Structured skills (and safety)

Just like the cowboy (and cowgirls) rodeo has a season, so too does the bike rodeo.

The final local bike rodeo of the summer is coming up, and BikeCdA founder John Kelly and other volunteers are putting forth efforts locally to improve the bike handling skills and safety of our local youth riders before they set off on their bikes for the first day of school, which is fast approaching.

With the safety of our children as a focal point, bike rodeos seek to provide the information which will hopefully decrease the incidents our local student riders are involved in.

A bike rodeo is a structured bicycle skills and safety course with a series of obstacles to simulate bicycle riding in the real world. Riders with skills can show them off, while novices can improve their skills, with structured drills and education available to build confidence and good habits.

The last rodeo in this area before school starts will be Saturday, Aug. 27 at Candlelight Fellowship in Coeur d’Alene.

“Bike rodeos are a way we can use as a countermeasure to our crash problems, specifically car vs. bike problems,” Kelly said. “We help and support organizations within the community to put these on. So far this year we’ve had rodeos at Spirit Lake, Wallace, the Hayden library and at Community United Methodist Church (across from Lake City High).

“(The rodeos) are just a way we can educate the kids in the community to not only learn the rules of the road and basic riding skills, but also introduce them to some of our frequent crash scenarios in the community and help them navigate through those in our controlled environment,” Kelly said.

When it comes to improving the odds that our kids can safely make it to school on a bike every day, Kelly said bike counts and traffic counts are critical.

“Anytime you can get data like that is critical, but one thing we found that is useful is the tracking of our crashes locally. So we started tracking car-versus-bike crashes in Coeur d’Alene,” he said.

To aid in that endeavor, Kelly joined the Kootenai Country area Transportation team, as the ped-bike representative. “And I felt like I should expand that perspective, to get a clear understanding on what is actually going on in the county, and Post Falls is an interesting case.”

Kelly said people riding bikes down sidewalks in that town is very common, and the majority of crashes involve children, and the town is unique in that regard. “It is a tragic thing to deal with, and as soon as you find an emerging pattern like that, it allows a community to focus their efforts on that demographic, so tracking crashes and analyzing data is really critical.”

Kelly said his organization gets the majority of its data through public record requests, with some entities more user friendly than others. “Some agencies are easier to work with — it is just their databases are more suitable to being very particular on the type of date we are extracting from the system. For example, Idaho State Police are unable to take a specific time frame and a specific type of crash and produce those local results.”

Kelly must get that data from Boise, and the ISP is usually several months behind in their data entry process. “It is really hard to identify a specific type of crash scenario, and say for instance the scenario of people riding on sidewalks, and specifically Post Falls where it is juveniles, I wouldn’t know that until the riding season is over, just going through the database in Boise. So in that case, you really miss the opportunity to educate and enforce in all the areas that you can address within a community.”

Kelly said he makes a “religious effort” to contact each person who has been struck by a car while riding a bike in the local area. “One key question is usually missing when we investigate such crashes, and that is why people were doing what they were doing when the crash occurred? So when we speak to them and ask them why, for instance, they were riding on the sidewalk, it is interesting to know why they are afraid and uncomfortable to ride in the streets.”

Kelly said those answers are critical and can help form change from an engineering and planning standpoint. “So if we can create through design and environment something safer, then we should see riders actually gravitate back into the street and ride in a predictable manner, and then we should see a trend or drop in our crash numbers.”

Kelly is impressed by the amount of local support he sees to ensure rider safety.

“Any time that an organization or police department like Keith Hutcheson, Spirit Lake police chief, steps up and puts on a bike rodeo, that speaks volumes, because it really addresses the heart of some of the issues that we are dealing with out on the street.”

That involvement is what Kelly expects is needed to turn the crash trends around. “(Hutcheson) and Pastor Paul Van Noy (of Candlelight Fellowship) and other churches are actually coming to us and saying, ‘hey, what can we do to help this problem?’ I can’t say enough to how enormous that is for our community.”

Another key part of the rodeo will focus on the bikes themselves. Mechanics will be on hand to do inspections and ensure that kids have bikes in good operating condition to ride to school in the upcoming fall season.

“We have a group of people who has stepped up, saying they want to help,” Kelly said. “So when we identify what their gifts or passions are, we will gather them together and when we have an event like this coming up, we will put out a blast to our volunteer mechanics and say here is an event that has the potential of being a large one, so it’s all-hands-on-deck. It is really great when the bike shops are available, because that brings them into the scenario as well. Every one of our local shops has supported the rodeos in some way, shape or form.

“I’m an ex-police officer and I’m driven by data,” he said. “If we see a pattern emerging like people gravitating to the sidewalks, people are riding there with a false sense of security that they are safe, but lo and behold, that comes with a group of dangers and they are not aware of.”

Kelly said a bike rodeo is a excellent opportunity to expose those riders to the dangers. “The highest frequency crash for cyclists in our areas right now is on sidewalks, and generally they are going against the flow of traffic in the adjacent street, with a car coming out of a private drive or a side street. The car is intending to turn right so they are looking left, the cyclist comes from the right so it is just a collision at that point.”

By way of the bike rodeo, organizers can recreate that situation and teach those kids to stop and wait until they get some sort of acknowledgment that they are seen, which greatly improves their chances of riding accident free.

“Anytime there is a conflict between an automobile and a cyclist, the automobile is always going to win, so you need to be defensive,” Kelly said.

Officials from the Coeur d’Alene Police Department have been invited to instruct riders on the rules of the road at the rodeo.

Kelly served with the Coeur d’Alene Police Department for 27 years, retiring in June of last year. “That is probably what caused me to be the way I am, since there was a certain time where I was part of the department’s accident reduction team, and that is how I got so focused on data.”

Kelly and other officers were assigned districts, and each got injury crash data from those districts. “I just happened to be assigned the district with the highest number of crashes in Coeur d’Alene, and we would then have to dissect those crashes and look for emerging patterns, like day of the week, time of day, weather conditions and then go out on the street and look for those particular patterns.”

BikeCdA has another related crusade involving student riders.

“We saw kids riding to school in the dark and we wanted to know if this was an anomaly or if this was a real problem,” Kelly said. “We were at Lakes Middle School, and saw one cyclist arrive in complete darkness. After school started we went over to the bike rack, which was completely full, and none of the bikes had a light on it.”

Kelly said they checked around at other schools, and determined the lack of bike lights was a widespread problem.

“So we came up with this program, Lights for Life, which is set up to get lights into the hands of these kids who are riding to school.”

Kelly said the two-year-old program has gained funding through donations from their nonprofit organization and they are hoping to continue the program as long as there is a need.

Kelly added that a national organization, peopleforbikes.org, has provided trinkets to hand out at booths at their local rodeo events. “We work together, and they are out supporting issues on a national level, so we are big supporters of theirs.”

For more bike rodeo information, call (208) 410-6369 or visit www.bikeCda.com.