Earlier this week a man was struck while biking down by the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues. Though the cyclist who was taken to Boston Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries, this unnerving incident again brings up the perpetual conversation about bike safety measures. The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is currently on the case, looking at how we can secure people from vehicles rather than overhaul infrastructure and paint more bike lanes.

For two years, the New Urban Mechanics have been tweaking and perfecting vehicle side guards aimed at keeping cyclists from getting pinned underneath municipal trucks, much the way the aforementioned biker did.

According to a City of Boston bike safety report from 2013, from 2009 through 2012, there were “1,700 confirmed cyclist  incidents documented by Boston EMS emergency medical technicians and paramedics.” Between 2011 and 2012 alone, the Boston Police Department recorded a total of 1,446 incidents, and EMS 1,432 incidents.

This is exactly why the New Urban Mechanics have been tinkering with vehicle side guards. In 2012, they partnered up with Boston’s Public Works Department to outfit 19 trucks with large wheelbases to gauge whether side guards would be an effective remedy for keeping bikers safe.

They used trucks modeled from 2005 and later to account for the most contemporary vehicular technologies and innovations accompanying them.

“We used trash vehicles because they’re mostly on the streets as cyclists at the same time, especially in the downtown core,” New Urban Mechanic Kris Carter told BostInno.”Obviously we’re looking for nobody to get hurt, but that’s a hard thing to test for. We were looking to see if we’d still able to access the underside of the truck for maintenance, if the side guards are easy to take on and off, and getting feedback from cyclists to see if they notice the side guards or not.”

As you can see in the embedded tweets, the trash truck that collided with the cyclist was equipped with side guards, though he still managed to get pinned underneath it. In fact, more specifically, it was a front-side collision on a right hand turn.

Peculiarly angled accidents like this are not lost on the New Urban Mechanics, who are still hashing out ways to prevent them as well. Just some, as Carter relayed, pertain to mirrors and audible turn signals.

“This has been a really great partnership between what New Urban Mechanics does and city departments do,” added Carter. “We’ve provided a little bit of technical expertise and access, but they were the ones that actually had to go through installing them and monitoring.”

Featured image via New Urban Mechanics

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