When I was eleven years old, a police officer came to my sixth grade class and gave a presentation on bicycle safety. I remember he brought very gruesome illustrations of awful accidents with children on bikes. In one, a boy is hit by a three-hole Buick that had one of those jet plane hood ornaments. The picture showed the boy flying off the car just as dead as he could be, and you could tell that the nose of the hood ornament had stabbed him very nicely in the back. What I most remember, however, is the point that the policeman kept emphasizing. "Bikes go with the traffic," he said again and again with a flamboyant motion of his arm in the imaginary correct direction. He told us repeatedly that bikes had the same rules as the cars. "Go with the cars!" he admonished. This was the main focus of the speech.

After the safety presentation, I went out on the new four-lane Broadway Road on my bicycle. I chose the lane closest to the double yellow, as cars do, and signaled with my arm to make a left turn onto Sierra Vista Drive. The immediate result was that neighbors visited my parents that evening to explain to them that I must have lost my mind and that I was bound to get killed riding a bicycle out in the street with the goddamned cars.

Perhaps people had better sense  back then -- at least better horse sense. They knew that my bike and I had nowhere near the horsepower to compete with the cars, and anyone who did what I had done had to be a missled eleven-year-old or an absolute idiot. Those were the only two possible explanations for such foolishness.

The main problem with the policeman's presentation was that he didn't explain the reason why cyclists should ride on the right side of the road. The reason was --and is -- that drivers turning right look only to the left -- almost never to the right -- and the minute they're clear on the left, they will run right over anything on their right. That is it. That is the one and only reason for the big lecture on riding on the right. And it is the element of safety that was missing from the presentation. Pedestrians were advised to walk on the left, although no decent reason was given either. Pedestrians can get run over just the way cyclists do. Perhaps they appear less suddenly than do bike riders. Perhaps they are advised to walk against traffic because they can see a car leaving the road and they can jump out of the way. It's hard to say when no explanation of the safety rationale is given.

The presentation took place in Broadmor School in 1962 well before the bike lobby petitioned for and got the right to ride any damned place they wanted no matter how dangerous it was and no matter how it distracted and pissed off drivers and created an unsafe condition for everyone. Today, things have changed. I can't imagine neighbors coming by to express concern and bringing forth common sense when they see cyclist riding in the middle of the highway. Public awareness of many things has improved immensely over the years in many areas, but some things like this weird bike mindset even get a little worse.

Last week I attended a bike safety class for the school I work for. I had a definite sense of deja vu. The officer explained everything in the same way. His presentation was much improved by the addition of information regarding why one should ride on the right, though I felt that that part could have been emphasized more. What really disturbed me, however, was that his presentation, too, gave the same kind of wrong focus, a focus that strayed from concern for safety and that concentrated on what was legal and how to survive riding around in the street like a fool. I am convinced will only put bicycle riders in danger just as the policeman's speech did to me forty years ago.

This new policeman's emphasis was on the "bike lane." It's a legal sanctioned and officially painted area so it needed to be emphasized in the talk. The other reason he made this emphasis is because he knew very well that the bike lane is intrinsically unsafe. Bike lanes vary in size and they narrow or disappear It wouldn't matter if they didn't however: riding near the cars is dangerous. Period. Drivers themselves are warned never to stop on the apron of the highway to change a flat. It's dangerous because you will be in harm's way just as a cyclist is in the bike lane. Public service notices say, "Drive your car to a safe area away from traffic and change your flat. Remember, it is possible to drive for some distance with a flat tire." The message for flat tire changers is: "Stay away from the goddamned cars! The right side of the road is unsafe!"

Such wise advice is not given to cyclists. In fact, with all the emphasis on the bike lane, almost everyone now believes that riding on the sidewalk is illegal when it's not. I asked the policeman last week if it was legal to ride on the sidewalk and he said it was perfectly legal: "Just look out for pedestrians and -- as must bike lane riders -- look out for cars driving in and out of driveways." he explained. The policeman believed as I did that the sidewalk was the safest place to drive, but he didn't mention sidewalks in his talk. Not once.

Sidewalks were not a part of the safety presentation even though they are the safest place to drive. This is because survival skills for riding in dangerous, idiotic places take up so much time that there isn't any room to talk about the sidewalk. Time spend explaining the rules and the law takes precedent over safety.

The policeman also wasted safety time by giving us advice on how to get out with the cars in six lanes of rush hour traffice and make a left turn at a green arrow without getting killed. He said only people who felt confident should drive out in the street. I guess he meant only daredevils or idiots.The policeman admitted that he had such confidence and drove in the middle of the street himself. With what I had learned at the age of eleven, I know in my heart that anyone that makes left turns in the middle of four or six lanes of automobile traffic on his bike has no business giving a lecture on safety or much of anything else.

About three years ago I got a ticket. Some workmen had put a no right turn sign at a busy intersection and no one could believe that the major artery could be closed by a dinky sign for no good reason and everyone turned and got trapped by the cops who had nothing better to do. I was pissed but I can explain this dirty rotton injustice in another essay.  Since I had also had a ticket about twenty-seven years ago and obviously needed instruction, I was sent to driving school.

At the day-long school I found that all of the instruction was based on explaining laws. I learned that my front bumper can't pass the bumper of another car in any lane in the same direction in a school zone -- or something. I can't remember much and who cares. Because they wasted time on explaining laws and regulations, I walked away with poorer driving skills. You see, without that safety talk I would never have thought about the fact that if I drive through a traffic signal I am completely legal if only my car enters the intersection when the lights are still yellow. I can drive through 99.99 percent of the intersection through the red. It doesn't matter. Just so long as I catch the first millisecond of yellow, I'm legal. I'm not safer, of course;  I was taught about law, not safety.

Now I find myself straying from my old cautious ways and "sniggling" the light and even missing the yellow from time to time. Nice curriculum, boys and girls.

Years ago Shell Oil or some other gasoline company did a series of quick safety tips for drivers. One explained that when making a left turn, look left, right, and then left again. They said that the car coming from the left was the one that was going to hit you first and to take pains to make sure it didn't. That kind of advice, without an explanation of law, without a muddled presentation, is the best kind.

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Sun Lakes, Arizona