By Ted Cohen

Bicyclists, most notably in Vermont’s largest city, hopefully learned a lesson following last week’s fatal bike crash.

The lesson is, bikers shouldn’t be riding in the streets.

Making such an argument is, of course, blasphemous in Bernie country, where (mostly liberal) bicyclists think they own the road.

After all, it’s the “environmentalist” liberals who have persuaded city councilors to abolish dozens of parking spaces in the central shopping district to create “bike lanes.”

Ironically some of those same liberals, including staffers for a bike-advocacy group known as Locomotion, don’t even use bikes.

Yet they are full on when it comes to spouting nonsense about ridding Burlington of cars and transitioning to bikes.

So, as part of this biking push, they’re urging people to ride in the streets which, by design, are for cars not bikes.

The young woman killed last week on her bike was, yes, riding in the street when she was hit by a car.

The tragedy was made even worse, if it could be, by the fact she was three feet away from a so-called bike path that would have kept her away from traffic.

In other words, even as the biking lobby is promoting two-wheelers, the people who ride them aren’t even using the off-road paths to safety.

Why aren’t they?

Because bikers, who fail to realize they are no match for 4,000-pound SUVs, are too proud to use bike paths and sidewalks.

They ride wherever they want, including in the middle of the street. 

It’s another disaster just waiting to happen. In the past year alone, at least two bikers in the Burlington area have been killed riding in the street when they could easily have been using the sidewalk.

Now of course the biking lobbyists are going to scream that no one should be telling them to get out of the road.

Let me tell you about how dangerous riding in the street is – I was hit by a truck recently while riding my bike in the road.

The driver never saw me and my little 20-pound bike because we were virtually invisible when he looked over the hood of his huge truck and tried to turn right on a red light – an otherwise perfectly legal maneuver on his part.

So to the biking crowd who will holler and scream that it needs more respect from motorists, I say take it from someone who both rides a bike and also drives a car.

Streets are no place for bikes.