Take a Second Look

     How many times are you driving a car and say, “Oh my god I didn’t see that guy!”? This is a statement you hear a lot when you are riding with some people. Today I was driving down a main road in the city of Keene, NH. I see ambulances, police cars, and even a fire truck. As I get closer I see it, a motorcycle with a guy talking to an officer with blood on his arm. Sitting behind the motorcycle is a car that had a lot of front end damage. I don’t know who was at fault and who hit who, but all I could think was, “Wow he is lucky to be alive.”

     This brings me to the title, “Take a second look.” Put down your phone, look both ways before pulling out on main streets then, take a second look. I bring this up because I bicycle many times a week, I bicycle on this very road that I was driving today where I saw the aftermath of this. I think about how many times in the USA a person on a bicycle is struck and killed each year. Per the CDC Website: In 2015 in the United States, over 1,000 bicyclists died and there were almost 467,000 bicycle-related injuries.

      I don’t have the stats for 2016 but I bet you the numbers are not going down. With more people getting on bikes, with more people buying cars and driving, please listen to these four little words, take a second look. The motorcycle world has coined the phrase, look twice and save a life. This same term could apply to bicycles. If you bike enough on the roadways you will have stories where your handle bars were inches from a cars mirror as it drove by because that driver didn’t care how close it came to you, this very thing happened to me a couple days ago.

      I got back into bicycling for the joy of it, for the rush as you feel the wind on your face, the feeling you get when your legs are screaming in pain but you know you must still bike home. The moment you pull into the end of the ride and know that the things you saw are seen because you did that ride, that you just completed that ride. Let’s think about all those riders who want to think about that feeling at the end of the ride that don’t get to, because someone was texting, someone looked once and pulled out. Let’s take a moment and think about the people laying in the hospital bed right now that can't complete that ride, or worse.

     Let’s just do one thing and look twice before we pull out. Let’s look at the sides of the road as we drive, let’s give the people on bikes space, let’s make it so that a person can go home to their family and have that end of the ride feeling. Let’s just take a second look!

- Travis