Yield to oncoming traffic before turning. If you are riding in a bicycle lane, or on a multi-lane road, you need to look and signal each time you change lanes. Never make a left turn from the right side of the road, even if you’re in a bicycle lane.
Wearing a helmet will do absolutely nothing to prevent you from getting hit by a car. Sure, helmets might help you if you get hit, but your #1 goal should be to avoid getting hit in the first place.
Plenty of cyclists are killed by cars even though they were wearing helmets. Ironically, if they had ridden without helmets, yet followed the advice on this page, they might still be alive today.
Don’t fall for the myth that wearing a helmet is the first and last word in biking safety. In truth, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s better to not get hit. That’s what real bicycle safety is about.
The next most common bike safety advice after “wear a helmet” is “follow the law,” but most people are already aware that it’s stupid to race through a red light when there’s cross traffic. So the “follow the law” advice isn’t that helpful because it’s too obvious.
What you’ll find here are several scenarios that maybe aren’t that obvious. The other problem with the “follow the law” message is that people may think that’s all they need to do. But following the law is not enough to keep you safe, not by a long shot. Here’s an example: The law tells you to ride as far to the right as is practicable.
But if you ride too far to the right, someone exiting a parked car could open their door right in front of you, and you’ll be less visible to motorists pulling out of driveways and parking lots, and motorists coming from behind may pass you way too closely in the same lane because you didn’t make them change lanes.
In each of these cases you were following the law, but could still have been hit. This page doesn’t focus on the law; it focuses on how to not get hit by cars. Now let’s see how to avoid getting hit.
You’re riding the wrong way (against traffic, on the left-hand side of the street). A car makes a right turn from a side street, driveway, or parking lot, right into you. They didn’t see you because they were looking for traffic only on their left, not on their right. They had no reason to expect that someone would be coming at them from the wrong direction.
Even worse, you could be hit by a car on the same road coming at you from straight ahead of you. They had less time to see you and take evasive action because they’re approaching you faster than normal (because you’re going towards them rather than away from them). And if they hit you, it’s going to be much more forceful impact, for the same reason. (Both your and their velocities are combined.)
Riding against traffic may seem like a good idea because you can see the cars that are passing you, but it’s not. Here’s why: Cars which pull out of driveways, parking lots, and cross streets (ahead of you and to the left), which are making a right onto your street, aren’t expecting traffic to be coming at them from the wrong way.
They won’t see you, and they’ll plow right into you.
Riding the wrong way is illegal and you can get ticketed for it. One study showed that riding the wrong way was three times as dangerous as riding the right way, and for kids, the risk is seven times greater.
.Nearly one-fourth of crashes involve cyclists riding the wrong way. Some readers have challenged this, saying if 25% of crashes are from going the wrong way, then riding the right way is more dangerous because it accounts for 75% of crashes.
That thinking is wrong. First off, only 8% of cyclists ride the wrong way, yet nearly 25% of them get hit — meaning wrong-way cyclists really are three times more likely to get hit than those who ride the proper way. Second, the problem with wrong-way biking is that it promotes crashes, while right-way biking does not.
For example, cyclists running stop signs or red lights are 17% of their crashes. But do we therefore conclude that not running signals causes 83% of crashes?
A car passes you and then tries to make a right turn directly in front of you, or right into you. They think you’re not going very fast just because you’re on a bicycle, so it never occurs to them that they can’t pass you in time.
Even if you have to slam on your brakes to avoid hitting them, they often won’t feel they’ve done anything wrong.
This kind of collision is very hard to avoid because you typically don’t see it until the last second, and because there’s nowhere for you to go when it happens. So be alert at all times.
