The Three E’s

Blank Slate for Bicycle Control Gadgets

The other night, a good friend of mine told me about the three E’s of cycling promotion: Engineering, Education, and Enforcement.

I was immediately excited about this because I have never heard of this, but I work with a lot of engineers, and my job title is nominally an engineer. Finally, I really like letter games, and the Three E’s sounded cool.

Obviously, since I am into engineering, eductation and enfocement kind of bore me. It’s not that they are totally unimportant or anything, but knowing myself and other engineers, we really don’t care too much for the other two E’s because engineers love to talk gadgets.

Since I design user interfaces, I see things in terms of widgets like the buttons on this screen that can be clicked with your mouse. I see the road in a similar way–like a vast UI.

Thus engineers see things in terms of constant improvement. All the engineers I know who bicycle can think of many, many ways the road can be improved for cyclists. Even when improvements cause problems, most of us would actually like to add something to the design rather than to resign themselves to failure.

Another thing about the engineers I know is that we don’t think too much about safety. However, we don’t go out of our ways to be unsafe, we just don’t think of it because we are too excited making new gadgets to worry about that.

For example, a friend of mine was able to put together a magnet which spun very quickly on his desk. Only did his boss notice that this might be dangerous. But the boss being an engineer, too, didn’t get emotional, but rather he said very calmly, “be careful with that.” That is, he was OK with his employee playing with high speed magnets in his office as long as he was careful.

Thus, if we’re directed to make things safer as part of the design specification, we’ll do it.

For example, many people say that streets are dangerous. I analyzed this and looked at the statistics, and I realized that getting hit from behind was the highest risk of injury. Many things are being done to address this such as bike lanes. However, there’s still the fear of getting either hit from behind when drivers make a right turn or getting hit by the side via the right hook. Overall, these are pretty equivelent collisions, and both can be solved by a simple method.

Instead of having slower bicycles merge with traffic, which is quite dangerous, cyclists should go straight, only. This will totally eliminate getting hit from behind and save a lot of lives. There still is the problem of getting right hooked by distracted motorists–damned engineers who make gadgets.

My solution to this problem is of course, another gadget. We should have lights that activate for the cyclist only. Right turns for cars will be allowed only when they get a right turn green arrow. Thus both problems are solved.

Now the only time someone will get hit will be when they break the law. Thus gadgets make safety better and rely on ENFORCEMENT less, though, of course, we still will need enforcement. The difference with my gadget is that in the past many cyclists who FOLLOWED THE LAW were killed. This should reduce this number.

Finally, motorists are going to need to learn something which is really easy to pick up, thus, the gadget will make EDUCATION, no unnecessary, but less important and much easier.

Think of how quick people went from not knowing what an iPhone was to being experts at zoom and scrolling. Similarly, the streets are a vast UI which can be ENGINEERED to make it easy to use for all of us.