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After they learn to ride a bike kids are just turned out into the street and chaos occurs. Too many people ride bicycles on the wrong side of streets, do not know how to make a left turn, disobey traffic laws, ride like nutcases down crowded sidewalks and shared pedestrian paths and do not know how to drive bikes safely. This is not just kids, adults are blowing through traffic lights, riding sidewalks at 10 mph and riding on the wrong side of the street. At night it is common to see (or not) adults riding with no reflectors or lights and doing the same behaviors I described above, but at night the accident rates are much higher for bikers that cannot be seen by other traffic.
There should be a bicycle education course in the schools just as there is for the automobile. The automobile transit system has a whole infrastructure of public school supported driving lessons, private driving lessons, testing permits and finally the license to kill as well as more licenses for various vehicles, training and tests for larger trucks and passenger vehicles.
There are no widely available training programs for operating bicycles in schools or anywhere. I do not advocate licenses for riding a bike but training for operating bicycles done by the schools would improve safety and transit use of bicycles. Bicycle training would be best taught in the older elementary grades and middle school when a child starts to use a bicycle to get to local destinations.
If the schools did do bicycle training and many people were trained to use the streets and become traffic it may create better drivers that would be trained to use the traffic laws and how to negotiate traffic early in their youth and better automobile drivers may result. A driver with more road experience is a safer driver and nothing gives me the willies more than being cut off on a bike by a 3 ton rusty Chevy Suburban driven by greenhorn 16 year old texting like a five thumbed gibbon with all the experience and road smarts of a 3 week drivers ed course. I would rather see a kid at 16 trained to bicycle and with 5 years of driving a bicycle on the roads with no drivers ed training rolling in that SUV, odds are probably better that we both might live through the encounter. That is one reason auto insurance costs so much for the under 25 year old drivers, they do not have the years experience on the road to drive in a predictable lawful way. If you use your bike on the road, even as a child, you are traffic and learn how to drive and follow the law using many of the same skills as car drivers.
There are many courses that have been created for bicycle training, it is not a difficult task to find a good curriculum. Great bicycling courses exist, they are just not done in school education, no funding exists to teach children useful skills. I guess the children are just left behind in the transit network.
So what would be the testing to verify that bicycle education actually is an effective transit usability tool? Tracking accidents (auto and bike) and people that have had bike training vs no training may show if training is an effective strategy to improve transit usability. It may mean tracking substantial population groups for many years.