RECREATION / BIKING : Bicyclists Shed Their Loner’s Image to Press for Traffic Safety, Helmets

Bicyclists are, by nature, loners. They often ride by themselves, demand little of the taxpayers and enjoy the fruits of their sport with nothing more than a blacktop road and the courtesy of motorists.

If they ride as a group, chances are they meet in front of a local bike shop or shopping center, hit the road in a long pace line--if they’re smart they’ll also obey all traffic laws--and return several hours later to the same spot and call it a day.

The sport makes no demands on public ball fields, arenas or community centers.

It can be beautiful in its simplicity--a good bike, well-toned muscles, the fresh air, and all without the hassles of competing with other organized sports for the ever-shrinking number of public recreational facilities and parks.

It should not be surprising then, that in Orange County and many other places across the country, there are no organized bicycle advocacy organizations that go before city or county boards looking for major capital expenditures to support their pastime.

But as the roads become more crowded and the friction between bicyclists and motorists increases, the voices of some Orange County cyclists are beginning to be heard.

Don Harvey and Fran Farrer are two of those voices, both veteran cyclists concerned about safety, traffic, and finding a happy medium between the rights of cyclists and motorists.

For the past six months, Harvey’s focus has been on the widening of Pacific Coast Highway between Beach Boulevard and Golden West Street in Huntington Beach, a major choke-point for motorists but also a favorite strip for bicyclists headed up and down the coast.

Cyclists will encounter a grave hazard if Caltrans leaves only a 14-foot-wide curb lane in both directions, according to Harvey. Not counting two feet for the gutter, that leaves just a 12-foot lane--the width of a standard freeway lane and hardly room enough for bicyclists to squeeze by in an already dangerous strip of highway.

At 58, Harvey knows the road well. He’s been commuting along that stretch from his home in Newport Beach to McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach for the past 11 years.

“I looked at the plans and I thought, ‘This is crazy,’ ” Harvey said recalling the widening plans. “Then we started talking to the city (Huntington Beach) and Caltrans. It hasn’t been easy.”

Thanks to support from the two largest organized recreational cycling clubs in Orange County, the Bicycle Club of Irvine and the Orange County Wheelmen, Harvey said that several hundreds letters have been written to the city and Caltrans urging that wider lanes be installed to ensure the safety of bicyclists.

But the response from Huntington Beach and Caltrans, he said, has been less than satisfying.

“Sometimes you get the feeling they are just giving you lip service,” Harvey said. “But they should care. There are a ton of bicyclists out there on the weekends. But I don’t think they want to hear us.”

Working on his own at first and later with the support of the Wheelmen and the Irvine club, both of which put notices in their newsletters, Harvey has spread the word among cyclists to show up at a public hearing on the road project, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. next Thursday at Huntington Beach City Hall.

“I don’t know if it will do any good, but we want to be heard,” Harvey said. “I really haven’t tried to get an organization together to fight this. I was just concerned about it and made a few calls. But I’m glad I’ve gotten some help.”

Regardless of the meeting’s outcome, one thing seems certain: cyclists throughout Orange County are organizing to make their voices heard, and the meeting in Huntington Beach may signal the beginning of a new advocacy on the part of recreational bicyclists here.

For Fran Farrer, the issue is different--in this case it is the need to persuade youngsters to wear bicycle helmets--but it, too, has served to convert her from a recreational cyclist and occasional racer into something of a crusader.

Farrer, a Newport Beach grandmother and accomplished biathlete, and neighbor Karen Evarts are the forces behind an innovative campaign, called SprocketMan, to get school-age children wearing helmets early, and often.

Modeled after a similar program in Seattle, the program is taken into the schools to let youngsters know the importance of wearing helmets, and the deadly consequences of not doing so.

Citing a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, Farrer notes that helmets can reduce serious head injuries by 85%, yet only 5% of the children who ride bikes wear them.

“I know from personal experience how important a helmet can be,” said Farrer. “I had a fall once, on my head. I was riding my bike and I don’t even remember what happened. The next thing I knew I was in the emergency room. I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Now I wouldn’t be caught dead without one.”

After learning of the SprocketMan program from her son, who lives in Seattle, Farrer and Evarts received a $3,000 grant from the city of Newport Beach, got the backing of Hoag Hospital and the Orange County Medical Assn. Auxiliary, and went to work spreading the word through the schools.

So far, they have presented the lively and entertaining SprocketMan program to 3,500 students in the Newport Beach schools, and are working with other people to establish similar programs in other school districts.

“Quite frankly, I haven’t seen any huge increase in helmet use, but we have broken the ground and started the awareness,” Farrer said. “We liken ourselves to the seat-belt campaign. That took years to take hold. We are educating the parents and the kids, from kindergartners on up.”

Evarts, a mother of three who does not ride bicycles but plans to do so, said she got involved out of concern over the number of injuries suffered by cyclists not wearing helmets, particularly children.

“This is an idea whose time has come,” she said. “People need to be aware that these little pieces of Styrofoam will save lives. They are proven to be successful, but we have to sell this to the community.”

The next step: Both Farrer and Evarts say they would like to see schools make it mandatory for students to wear helmets if they ride their bikes to school.

While the SprocketMan program grows, the Bicycle Club of Irvine is continuing its own helmet-awareness campaign by buying 100 helmets that will be distributed sometime this year.

Richard Martin, past president of the club, said that it is not yet clear how the helmets will be distributed but that helmet awareness will remain one of the organization’s main projects for the near term.

More helmets, he said, will be bought with proceeds from the club’s 7th Annual Shamrock Century on March 17, a 100-mile ride through Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Santiago Canyon and Irvine.

“Right now we have more helmets than we have avenues to distribute them,” Martin said. “But we will distribute them one way or the other, to get them into the hands of people who are not wearing them now.”