GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The ‘Yield to Your Neighbor’ campaign is aiming to improve safety and reduce crashes involving motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians in Green Bay.
The campaign focuses on what they call the number one action people can take to keep everyone safe – yielding.
“How crashes happen, it’s incredibly predictable…Since how those crashes happen are predictable they’re also preventable,” said WE Bike President, Peter Flucke. “There’s just a few mistakes that pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists make on a regular basis that account for the vast majority of crashes. But if people don’t know what those are, they won’t know how to make it better.”
The leading cause of crashes between adult bicyclists and motor vehicles is a left-turning motorist not yielding the right of way to their two-wheeled counterpart.
“I have the right away. I’m a legal vehicle in traffic, but if the motorist isn’t on board and I don’t think they are, it’s just that respect part,” Flucke said. “If people would follow the rules of the road, abide by the traffic laws, these crashes wouldn’t happen.”
Riding against the flow of traffic is also a contributing factor in one-third of all crashes. But people on wheels aren’t the only ones who need to watch where they’re going.
“Not yielding the right of way to a motorist can be extremely dangerous. So crossing against the traffic signal, or worse yet and more common, running across the street mid-block and not yielding the right of way,” Flucke said. “We need to tell people what it is we want them to do. We can’t expect people to change their behavior if we don’t give them another way to do it. But that’s not just enough, you also need to tell them why…We know these things are dangerous, I can tell people about them, but why would they want to change their behavior? The first [reason] is, it’s safer. If you don’t want to get hurt, stop doing this and start doing that, it’s pretty simple.”
The Green Bay Police Department has also been working with bicyclists in the community for years to find ways to create safe avenues for them to ride on the roadways.
“The ‘Yield to Your Neighbor’ campaign is really just brings education to our community so that people are safe. We want people to know it’s the law, it’s courteous, and it’s most importantly keeping people safe on the roadway,” said Police Commander Kevin Warych. “We don’t want to give tickets. We don’t want these crashes to occur. We don’t want people to be put in bad situations. If people can just maintain their distance between vehicles and bicyclists, give them the proper distance, be courteous, take a second look when you’re making a left turn, we’re all safer by doing so.”
Warych says they don’t see many bicycle crashes, but when they do, it has the potential to be very serious. He hopes the expanded education on the topic through the campaign will help gain better compliance in the future.
Information about this campaign and more can be found at Wello.org.
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