A Proposal To Decrease Dooring

I bike in New York City. I love it. I get to see the city, get some exercise, and avoid the smelly and ever-more-expensive subway system. But biking also has its downsides. It’s dangerous, for all sorts of reasons, and for now I’m going to talk about one: car doors. Specifically, being hit by them. If you’re unfamiliar, being doored means slamming into a door someone has just opened into the bike lane. Often that someone is a taxi passenger. Being car-doored is not fun. I’ve been lucky enough to walk away from both incidents with minor scrapes and bruises, but not everybody is so fortunate.

There aren’t good statistics about just how often dooring happens. But most bikers I know have either been hit by one, or have come close. One study done in Sweden found that collisions with open doors compromised 4.3% of insurance claims involving a bike-on-car collision. It’s a big enough problem that in 2012 New York City taxis started adding special stickers to the inside windows of their cabs, reminding passengers to look before opening their door. But even as a biker very well aware of the pain of laying on the asphalt after colliding with an open door, I admit that between paying for the ride and remembering to grab all my stuff as I get out, I don’t always remember to look.

And so I have come up with a terribly drawn proposal!

In case it’s not clear from this highly detailed and technical drawing, here’s how it would work: On the handle is a little touch sensitive region. As soon as someone places their hand on it to open the door, that sensor sends a signal to the speaker, and the speaker reminds them to look for bikers. It’s simple, and probably will never happen, but hey, this is an open platform for people’s weirdo ideas and by god I’m going to use it.

I’m well aware this won’t solve all our dooring issues. There will still be taxi passengers who will fling the door open before the reminder to look registers. And this wouldn’t address the issue of private car passengers either. But this system is really simple, touch sensors aren’t that expensive, and if even just a few taxis or Ubers or whatever future car-riding method we arrive at uses something like it, bikers could be just a little safer. Which sounds good to me.