Santa Cruz County bike injury concerns prompting safety adjustments
Santa Cruz is ranked the 2 nd worst county in the state when it comes to bike injuries. That’s according to a report released Monday by the California Office of Traffic Safety.
Amelia Conlen has been biking in Santa Cruz for years, and considers herself an experienced cyclist. Like thousands of people in Santa Cruz County, Conlen uses her bike to go just about anywhere.
“I’m expecting for drivers to not see me, I’m expecting them to do something like make a right turn without signaling. You know I am paying a lot of attention to people driving and if someone looks like they are going to veer to right side of road even if their blinker is on even if blinker is not on. I’m going to give them a lot of room,” said Conlen.
The most current crash data from the California Highway Patrol said 197 bicyclists were injured and three killed in Santa Cruz County in 2013.
“Three type of collisions that we see most commonly, involving bicycles that being collisions within intersections, vehicles passing bicyclist and then solo bicyclists either going too fast or railroad tracks are a large cause of them colliding,” said CHP officer, Trista Drake.
CHP said Soquel Drive is where a lot of their bike accident calls happen. Soquel Drive is a long congested road, with lots of stop signs and cyclists typically ignore them. According to a 2015 report, only 62 percent of cyclists obey stop signs and 86 percent rode with traffic on the correct side of the road. County health educators said when it comes to car vs. bike accidents, 50 percent of the time it’s the bicyclists fault.
“We always assume that we really need to focus more on speed for motorists, which we do but we also need to look at how fast bicyclists are riding,” said Health Educator, Theresia Rogerson.
With all the hills in Santa Cruz, picking up speed isn’t that hard. Bike Sznta Cruz County has a goal of installing protected bikeways on high traffic streets to keep everyone on the road safe. Also the Community Traffic Safety Coalition is offering free bike traffic school to anyone interested.
