- Steve Mags, thank you for joining us on Brick By Brick.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

- Yeah, appreciate your time man.

You know, one thing I wanted to know, how did you become the bike lawyer?

- I always rode, I mean, I rode as a kid.

I kinda lost it for a while as a teen after I got the car.

But then in law school I didn't have a car, so I, I had a bike and I rode to classes today.

Now about 2009, I started my own solo practice.

The bike lawyer thing has kind of developed over time, but it started early on doing advocacy and handling cases and then kind of more officially with the, the email and then the website came out like 15, 16 years ago.

So - You wrote an article on your website, Ohio bike lawyer.com, where you described the worst cities for walking and cycling.

I wanna focus on that cycling piece.

Cincinnati wasn't number one in the country, but it was number one in Ohio.

Why is that?

- Cincinnati's been kind of slow to react to some of the infrastructure changes.

It's just been in the past seven or eight or nine years that we've seen some cycling infrastructure improvements.

We've seen some bike lanes, we've seen protected bike lanes, which have come into play.

There's some learning curves when it comes to how to motorists.

I've had at several intersection crashes where the motorist has run into cyclists and protected bike lanes.

Cleveland and Columbus have tried some other things.

They call 'em bike boxes where there's a bike lane to the right and then the bicyclists can come up to the front of the line and filter in and then get a head start on the traffic.

Those seem to be pretty effective.

So there's a lot of little infrastructure changes.

Sometimes it, we, it's just paint.

Sometimes it's paint plus some, some safety or barricades and things like that.

And there's other types of infrastructure things that we try to do to increase safety or at least decrease the road violence.

- Now, how many cyclists have been in car related accidents in Cincinnati and, and day and or in southwest Ohio?

In general?

- Statewide, we expect around 1500 crashes a year where a cyclist and a car tangle, and that generates a crash report.

Then that generates a number in some statistical model somewhere.

Cincinnati is in the hundreds, you know, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati are the three big cities.

And if you look, we're look at a map of where all the bike crashes occur.

They're gonna be clustered, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and then, you know, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, Canton, Youngstown.

The bigger cities in the state have their, their share as well.

I mean, I gotta, I always, I talk a lot about bike stuff, and I always start with the fact that Ohio, relatively speaking compared to all the other states, is really a very safe place to ride a bike the numbers wise.

- I know right outside this office in Anderson Township, there's Beach Mount Avenue.

Are there a lot of cyclists that go through there and, and if so, do you feel that it's safe for them to, to ride there?

- Beachmont has its moments.

It can have distracted drivers, it can have drivers going too fast.

This, the bike lanes have certainly helped.

They've put a, starting at the, the, a beachmont levee down at the bottom of the hill, they put a bike lane on the right going up the hill, which has been, I'm sure for the traffic.

The other cars have been very helpful because people that can't climb that hill at 20 miles an hour, you know, kind of are pushed out of the way of the faster traffic.

So I'm, I'm sure that helps.

And same with Beachmont Avenue.

The, there is a bike lane on both sides of Beachmont.

Bike lanes are funny because in Ohio the law does not mandate that you use a bike lane.

However, if there's a bike lane there and because it's debris laden or whatever, you don't want to use it.

So now you're in the regular traffic lane, people get mad at you, you know, so you, so there's this stress component that get, gets added into it as well.

- What gives you hope that we're heading in the right direction and that, you know, we could hopefully one day lower the rates of, of cyclists related accidents?

- That's a, that's a good question.

I look at back to the eighties, and when I say the eighties, I mean the 1880s people got bikes for the first time in the 1880s.

And they rode, they bought 'em like crazy.

They rode all over the place.

There were no laws in place at that point, but a whole legal thing developed where people passed laws and each boom that we've had.

'cause the car took over for a while.

A boom came in the sixties.

Another one came recently during COVID when bike sales went through the roof.

Bicycling is here.

It's not going anywhere.

I think we're slowly making inroads, you know, at the state level, at the local level in terms of spending the money and doing the thinking that's required to, to try some creative ways to keep cars and bikes from tangling with each other.

So I, I've got a lot of optimism that we're in heading in a good direction.

- Well, Steve Magus, bike lawyer, thank you for joining us on Brick Barber Brick.

- Thank you for having me.

What a great thing I.