Thank You, Lori: A Message of Gratitude & Hope for Lori Cove
The Tour de Cove is a ride and walk event to benefit the ongoing care of Lori Cove, the Director of Transportation for Town of Cary. The accident occurred on October 17th, 2016 on High House Rd in Cary towards the end of a group ride. Read more about it here.
Lori was incredibly fit, just coming off of doing Ironman Chattanooga and Ironman Barcelona. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and is currently in a skilled nursing facility outside of Charlotte gradually building her strength. Watch a video on it here.
This was the speech delivered at Tour de Cove on October 7th, 2017 by Steven Goodridge, BikeWalkNC representative who worked with Lori. It’s an incredible message of gratitude and hope.
“Eight years ago, Lori Cove set up a meeting between the Cary Police department and a small group of uppity cyclists including myself. The topic was law enforcement’s role in supporting the safety of cycling in Cary.
Lori knew that creating a direct dialog between police and cyclists would benefit both groups. What ultimately grew from those early conversations was police education program called Bicyclist Safety and Law Enforcement. Hundreds of police officers in Cary, Raleigh, NC State University, Orange County, and other cities across the state have participated in the education program. The generic state-wide version can be found on BikeWalk NC’s web site, BikeWalkNC.org.
As a cyclist and as an enlightened engineer, Lori helped us spread the message that the problem needing to be solved is not that bicyclists are slower or more vulnerable than motorists.
Our humanity is a virtue, for which we need never apologize.
No, the real problems are when individuals choose to impair themselves with alcohol or drugs, distract themselves with their phones, or behave recklessly when operating a motor vehicle. We are all thankful for the hard work our local police do to tackle these problems.
Lori also understands how engineering affects road safety.
Many of Cary’s streets now include wide outside lanes or bike lanes that allow cars to pass bicyclists more safely without changing lanes. But roads with narrow lanes are just as important to those bicyclists who use them.
Motorists who encounter bicyclists on those roads need to understand the importance of slowing down, waiting until safe, and moving into the next lane to pass. The shared lane stencils and bicycles may use full lane signs we see on many roads are part of Cary’s effort to remind motorists of this. The slogan “Share the road” may sound good, but it has been too vague to be effective.
I’m happy to say that the state DOT now supports a new slogan, “change lanes to pass bicyclists” for ordinary roads with narrow lanes.
The goal is to discourage motorists from “squeeze-by” passing where there isn’t enough room to be safe.
Clearly, there is much work to be done to improve the safety of bicycling on our streets.
But I think this will happen inevitably,
because as Lori would point out, changes in engineering and behavior that improve safety for cyclists actually improve safety for everybody on the road.
Lori has been a champion for civility on our streets.
She is a model of a civil engineer.
And so I think we all want to say to Lori, “thank you.””
Thank YOU, Steve. We’ll keep fighting for everyone’s safety!
