Pioneers at the California Transportation Commission Technical Advisory Committee

One week ago Matt Turner, Chair of the Alameda County Transportation Commission’s Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, and Craig Davis, Founder of www.CyclistVideoEvidence.com, presented to the California Transportation Commission’s Technical Advisory Committee on “Criminal Near Miss Data for Inclusion in ATP Safety Scoring Rubric.” Currently, only collision data is explicitly requested in the Active Transportation Program funding grants. We believe that collisions are a lagging indicator of safety: when a collision occurs it signifies the failure of all of the forces arrayed for public safety. We believe that criminal near misses are a leading safety indicator that can identify, educate and in some cases prosecute egregiously dangerous drivers, before collisions occur.

Consistent with Craig’s recent presentation at the National Bike Summit in Washington D.C., no one in the room had ever heard of the term criminal near miss, or of a driver being charged with assault or reckless driving, actual criminal near misses, using cyclist video evidence, as in our Glendale and Castro Valley legal precedents. Audible gasps could be heard when we showed this condensed version of our California cyclists’ video evidence of criminal near misses.

After our presentation a key TAC member called us pioneers in this work.

There was a great deal of audience interest, and we successfully introduced these important concepts, but we have significant work ahead of us to get criminal near miss data explicitly included in the ATP grant safety scoring rubric. In the mean time, we have been told that CNM data can be included in ATP grants.

All cyclists need to keep submitting their criminal near miss incident reports to our free Incident Management System for their own safety, the safety of their cycling community and to generate criminal near miss data to fund local road safety improvements without requiring collisions. CNM data, combined with objective cyclist video evidence, also provides government agencies with the most accurate picture of the experienced and perceived risks causing cyclists to stop cycling and preventing others from cycling.

We need to work with the CTC to make sure all government agencies are aware of the critical concept of criminal near misses and to promote these legal precedents for the safety of all California cyclists.

 

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