New Brunswick pool-noodle rider recently hit by a car
More needs to be done to correct a culture of disrespect for cyclists
Harold Jarche, a “pool-noodle rider” from Sackville, N.B., was trying to get his fair share of the road. The pool noodle protruding to the left of his bike demonstrates a metre’s passing clearance–an idea Jarche adopted from a Toronto-area rider who recently did the same. But it seems that even with the recently enacted Ellen’s law and that pool noodle, safety is still a major concern.
On June 1, the day that Ellen’s law went into effect in New Brunswick, Jarche was out for a ride, celebrating the rule that legally requires drivers to give cyclists a metre’s berth on the road. With the vibrant blue of his bike, his traffic cone-orange pool noodle, and his yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words “share the road,” Jarche, no doubt, was anything but invisible. Nonetheless, at around 1 p.m., the CBC reported, a driver who apparently couldn’t see him made a sudden right turn while trying to enter a parking lot and hit the 57-year-old cyclist.
“He completely cut me off,” Jarche said. “I had no place to go.”
Jarche said that it wasn’t a hard hit. “Almost like a gentle bump,” he told the CBC. And though both he and his bike are still in “fine” condition, the fact that it happened at all, despite his bright colours, is bad enough. The problem, he said, is that it demonstrates a fundamental “lack of respect” for riders on the road, particularly in his home community.
As a rider, he said—one who has had many close calls—he routinely sees drivers in Sackville making dangerous, potentially deadly manoeuvres when encountering cyclists, many of which are now illegal with Ellen’s law in effect. For that reason, he believes the new law may not go far enough in protecting cyclists and holding motorists to account, arguing that a metre is still too close when some drivers move at speeds approaching 100 km/h. What’s needed, he said, is mandatory testing for elderly drivers, reductions in speed limits, and of course, more and better cycling infrastructure in New Brunswick.
It’s also a matter of a metre’s clearance being hard for drivers to judge, he said.
“Drivers can’t judge the distance,” Jarche said, “as even just my little sample showed. They don’t know what a metre is.” Still, he said, the reception to his pool noodle has also been a positive one among some drivers, many having told him that it’s a “good idea” as a visual aid.
