Bicycle Friendly Driver Training Is Now Online

It’s free, educational, and always open! The League’s Online Learning Center is a great place for people who ride bikes to build their knowledge base about bicycling and how to safely share the road — and now it’s a great place for drivers to do the same! 

Bicycle Friendly Driver training is now available online and for free through the learning center, offering the only interactive online class to teach drivers how to share the road with bicyclists. The curriculum is designed to educate drivers about how and why bicyclists use the road and maneuver in certain ways. After completing the class and quiz, drivers should have a better understanding of not only their responsibility but also ways to adjust their own driving to safely share the road with people on bikes. 

“From close passes to cars stopped in bike lanes — we’ve all seen some behavior by drivers who could use a better education about what it means to share the road,” said Alison Dewey, education director of the League of American Bicyclists. “The Bicycle Friendly Driver training is designed to remedy the fact that too often education efforts for bicycle safety are aimed exclusively at bicyclists. We encourage drivers who have had trouble sharing the road safely with bicyclists in the past or have been unsure of what they could do better in the future to take this course as soon as possible!” 

In 2018, the League took the Bicycle Friendly Driver training developed in Fort Collins, Colorado, to the national level by giving our League Cycling Instructors across the country access to the curriculum for their in-person classes. Now, we’re making Bicycle Friendly Driver education available to even more people, thanks to our online learning platform and our new series of Smart Cycling videos made possible through our partnership with DoorDash. 

Future Bicycle Friendly Drivers will learn how to drive more safely and respectfully around people biking with an easy-to-follow curriculum that consists of ten short videos and 20 questions designed to test their knowledge and prepare them to apply what they learned while out on the road. In total, the course is estimated to take 45 minutes or less to complete. Users can also break the training into more manageable time chunks over time to fit their schedule. Regardless of how long it takes a user to complete the training, all users receive a Bicycle Friendly Driver certificate upon successful completion.

The videos, which are available in both English and Spanish in the course and on YouTube, and the 20-question test cover topics such as rules of the road for both drivers and bicyclists, how drivers can avoid common crashes, and other actions drivers can take to keep bicyclists safe like adopting the Dutch Reach to avoid opening a car door onto the path of a bicyclist and never parking in a bike lane. 

Complete list of topics covered:

• Traffic Laws & Bikes, Sharing the Road Safely
• Humanizing Bicylists
• Common Crashes between Motorists and Bicyclists
• Dooring & The Dutch Reach
• Speed Limits
• Bike Lanes
• Large Vehicles and Trailers
• Weather and Illegal Courtesies 
• Sharing the Road with Children

We all deserve to get home safely, and with the Bicycle Friendly Driver training now available online, we are one step closer to helping keep all road users safe.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Bicycle Friendly Driver training or sharing the training with your non-cycling friends, visit learn.bikeleague.org. If you like what the League is doing to promote safe bicycling and want to get involved in bike education, consider becoming a League Cycling Instructor.