The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting “Doored”

It helps that our bikes are heavy and you sit up straight.

The rest of the world keeps talking about helmets, even though they ride complete death traps. Their mountain bikes and race bikes. Off course you are going to die riding one of those in NYC.

I would advise them to just outlaw those bikes, instead of making/keeping helmets mandatory.

Yeah, I guess you've got a good point there. Also, the infrastructures to cycle are not as good here as in The Netherlands.

I just think, based on people's comments, that there's some silly stigma associated to the helmets like "they're ugly" or "you look silly with it". I've only started cycling again a few years ago, after a childhood of cycling every day without any safety gear; it was hard at first to make myself comfortable with the idea of wearing a helmet. Some time later it just feels natural and I actually get worried when I see people without helmet.

It seems to be something similar to the seat belt. It took time for people to get used to it and nowadays I still see that problem in some countries (usually with old people in small towns).

Edit: Typos. Lack of coffee. Lack of sleep.

When you make a long list like that, the human intuitive norm is to start by assigning a roughly equal responsibility for each of them. However, it is rare to encounter a situation where some effect is obtained by 10 distinct factors all providing an equal contribution. (Think about it from an entropic point of view; that is one very specific configuration of contributions, vs. all the others in which they are not balanced.)

So the relevant question is "Of all the differences, which are the relevant ones?" If the "Dutch reach" is, say, 75% of the contribution, it's worth bringing over. [1] If it's 3%, it not worth worrying about at a governmental scale, as the costs of getting everyone to do it are not zero, and the benefits need to outweigh the costs. (You are free to adopt it; the costs for a person are negligible and the possible benefit of "not dooring a biker" are substantial both to you and the biker in question. But what you should do is a different question than what the government should do.)

In this sort of situation, listing out all the possible reasons and then leaving people to intuitively apply equal responsibilities is a great way to ensure that nothing happens. (I mean, you can actually use that as a technique next time you're in a meeting proposing that something be done that you don't want done; just exhaustively enumerate all the things that would be necessary, watch the idea wither as people intuitively assign incorrectly-large values to every little task if you do it right. You didn't hear this from me though. (I haven't done it, but have been on the receiving end.)) Bringing over one practice at a time in order of effectiveness is something that can happen. Implicitly insisting that we adopt 10 cultural practices all at once, some of which are major changes, just causes fatigue and people to just give up and walk away, and nothing changes.

[1]: Albeit possibly with a different name. It probably would actually be good marketing in the end to leave the name sounding vaguely like a sexual thing as it would get people's attention and generate some good buzz, but I doubt our bureaucracy would go in for that approach.

I know this would be a lot harder, but I think the best solution would be some city redesign where we separated bike and automobile routes, or at least minimized the places where they are together.

The Dutch reach _is_ clever, but it takes a lot of retraining of existing motorists, so it will take concerted awareness raising and probably a fairly long time-frame to take effect here.

Yeh, as an American driver I don't know how people open their doors in the city WITHOUT looking first.

In rural areas where bikers ride on the sidewalk and are not super common, sure, but I can't remember a time driving in a city where I was NOT super paranoid about hitting a car or a cyclist or a pedestrian with my door.