Lame duck councilmember Jim Graham wants to make it illegal to ride a bicycle or ride a Segway on the sidewalk along roads when there is a bike lane going in the same direction, except for children 12 years and under.

A sidewalk cyclist on Barracks Row (often not a great place to bike, but not covered by Graham’s bill). Photo by thisisbossi on Flickr.

Graham, who currently represents Ward 1 but was defeated in the Democratic primary by Brianne Nadeau, introduced the bill this morning. His press release says:

Graham introduced the bill after receiving many reports of bicyclists who ride on the sidewalk without sufficient regard for the safety of pedestrians, especially the elderly, mothers with young children, and others.

This problem was tragically demonstrated four years ago when while walking in an alley near the Convention Center, a 78 year-old man and his wife were knocked to the ground by a speeding “hit-and-run” bicyclist. The elderly man was killed and his wife was hospitalized.

In recent years, the District has emerged as one of the foremost cities for bicycling in the US through the building of dozens of miles of bike lanes, and through its pioneering and successful Capital Bikeshare program. Graham stated “With so many miles of bike lanes now available, I think it’s time that rather than riding on sidewalks, bicyclists and others be required to use bike lanes. I think this bill will help to encourage the construction of even more bicycle lanes for the safety of all”.

People riding bicycles on sidewalks at high speed can be very scary for pedestrians, and they feel legitimately threatened. It’s the same as the way cyclists feel threatened on the road. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer because outside rare cycletracks, cyclists don’t have their own space and are yelled at both on the road and on the sidewalk (and on multi-use trails).

Just as many drivers think they can safely pass a cyclist with less than 3 feet of space, or nose through a group of pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk, there are cyclists who think they can use their maneuverability to squeeze quickly between pedestrians without hitting them. And 99% of the time they are right, but that doesn’t make the more vulnerable road user not feel intimidated.

I’ve been walking around and had someone on a bike ride by too fast and too close many times. I’ve been walking with our one-year-old in a stroller, or with my wife when she was pregnant. Just because none of them actually hit any of us doesn’t make it right.

Would a ban even work?

However, a bill banning sidewalk cycling near a bike lane is probably not the answer. While people should ride in the road, there are often legitimate reasons to sometimes ride on any given sidewalk at certain times and in certain circumstances. What if the bike lane is blocked, for example? Graham’s bill won’t deal with many situations where sidewalk cycling is a problem while also making riding illegal at times when it’s not a problem.

It’s hard have a law that basically says it’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk only in a way that intimidates pedestrians. And any legal restriction is only going to have an effect if police ticket, and we don’t need police deciding to target cyclists here as they have been in NYC.

It could be worth discussing some measure like a speed limit that applies on sidewalks where there are pedestrians (but not empty sidewalks), or a 2-foot passing buffer distance. When we’ve discussed this before, commenters seemed open to somehow codifying the idea of “pedestrian pace in a pedestrian space.”

Would this bill encourage building bike lanes, or add to acrimony?

The only real way to reduce bicycle-pedestrian conflicts is to make sure cyclists feel safe riding outside the sidewalk, and that’s simply not the case right now. Many people say they just aren’t comfortable in the road.

Walking around the city, I often see people riding on the sidewalk when there is a good bike lane or low-speed street, and I wonder why they are bothering to ride there. But instead of passing a law, let’s find ways to help those people feel safe (and be safe).

Graham says in his press release that he hopes this will lead to more bike lanes being constructed. It’s hard to see how a bill limiting cyclists’ rights will lead to more bike lanes.

The obstacle to more bike lanes is that whenever one is proposed, people complain about losing travel lanes or losing parking. Graham has often expressed “concerns” about a transportation bill because it might take away parking spaces. That kind of rhetoric tells transportation planners that they should be very hesitant to embark on any project which impacts even a small amount of parking, or at the very least, they have to do many years of studies and outreach.

Maybe Graham is thinking that if this law exists, people worried about sidewalk cycling will turn into advocates for bike lanes. But the bigger danger is that it only further demonizes an activity that already comes under a lot of criticism, against whom some columnists in national newspapers think alluding to the possibility of violence is appropriate.

Graham said he hopes to start a conversation about what to do about this problem. It’s not clear that one best starts a conversation about conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians by proposing a restriction on one of the two groups. It’s only going to lead to more rancor rather than understanding.

Why this, and why now?

Incidents of cyclists hurting pedestrians are vanishingly rare (while deaths involving cars are quite common). That doesn’t mean it’s okay to ride at a high speed on a sidewalk near pedestrians in a way that can be scary, but it’s hard not to notice a little irony in the fact that Graham’s press release cites a case from four years ago which wasn’t even

a fatality

on a sidewalk or a road with a bike lane at all.

What bills has Graham introduced to deal with fatal crashes between drivers and pedestrians or bicyclists that happened since four years ago? In fact, speaking of safety for seniors and children, Graham has long fought a bill to get property owners to shovel sidewalks; icy walks create a real hazard, but not one that he seems to think is important enough to solve with a change in the law.

Anyway, it’s almost the end of the session (and Graham’s tenure on the council). He knows that there is probably not time to even hold a hearing if transportation chair Mary Cheh wanted to, and she likely does not want to. The bill will almost surely just die with the rest of Graham’s actions this year that amount to shaking his fist at his younger, changing ward. But he can go out making a statement that of all the things that threaten seniors on the streets, like icy sidewalks or drivers not yielding in crosswalks, those damn bicyclists are the worst.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.