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Permalink Reply by Megan H on October 7, 2012 at 4:43am

The Australian state of Victoria ran an anti-dooring ad and sticker campaign earlier this year:

http://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/general/bikes-and-riding/93916/

As a cyclist and driver (and I'll be driving more than cycling this season because of recent knee surgery), I would love to have a prominent bumper sticker for my car to remind people parked behind me to watch for bikes. Maybe even one for the front, backward AMBULANCE style, so drivers can see it in their rear view mirror. I'm not much of a designer, and I don't have any sticker-making connections, but I'd put some cash behind a campaign like this, for sure.

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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on October 7, 2012 at 7:14am

Terrific contribution.  Thanks, Megan.  The Australians seem to be much further along with dooring than we are here in Chicago.  One of the best parts of your post:

 

"Dooring fix available

3 May 2012. A new study investigating car doorings in Melbourne has found that the problem is highly concentrated on just a few streets and therefore should be fixable.

Remarkably, thirty per cent of all crashes occurred on just four streets—St Kilda Road, Collins Street, Chapel Street and Elizabeth Street.

The most common ten streets represent 47 per cent of all dooring crashes involving bike riders.

The study, “Bicycle Rider Collisions with Car Doors”, was commissioned by Road Safe Action Group Inner Melbourne (RSAGIM).

RSAGIM is working with Bicycle Network Victoria on Operation Door Knock, a project to research and devise solutions to the car dooring epidemic.

The report is to be presented to the Parliamentary Inquiry into the car dooring problem, which is currently underway in State Parliament.

The report implies that councils and road authorities need to look closely at these ten streets to examine how they can be reconfigured to reduce the risk to bike riders.

According to the report, streets with high risks of doorings have high numbers of parking movements, compounded by the fact that lane widths are narrow and tram track positioning pushes riders closer to the door zone.

The removal and/or re-confugration of parking spaces at critical locations is an obvious response to the findings of the report."

Yes!  One of the most direct ways to prevent dooring is to reconfigure street parking from parallel to angled.  You can't get doored when cars are parked on an angle to each other, the doors only open to the cars parked next to them.  From the Chicago dooring map, it seems that the major dooring streets are Milwaukee, Lincoln and Clark.  Remove parking from one side of each street, add angled parking to one side only, shift the center line of the street over a few feet--and you'd probably get a net increase in available car parking as a bonus, which would take care of any protests from LAZ about removal of parking. You might not prevent all dooring, but with fixing just those three streets, you'd erase at least half the crashes. 

Your idea of bumper stickers is good.  Anything that helps awareness of dooring can only help.  For motorists who don't cycle, dooring isn't even in their conscioiusness, or if it is, it's a trivial problem.  And we have to change that.

 
Megan Hauser said:

The Australian state of Victoria ran an anti-dooring ad and sticker campaign earlier this year:

http://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/general/bikes-and-riding/93916/

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Permalink Reply by Melissa on October 7, 2012 at 4:38pm

This is brilliant.  Thank you for sharing.  The magic of the internet, put to good use. 

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