Are You Road Worthy Enough to Drive Around Cyclists?

While dropping some books off in a Little Free Library this past weekend, I found a copy of Road Worthy, a high school driver education textbook produced by the Ontario provincial government in 1985. Lessons from books like these—if courses or proper instruction on road safety are provided to drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians at all—seem to have been forgotten on Toronto’s increasingly nightmarish streets.

Getting around the city is not easy. There are days it feels like everyone lacks their survival instinct, where the most important duty is to get ahead of others by a fraction of a second. Where concepts like crosswalks, red lights and stop signs belong to an earlier era. Where entitlement is based on your mode and brand of transportation. Where people are utterly oblivious to their surroundings. Where horns are laid with little provocation if you aren’t going fast enough. Where politicians posture or promote divisiveness as cyclist and pedestrian fatalitiesrise. Where life is considered cheap. 

So here’s the section on dealing with cyclists from Road Worthy. Much of its advice remains helpful 30 years. What’s critical is that everyone using our roads be aware of each other. Seconds added to commutes equal years added to lives.