Cherriots just published a "share the road" video and mostly it's not very objectionable. But too anodyne and too committed to false equivalence between walking, biking, and driving, it could be so much better.
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| Biking in the door zone on the margin of a quiet street with a dead-end |
The first impression was dislocation. The streets looked all wrong for starters, too quiet and with unfamiliar houses, and I wondered if it was even in Salem or Keizer. That one of the leads is a City Councilor in Monmouth suggested it might not be. A Monmouth business was more evidence that it was not filmed in the primary territory for Cherriots and local service. That's a little weird, isn't it? Even though they run regional routes, it's still the Salem Area Mass Transit District.
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| This is a Monmouth business - via Twitter |
For a video that ought to be relevant in Salem and Keizer, the street scenes were not an accurate reflection of actual road traffic a person in Salem or Keizer is likely to encounter. (It looked a little like Edwards Addition in Monmouth, but I couldn't tell for sure.)
They also discussed sharrows. This seemed at first like it might be positive.
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| "keep an eye out for sharrows" |
But they never showed a person biking with them!
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| Biking next to the curb |
Instead the person biking was always on the right hand margin. And they never passed over a sharrow showing proper lane positioning and sequencing.
Why even mention sharrows if you aren't going to show them in action?
The move here was to show a person using a sharrow and taking the lane, with the car behind and sharing.
But instead, they talked about passing and giving "three feet between yourself and the bicyclist" (top image). But on a low-traffic, neighborhood street, even on a street not yet finished and barricaded with a dead-end, there is little need to speed up for the stop sign and to pass a person on bike. That's just an expression of autoist impatience.
More generally, they showed very low-traffic streets where there didn't actually have to be very much "sharing."
Sharing is Most Meaningful in Settings with Real Conflict Points
Much more useful would have been more time on busier streets.
Illustrate "sharing" when a person driving on an arterial actually stops for a pedestrian using an unmarked crosswalk, not on a calm residential side street. Show "sharing" when driving patiently behind a person on bike taking the lane, or sharing in yielding on a left-hand weave when the through bike lane passes inside of a right-hand car turn lane.
We need to talk about "sharing" not in low-stakes, easy transactional moments in calm traffic, but at higher conflict sites and moments. And to focus on the person with the most power in the encounter, the person who employs lethal force: The driver. Drivers are the ones who need to learn to "share."
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| Guerilla signage on State Street downtown in 2015 |
A different location might be more difficult - and perhaps require a different budget. Still, for an effective video, higher traffic sites really are necessary.
Downtown right by the Cherriots office there are lots of better road environments to illustrate "sharing." They had, for example, sharrows on Chemeketa (even on Commercial!) and other busier streets like State Street, the site of a creative sign experiment in 2015.
The video's not terrible, but it doesn't really grapple with the idea of sharing and to illustrate to drivers higher-conflict areas where they really need to engage the idea of sharing. In the end, it's far too nice. (Maybe they should lean more, not less, into the character of the shouty mascot!)
2 comments:
Thank you for the feedback; your points are well-taken. My name is Stephen Custer and I am the Digital Marketing Coordinator at Cherriots. I helped create this video and I might be able to answer some of your questions. You are correct that the video was shot primarily in the Edwards addition in Monmouth. We chose that location primarily because it was a convenient location for our volunteer actors.
You are also correct that showing a bicycle taking over a lane in the location of a sharrow would have been more effective. I primarily work with the buses at Cherriots, and in the process of working on this video, I actually learned the word "sharrow." And it is evident that there are plenty of people who don't know what they mean, or that bicycles have a right to the road like cars. There's a comment on our Facebook post of this video to prove that. But even then, I took the opportunity to educate the person who commented, so I consider that a win.
I also want to address your claim that the video was just too nice. You're probably right, and we have a reason for that. When we started planning the script, we kept coming up with rules that everyone should follow and it started to sound very punitive. We shifted the focus to the concept of sharing the road and thinking about what we can do to keep the other people on the road safe. You are correct that drivers of cars probably have the greatest responsibility for this, but we didn't want the video to focus only on drivers.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and we'll keep them in mind for the next video. We hope that, even with its shortcomings, it can do some good in reminding everyone we have a responsibility to watch out for each other on the road.
Thanks for thinking about this!
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