When I was in high school, I took my first organized charity bike ride. It was in the Spring of 1976: the tide of the 1970s Bike Boom was ebbing and few (at least compared to today) adults rode bikes. In fact, most had not pedaled since they were kids, if they ever had ridden.
That is what made some of my sponsors hesitant before signing up: They simply could not imagine anyone riding the distance of that ride: 25 miles. Little did they know that I had already done rides twice and three times as long and a “century” was not far in my future.
Of course I finished that ride easily and my sponsors paid up. But the reason I am recalling that ride now is because of a near-tragedy.
The ride crossed railroad tracks. Many riders were inexperienced and almost none wore helmets. (I didn’t!) Someone apparently didn’t realize that cyclists should ride across at a 90 degree angle, preferably while lifting themselves off their seats—or, if the tracks protrude too far off the ground or are wet, simply walk across.
That cyclist’s tire skidded against a rail and when he fell, his head struck the rail. At least that was the story I heard. About a week later, I heard that he’d recovered and was out of the hospital. I wonder, though, whether he suffered any permanent damage that wasn’t detected in those days before CAT scans (as they were called) were widely used.
I got to thinking about that incident, nearly half a century (!) later when I read about how the city of Ghent, Belgium is trying to deal with a similar problem. Ghent and other European cities have trams—similar to the streetcars that once laced many American cities and “light rail” lines that have recently been built in Jersey City and other places. Those conveyances run on a narrower set of rails that are more likely to be at or near pavement level. Also, in some places, cyclists and trams share the same spaces.
So while it is easier to traverse them, it is also easier to miss them or simply not to take the necessary precautions. In Ghent, with a population of around 264,000, bike crashes on tram lines send about 500 cyclists to the hospital every year.
The city is testing a possible solution: Lining the cavity in which the track lies with a new elastic compound. While it won’t sit completely flush with the pavement, there would be enough so that a cyclist could more easily move cross or move out of a tram’s way—and is less likely to get a tire caught between the track and pavement.
