusive and multi-modal. It provides a messaging and legal framework for a wide range of advocates interested in road safety that highlights and increases awareness of the inherent safety disparity between road users encased in a protective shell and those who are not. As a newer concept, it has the potential to engage law enforcement, judges, and juries in a way that they have not been been before and shift perceptions. While these individuals or groups may not always understand what it is like to be a cyclist, at one time or another everyone has been a vulnerable road user.

Enforcement: A VRU law may increase access to justice. Vulnerable road users, unlike automobile users, may lack the evidence and expensive property damage that is created in a car crash. Statutory civil penalties may provide an incentive for lawyers to work with vulnerable road users to recover damages and recognize the serious of vulnerable road user crashes. Criminal penalties provide an additional enforcement tool for police and a framework for better traffic enforcement.

Who has them?

Five states – Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington – have VRU laws that define a set of road users as vulnerable and provide specific processes and penalties for actions directed at those users. The District of Columbia and 17 other states in some way address vulnerable road users by prohibiting certain actions — such as harassment or the throwing of objects — or by providing the ability for persons to be charged with greater penalties when their actions result in the injury or death of a vulnerable road user.

Where did they come from?

The first state to pass a vulnerable road user law, which defined a set of road users as vulnerable and provided specific penalties for actions directed at those users, was Oregon, in 2007. Many of the other laws that protect vulnerable road users from certain actions were passed in response to tragedies caused by motorist-bicyclist collisions. As of the last revision to the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC) in 2000, there is no UVC section equivalent to vulnerable road user laws. The closest relevant section is UVC 11-1111, which deals with glass and other substances likely to injure on a roadway. Some variation of UVC 11-1111 has been adopted in a majority of states.

Spotlight State: Oregon

Oregon enacted the first Vulnerable Road User law in the U.S. in 2007. The law provides a definition of vulnerable users and sets out distinct penalties for the serious physical injury or death of vulnerable road users under the careless driving law. Careless driving is a Class A or B traffic violation — depending on whether it involves a crash — and requires a hearing when it involves the serious physical injury or death of a vulnerable road user. The penalties are significant when that careless driving results in a serious physical injury or death of a vulnerable road user: a fine that’s six times the standard maximum fine for a Class A traffic violation and a one-year suspension of driving privileges.

In addition, Oregon addresses vehicular assault against bicyclists and pedestrians as a separate Class A misdemeanor. This vehicular assault law can complement or provide an alternative to a citation for a violation of Oregon’s safe passing law, giving law enforcement options to account for different driver behavior or enforcement concerns related to the safe passing law.

Learn more about how the vulnerable road user law was developed and enacted here. Since the initial law, advocates, like the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, have worked for improvements, including an amendment in 2011.

Photo: Alliance for Biking & Walking Photo Library

Ken McLeod
Legal Specialist, Advocacy Advance

Ken joined the League in 2012 after graduating from William & Mary School of Law. He is a licensed attorney in the state of Virginia. During law school he worked for a private law firm in Cambodia and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Prior to that, Ken worked at a law firm in Orange County and a legal services provider in Seattle. He graduated from Pomona College in 2007 with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He began using his bike regularly after college and has been car-free since February 2012.

First, there was the glorious return of the winged wheel to the League’s logo. Then there were several requests for “proof” of the link between the League of American Wheelmen and AAA. And, of course, with Women’s History Month comes a string a fascinating profiles of women that have a left a mark on the history of bicycling (including our own Phyllis Harmon).

Where to go for all this information?

The role of the League in the creation of the Good Roads Movement and everything that followed from that is excellently documented by Richard Weingroff and fellow authors at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), of all places. I say “of all places,” but, of course, the FHWA most definitely traces it’s own existence directly back to the League of American Wheelmen and their lobbying for the creation of an Office of Road Inquiry in 1892. Colonel Albert Pope was one of the founders of the LAW and a force behind the creation of the Good Roads Movement. General Roy Stone took the idea and ran with it, including pitching the idea of The National Road, and being one of the founding members of the Automobile Club of America (which went on to be a founding member of the American Automobile Association).

The League’s influential past is more than matched on the other side of the Atlantic by the UK’s Cyclists Touring Club (CTC). Those parallels are about to get a thorough airing thanks to the extraordinary work and creativity of Carlton Reid — and the support of a lot of individuals who responded to a kickstarter campaign to fund publication of Reid’s “Roads Were Not Built for Cars.” In fact, interest was so high that the initial fundraising goal was reached in 20 hours and attracted the attention of Kickstarter staff themselves.

The League’s story is entertainingly told by Reid (and he actually did take the time and planned ahead to visit the Smithsonian!), and there are plenty of relevant Women’s History Month stories in there as well. Check it out…

Andy Clarke
League President

Andy Clarke was appointed to the position of Executive Director in April of 2004 after successfully leading efforts to create, interpret and implement the various transportation programs that are available to improve conditions for bicycling and walking as the League’s State and Local Advocacy Director. Before joining the League in February 2003, Clarke was on contract to provide technical assistance to the highly regarded Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center on site at the Federal Highway Administration. He is on the Board of Directors for America Bikes, and a member of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycling Professionals.

One thing everyone can agree on, however, is that bicycling and walking projects are broadly eligible for the majority of federal funding programs in the new federal transportation law, MAP-21. These large and often flexible programs represent a huge opportunity for bike/ped projects to compete with others for a larger share of transportation funding.

Advocates in Delaware and Washington State, for example, have already had great success tapping into some of these larger funding programs for their states’ bicycling investments. They have done this by understanding two things:

1. How the programs work, and
2. The political dynamics. Through the Advocacy Advance Program, a partnership between the League and the Alliance for Biking & Walking, we urge advocates to learn the Who, What, Where, When, and How of the funding process and political landscape.

To demystify a fairly complex process, we’ve created a series of flow charts to illustrate the technical process from planning to construction — and the advocacy steps advocates can take to influence the process. Click on the links below to learn about the program, and check the back for more detailed recommendations.

• The Surface Transportation Program (STP)
•  The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program (CMAQ)
• The Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP)
• The Transportation Improvement Program (TA or TAP)

Please contact me if you have any questions at darren@bikeleague.org.

Darren Flusche
League Policy Director

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

With more than 40 years of experience in the field, including more than two decades as an executive at Schwinn, Townley understands the business of bikes. Now a senior partner at the Gluskin Townley Group, which conducts the national American Bicyclist Survey, he also has insight on the other side of the coin — what makes consumers tick.

And his key take-away from the 2012 survey? Women are the new majority… so stop pink-washing!

This year at the National Bike Summit and the Women’s Bicycling Forum, we’re highlighting how Bicycling Means Business — creating jobs, boosting economic development and making our communities stronger. To get you geared up, we’ll explore the “Economic Impact of Women Bicyclists” on our next Women Bike webinar with Jay Townley and Elliot Gluskin on Wednesday, February 27th, at 2 p.m. Eastern.

Click here to learn more and register.

And don’t forget: Online registration for the Women’s Forum and the National Bike Summit closes on Wednesday, too. Sign up today!

Carolyn Szczepanski
Communications Director

Carolyn joined the League in March 2012, after two years at the Alliance for Biking & Walking. In addition to managing the League's blog, magazine and other communications, Carolyn organized the first National Women's Bicycling Summit and launched the League's newest program: Women Bike. Before she crossed over to advocacy, she was a professional journalist for nearly 10 years.