Integration Segregation

Jan Heine, editor of the much esteemed Bicycle Quarterly has recently engaged in one of his typically analytic discussions on the relative merits of the various types of bicycle-specific infrastructure popping up around US cities. In particular, he seems a bit incensed over a newly unveiled cycle path in his home city of Seattle. In the age old argument between those who advocate for equal rights of bicycles on the street (let's call them Vehicularists) and those who advocate for bicycles to be segregated from car traffic as much as possible (George Wallace took all the fun out of the term best used for these folks), Jan seems to be tending toward the vehicular side. But if you know how Jan's mind works (which you would if you read Bicycle Quarterly or his blog, Off the Beaten Path), you would know that he's really more of a data weenie than an ideological zealot. And more importantly, he is a lover of elegant design; and anyone who loves good, sensible, utilitarian design has got, inevitably, to hate most of what passes for bicycle-specific infrastructure.

My own city, that is the nearest big city, the one around whose edges I have spent the vast majority of my life, has been engaged in the rapid expansion of cycling infrastructure over the last decade or so, and is struggling as are many of our cities to figure out exactly how bicycles fit into the overall flow of traffic. We are in the early days of what sometimes seems like a genuine transformation of our city. And as is always the case with all of nature's transformations, we are experiencing growing pains. And it's not difficult to understand why.

"...evolving designs reflect a learning process, as bikes are squeezed back into a streetscape long dominated by cars."

The division between the two camps is completely understandable. White guys in Lycra want to be allowed treated like equal citizens, afforded the same rights as people in cars. They don't want to dodge baby strollers and speed walkers and all the other obstacles strewn about the average "mixed use" trail. And they want to make left turns without having to wait through two stop lights. The Dutch apparently don't mind waiting, but that's be presumably because they don't have real jobs to get to.

Pass the Dutchy on the left-hand side.

On the other hand, most people, thank Kröd, don't want to dress up in skin tight synthetic clothing, put a Styrofoam ice cooler on their heads and max out their lactic thresholds just to get to work or the store. It's the usual tribal warfare between caffeinated Baristas trying to get to work quickly and moms getting their kids safely to school; between racers and riders, carbon and steel, people who live in Copenhagen and people who live in an exurb with streets named after the features bulldozed to build the development.

I love this particular ideological war because it starts with the premise that it's good to have more people riding bikes. The argument is about how best to accomplish that goal. A worthy conversation. I am personally of the opinion that neither side is absolutely correct. We're not going to dig up all our cities and remake them around the bike. And the suburbs are not going to become friendly places for human powered vehicles until the gas runs out.

Ultimately we will find a range of options, more or less appropriate for each situation. I think cities will do a lot of retrofitting of their existing infrastructure, putting in bike lanes, bike shares and bike parking. Suburbs will continue to worship cars and parking lots but over the past decade more rail trails, sidewalks and mini-villages have popped up, so maybe there is hope yet. And country roads will still be lovely places for a delightful cyclo-tour despite the occasional yahoo in one of those silly big pick-em-up trucks hollering, "get off the road!"

Carry me back to ol' Virginny

Carry me back to old Virginny,
There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,
There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,
There's where this old darkey's heart am long'd to go.

Oh, Northern Virginia (NoVa), despite your gleaming towers of Rosslyn and the metropolitan hipster vibe of Clarendon; regardless of your increasing population density and the steady purpleization of your electorate, you are still the offspring of the inbred, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, pre-Enlightenment cretins that still dominate RoVa (the Rest of Virginia).

Struggle up through the slime though you try, you will just keep being dragged back down into the primordial muck by the bigots, the racists and the gun nuts. The state is starting to look like a laughingstock with its whacked out retrograde politicians that are just downright embarrassing to anyone with an eighth grade education or better.

The latest affront to common sense and progress springing from the Ancient Dominion is the failure to pass an anti-dooring measure that would have made motorists who unthinkingly fling their car doors open in the path of oncoming cyclists at least partly responsible for the damage and injury they do.

Now it's bad enough that the Virginia Senate didn't pass the bill through the transportation committee, but what is particularly galling is the stated reason: they couldn't get their shit together enough to have all members of the committee actually attend the hearing. Half of the douchebags who allegedly sit on this committee couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote one way or another. So there you go, Virginia. You are one of only ten states in the Union (I realize many of you don't even recognize that you ARE in the Union) to extend exactly zero protection to people who get injured by thoughtless assholes who can't be bothered to look in the rearview mirror before throwing their car doors open into the path of fellow travelers. Well done.

