Four wheels good; two wheels bad...

Not to be the Trib's bitch, but they were relevant again today, so figured I'd throw out a quick link.

The RedEye of all publications ran a worthwhile story (I know, I know!) today about cars versus bikes in the streets of the city. As someone who biked from west of Wrigley to the Northwestern University Law School on the lakefront every day of the spring, summer and fall, I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased here, you know, in the name of full disclosure.

I've had this discussion with plenty of bikers at Northwestern and other places, and there are a few ways to keep everything safe on the roads when you're on a bike in the city. The funny thing is that most drivers are slammed in traffic and aren't close to keeping up with a bike on the surface streets. For all the complaints about bikers in traffic, there's not much movement on the auto side and it's not too difficult to keep track of two or three bikes as you crawl down Clark Street.

While there are a handful of bike messengers that are causing problems and darting in and out of traffic, there are many more drivers out there and most aren't aware of how to share a road with a bike. Before I break out the soapbox, suffice to say that if you took 10 drivers and 10 bikers and snuck hidden cameras onto their respective vehicles, there'd be more to find fault with the cars. (As my buddy, Greg, told me when I started biking to work, "Always make eye contact at intersections to make sure drivers see you and if someone almost hits you, it's going to be some chick in her SUV on the phone with a cup of coffee in her hand.")

Here's what it boils down to from my perspective: When you're in your car, doing 5 to 10 miles per hour as you creep home from work and someone cuts you off it's a pain in the ass, it's annoying and you're glad when you don't have to deal with your insurance company.

When you're biking, you take it a lot more personally. Even wearing a helmet and doing what you need to do to try and stay alert and safe, a car cutting out and nearly missing you is a big deal. Friends of mine have been struck by doors opening into traffic, t-boned by cars making turns without looking and run off the roads in varying degrees.

All of these are much bigger deals when you're rolling along at 20 miles an hour or more without any protection above a set of gloves and a helmet. So who is responsible here? The bikers or the drivers?

Here's how I see this - At the shelter, we swing the gates into the kennels to try and push the dogs back a bit to clear space to get in and snap a leash on them. Sometimes the little guys can get caught by the fence, or get their heads caught as you're shutting the gates after a walk. While it's an imperfect analogy, it fits here - the dogs, like the bikers, are responsible for their own well being, but a person with a gate is the only one in the equation who can do any serious damage to the dog and none to themselves. It falls on the person shutting the gate to watch out, take an extra second or two and make sure that there are no problems.

So, while the story may be interesting and some of the points are valid from both sides, it really shouldn't be entirely up to the bikers to stay out of the way of cars and SUVs. The lion's share of the responsibility should fall on the people whose vehicles have the potential to be deadly.