DAPHNE, Ala.—Bicycle safety awareness may swell after Emiko Lake, wife of Councilman John Lake, was struck by a car while riding her bike last weekend.

That’s because John Lake has made it his mission.

The Lakes took an afternoon ride down Main Street near Eastern Shore Baptist Church when Emiko Lake—wearing a helmet and  white gloves—accidentally was knocked to the ground by a motorist who was turning onto Main Street near the intersection at Park Drive by Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She was uninjured but was “shaken up,” according to her husband.

Initially, he was upset because he turned around and saw his wife lying in the road.

“All I could think was—Emiko had the right-of-way—what is this person thinking?” the councilman said.

A perceived lack of bicycle safety education since has inspired him to take action in remedying the city’s void of ‘sharing the road’ awareness.

One improvement, the city leader proposed to a Daphne Bulletin reporter, is to build more sidewalks and bike paths.

“Lake Forest—a development with 6,000 people—has no sidewalks,” he  said.

Adding sidewalks there could prevent a mulititude of bicyclists—children and adults—from having to share the road with cars, Lake said.

“I think there should be a walking trail in the median,” he said. “It could be a paved sidewalk. In some places, you could put in crushed gravel or aggregate.”

Other improvements he would like to see include:

•An organized, biweekly bicyclist group that rides from City Hall to the Jubilee Square Shopping Center.

•Placement of “share the road” signs on major thoroughfares.

•Bike enthusiasts wearing proper reflectors.

Though gas prices have been dipping lately, recent record prices per gallon—hovering at around $4—has spurred several people to find alternative transportation. In fact, bicycle ridership increased by 2.1 percent in 2007—to its highest level in 50 years—according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Michael Dingmon, an Eastern Shore Cycles employee, rides his bike to work each day, and said he’s noticed a need for more bicycle-safety advocacy.

A ride down Whispering Pines Road to U.S. Highway 90—which he said has encountered potentially dangerous situations—has led the 31-year-old to incorporate watchdog tactics to safeguard himself from aggressive drivers. Dingmon regularly rides with a spy-cam attached to his helmet and videotapes people who have resorted to vehicular intimidation.

“I get hassled by commuters,” Dingmon said. “There are a couple people I have trouble with.”

He said a typical altercation involves honking and shouting from drivers; the excitement sometimes involves the ‘middle finger,’ and almost always, a malevolent mix of foul language.

“I know people who get drinks thrown at them,” he said.

Dingmon feels that bike paths should be painted on the road, but that “they won’t do any good if they’re not maintained.”

He said that one of the most popular routes cyclists take is scenic 98 but it’s too crowded sometimes to feel safe riding a bike.

“The sidewalk system (on Main Street) is not up to commuter standard,” Dingmon—whose speeds average 20 miles per hour—said. “It’s all right if you’re going four miles per hour.”

But it’s the law

Section 32-5A-260 of the State of Alabama Traffic Law states:

“The Traffic Safety Center of the University of Montevallo, in conjunction with the Child Safety Institute at the Children’s Hospital of Alabama, shall furnish all materials, handouts, brochures, and other information related to bicycle safety used by police departments.”

However, Butch Moss, of the Traffic Safety Center, said the center was unknowingly included in the law—and that it hasn’t received any funding to provide bicycle safety materials.

“We don’t even do anything because we don’t have a budget,” Moss said, referring to a lack of distributing safety information. “(The Children’s Hospital) didn’t even talk to us or give us any money for it. No one ever said how we were going to fund that.”

Alabama law stipulates that a municipality may establish a more comprehensive bicycle safety program by ordinance.

Lake has put the wheels in motion to do just that, with plans to work with the city’s Public Safety Committee.

“We are looking forward to Mr. Lake bringing this to the Public Safety Committee,” Council President Greg Burnam said.

The Daphne Police Department is doing its part to raise awareness, upon request, visiting schools and organizations to give bicycle safety presentations, according to Lt. Jud Beedy.

A safety course includes handouts and informational materials pertaining to bicycle safety, he said.

The department has a bicycle registration program that allows riders to register their bikes—to include the make, model, serial number and size of the bike—so the police can track it down if it is stolen.

Danger

According to a recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins Injury Prevention Center and sponsored by The American National Standards Institute and The American Society for Testing and Materials:

•Having one drink and then biking increases the probability of serious injury or death by six times.

•Four or five drinks make a bicyclist 20 times as likely to incur serious injury or death.

•Bicyclists with head injuries are 20 times as likely to die as those without.

•Wearing bicycle helmets has been proven to reduce risk of head injury by 85 percent and risk of brain injury by 88 percent.

In 1995, Alabama joined 21 other states that had adopted mandatory bicycle helmet laws. The state law requires all bicyclists under 16 to wear a strapped helmet, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

But only 15 percent of children under age 15 wear helmets all or most of the time, according to a study by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The perceived reason why those children don’t wear helmets is peer pressure—particularly if their social group disapproves of helmet use.

They need to learn better, and the city should accommodate informed riders who still need safe bicycle paths, Dingmon said.

The latter depends on city coffers.

“People need to know about bicycle safety,” Dingmon said.

“But it takes money to build infrastructure.”

BYtheNUMBERS

Source: Alabama State Traffic Law, bicycle section

<698 bicyclists died from motor vehicle crashes in 2007.

<2 percent of all traffic fatalities in 2006 were from bicyclists getting hit by motor vehicles.

<95 percent of bicyclists killed in 2006 were not wearing helmets.

<24 percent of bicyclists killed in 2005 had blood alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent, the legal limit.

Source: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit organization,

funded by auto insurers, that studies national traffic data