Atruistic punishment

How could you hate her?

A fascinating, if somewhat perfunctory article on the BBC's website yesterday posits that the reason motorists hate cyclists derives from the game theory notion that society functions only because we are programmed to self police by punishing one another for behaving outside the bounds of accepted "morality." That is to say that humans have actually evolved to punish people perceived to have broken the rules. And for drivers, practically everything cyclists do is technically in violation of the rules, since the set of rules by which they operate is specific to cars. Cyclists can't, by definition, obey some of those rules. We can't go the speed limit most of the time, for instance.

And the rules we can obey, we often don't. Largely because the laws of physics play a much greater role in our mode of transportation. Since the calories we burn are derived from the energy our bodies have converted from food instead of from the refined essence of prehistoric organic matter (i.e., gasoline), we cyclists typically observe much stricter adherence to the laws of conservation of energy. That is, since it takes us a lot of personal energy to build momentum, we often go to extraordinary pains to maintain it. Drivers just push one pedal a couple of inches and hundreds of horsepower are produced, whereas a pedaler has to grind a crank round and round just to get up to a speed most motorists disdain and curse. Don't believe me? Do the math. So we often blow through stop signs. We're following rules - just not the same rules motorists have to follow.

We come by our own little set of rules by the exact same method as drivers have come by theirs - through trial and error, underpinned by a grave sense of self preservation and public safety. We do what we do because we have weighed the costs against the benefits, considered the possible risks and come up with a pretty workable set of operating principles. Just like cars. Even in a society where bicycles represent a meaningful proportion of the mode share (transportation geek speak for percent of trips made by bike), the transportation induced death rate is negligible. Can we say the same thing about our own society in which the car is clearly the dominant mode of transportation? No we cannot.

So when a person sitting in a type of vehicle responsible for over 30,000 fatalities a year can get all pissed when I scoot around them on a vehicle responsible for so few fatalities a year as to be not worth mentioning, I don't really feel that bad about it. When was the last time you heard about a motorist getting killed by a bicyclist? Just doesn't happen. Sure occasionally a cyclist runs down a pedestrian and kills them. Occasionally. How frequently do cars run down pedestrians? But I also understand when motorists, being the good egalitarians they are, and apparently in thrall to their limbic brain, go berserk and start shouting out their car windows and shout, "get off the feckin' road!"

On snot

High in fiber, low in fat.

We stood around the parking lot at the Travilah store, a country market at a popular crossroads frequented by cyclists and other passersby. The Bunny nibbled lightly on a pretzel and sipped some water as a bunny will do, while I hoovered up a Cliff's bar that more than anything resembled some large animal's scat, and drained half a Podium Ice bottle's worth of Lipton instant iced tea. The days are getting cold so we are encumbered by tights, jackets and gloves, our movements constrained by layer upon layer of lycra, spandex and wool. Delicate maneuvers are out of the question and it can be a chore just performing the most basic actions necessary to get from Point A to Point B.

As I stood there chatting with my 60 year-old companion, a line of snot traced its way slowly down her lip and I, myself a bit of a mucus monster elected to not mention it. Even when this otherwise tidy woman, a mother and teacher of young children who has no doubt spent countless hours wiping the noses of others, unceremoniously wiped the slug across her face with the sleeve of her jersey, I took no obvious notice, though the event set me to thinking.

---

snot

noun

1.Vulgar . mucus from the nose.

2.Informal . a disrespectful or supercilious person.

Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English;  compare Middle Low German,
Middle Dutch snotte, Old English gesnot, Danish snot

---

Athletic activities, perhaps particularly endurance events, are specifically designed to push the athlete far beyond the comfortable state in which most of us exist most of the time. When we set out to ride a bike a hundred miles or climb a mountain or run a marathon we are intentionally setting a goal that will test our abilities, a challenge at which we may even fail. And for some reason we love it. I guess we hope to learn something about ourselves as we transcend our limits. Or maybe not. I don't know. All I know is that to be a strong cyclist is to at least occasionally find yourself covered with

I had a riding buddy many years ago who was known for hocking snot rockets over his shoulder as he rode. At one point or another, if you rode with him, you would inevitably be the recipient of a sinus shower. And despite numerous attempts to get him to cut it out, he could never shake the habit. Eventually I just resolved to become a better rider and never let myself get stuck behind him. Easier said than done, as he was pretty strong. But eventually prevailed.

