Eye to Eye: Bike and Truck Safety Event
Posted by: StephanieSep 15 2008, 11:33 am
Tuesday, September 16th, from 4:00 to 6:00pm, the BTA will join the Portland Water Bureau for an Eye to Eye campaign Truck/Bike Safety event at the corner of NE Broadway and Larabee.
Come by to see the view from the driver's seat of a dump truck, check out the Water Bureau's new video about truck and bike safety, and have a snack.
The Water Bureau has done a lot of special training with their drivers around bike and pedestrian safety and has been a strong advocate for engineering improvements to make biking safer and reduce potential conflicts between bikes and large trucks in the Rose Quarter area where their main facility is located.
In Tuesday's event they join with the BTA and other community partners to reach cyclists with information about what they can do to be safer sharing the road with large vehicles. A sneak peek at their video revealed good information about visibility, blind spots, and staying out of certain danger zones around large trucks.
Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams speaking at an Eye to Eye press event.
This is great! One question, when will getting truck drivers on bicycles be a part of these events? They also need to know what it is like to be a bicyclist around such large vehicles.
Truck Drivers on bicycles? The Water Bureau has been doing a lot of that through their participation in the Bike Commute Challenge and their internal bike buddy program that links new and would-be cyclists with experienced riders.
For those of us unable to make the truck soire can you please discribe and post truck blind spots? (something tells me there are a few of them.)
merci
Deb, check out the diagrams on the related bikeportland.org article. Sounds like a video will be posted soon too.
Nice post, keep up the excellent work
I took part in the Eye-to-Eye safety exercise and was shocked at the number of bicycles I could not see around the truck. The object of the experience was to see how many parked bikes you saw from the driver's perspective. I don't recall the exact number but I missed about half of them. Stay away from the trucks was what I learned, about 20 feet at least.