What is the safest way to ride bicycles with my children on city streets?
When you make the choice to ride on the street with your child, first of all you need to look at the traffic pattern. What time of day are you riding? Are you going to be riding in the business time when everyone's going home? Is it going to be crowded? But once you make that decision you're going to ride on the street, you need to look at where your child's going to ride in relationship to you. If your child is going to ride behind you, you make sure that they understand the basics of how close to stay to you. You don't want them too close, because if they touch your tire they're going to fall. You don't want them too far away so you can't communicate with them. So you make sure that they ride a safe distance, a foot, two feet from you so you can always communicate. Be very careful riding in the street with your child when you're going through an intersection. I always recommend if you're riding your bike with a child and going through a busy intersection, stop, get off your bike, get onto the sidewalk, cross together as pedestrians. You don't want to take a chance of you getting through the intersection safely, but the car not seeing your child which is much smaller than you. So use common sense. Try to make the safest move you can in traffic with your child, and that's always crossing from the intersection. When your child's older and they can be more easily seen by a car, then you can safely go through the intersection together, but otherwise cross at the crosswalk.
