Columnist Susan Snyder: Accident is a tragic educator

Friday, March 26, 2004 | 4:43 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

March 27 - 28, 2004

Lines on the road don't teach.

Crosswalks or bicycle lanes don't make a bicyclist safer. Only education can do that.

It is a biased, but educated, view. I'm certified by the League of American Bicyclists and trained by the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) to teach bicycle traffic skills.

I'm co-founder and president of a nonprofit, Las Vegas-based bicycle education organization that offers free bicycle driving classes at Mountain View Hospital each month. I volunteer as the instructor, and OTS pays for the class materials. (If you want more information on bicycle safety and classes contact the Silver State Bicycle Coalition, www.ssbcnv.org or the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety, www.ots.state.nv.us/bikeped.)

But let's talk about the lines that divided us last week.

It seems easy to condemn a Metro Police officer for not ticketing a woman who was messing with her cellular telephone and as a result drove her SUV into a 13-year-old bicyclist in a crosswalk Monday.

But the officer made the best decision in a tragic situation. Two drivers broke the rules Monday. Two families are devastated. No traffic citation will teach anyone anything new.

However, a lot of things did happen Monday that shouldn't have.

The SUV driver shouldn't have driven around cars stopped in front of her before knowing why they had stopped. She should have kept her eyes on the road and left the cell phone alone.

The bicycle driver shouldn't have been riding in a crosswalk -- one that took him from one sidewalk to another in the middle of a block. Bicycle drivers belong on the street, not the sidewalk.

Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 484.503 clearly states, "Traffic laws apply to persons riding bicycles." It doesn't matter whether a driver is 24 and driving an SUV or 13 and driving a bicycle. The same rules apply.

In two years, a 13-year-old is old enough to start learning to drive a car. At that point we expect a few weeks of driver education to unravel a decade of what might have been illegal and dangerous traffic behavior. No wonder teen drivers scare us.

A bicycle is a child's first vehicle. Problem is, we give a child a vehicle when he's about 6 and don't actually teach him to drive until he's about 15. In between we teach him to "be careful."

Can you imagine putting a 16-year-old behind the wheel of a car, fastening his seat belt, handing him the keys and saying, "OK, be careful of traffic?"

The parents of the teen injured Monday tried to teach him some good rules. They constantly reminded him to wear his helmet and to walk his bicycle in the crosswalk. Unfortunately, we can't always know what children will do.

But we do know they generally believe grownups will look out for them. And that's a perilous mistake, because some of us aren't looking at all. Many of us still don't realize that not all drivers have vehicles with motors.

More bike lanes or crosswalks won't change that. Lines on the road don't teach. We have to do that for each other. And the younger we start teaching our drivers, the better.

Make a child a good driver behind the handlebars now, and maybe he'll not dive for the cell phone when he's behind the wheel at age 24.