Now all of us on the bike have to deal with our nostralular eminations, and I am not trying in any way to imply that I am not just as disgusting as my fellow slime spewers. Though I hope I have at least a little more situational awareness than some. A few years ago I developed my own technique for ridding myself of unwanted nasal phlegm while riding. It's not perfect, but it worked. I would pinch out the snot between thumb and forefinger of my right hand and with a fluid (ha!) motion flick the unmentionable down at roughly a 45° angle toward the ground just off the road's edge. I would then wipe the hand on the left armpit of my jersey. With luck no residual residue would slather my riding companions. A suitable technique though by no means perfect.

Then, while riding from Venice to Florence in the company of  a couple of Aussies, I noticed that one of them kept a wadded up handkerchief tucked into one of the legs of his shorts. Ingenious! A handkerchief! Why didn't I think of that? Probably because throughout most of my cycling life I've been overly influenced by what is 'Pro' and believe me, professional cyclists don't carry hankies. But I'm not a pro cyclist, so I now do and should you ever chance to take my wheel, I assure you, there will be no loogies hocked your way.

Vélo moralitas

Yesterday I droned on and on about how cycling is more than a sport and how, even though the sport of professional cycling is currently mired in an agonizing act of self flagellation, there is redemption through the recognition of the value of the bicycle in leisure and transportation. I believe that. But it’s also true that I am somewhat in morning for the sport I love. I’m not saddened by the realization that the heroes of the sport are cheaters, as may be the case with many of my fellow fans. What makes me sad is that the sport has to endure this punishing mea culpa, this melodrama, this masochistic show of faux humility for the benefit of the same type of hypocritical audience for which every witch hunt is enacted.

USADA discovers doping in the pro peloton.

Though we may find it unfortunate, mere mortals are incapable of performing superhuman feats. Period. Sure, the equipment manufacturers would like you to think that their increasingly stiff bottom brackets can give any weekend suburbanite the ability to dance up the Tourmalet without breaking a sweat; likewise the marketers of training systems and nutrition supplements, the shoes with carbon fiber soles and the wind tunnel tested jerseys. But it’s all bullshit. Anybody who has ever spent any time on a bike knows that performance improvements just don’t come in exponential leaps and bounds. And anybody who can make sense of a graph ought to know that athletes long ago far exceeded the limits of human physiology.

But we Americans are eternal virgins; the descendents of Puritans, endlessly capable of re-growing our moral hymens, of regaining our innocence. We forget that the year before Armstrong started winning we had the Festina affair or that the sport has been riddled with cheating from the very beginning. How do we do it? How do we continue to believe in fairy tales despite all evidence to the contrary? And maybe more importantly, why would we want to? How can we be so naïve?

We have the same problem with so many of our societal problems, it blows my mind and makes me think psychosis is an integral part of the American character. And what should disturb us is that our false belief in moral purity, in Plato’s form of the good, causes actual damage. Our righteous moralizing blinds us to the true flawed nature of our species and as we point our accusatory fingers at the Other, we somehow manage to ignore the horrors right in our own houses. 

If we are able to pretend that people can stop wanting to get stoned, we can just spend ridiculous sums of money putting enormous numbers of non-violent citizens in jail, thereby destroying families and whole communities. Yet global pharmaceutical companies make obscene profits keeping the rest of us drugged up and we don’t seem to have a problem with it as long as insurance covers our antidepressants and boner pills.

And if we can pretend that priests and scout masters and coaches and teachers can stop abusing children, that they are some sort of rare aberration, a extraordinary satanic abomination, instead of admitting that such admittedly abhorrent behavior is well within the bounds of common human behavior and then putting processes and policies in place to actually protect children. 

We substitute a desire to pretend we’re not all perverts of one stripe or another while we let the dangerous ones, the real predators continue to diddle the youth. Why? Because we can’t admit to ourselves that wanting to get blasted and have sex is central to the human experience, but that some of us color outside the lines and we have to keep them within the limits of healthy, non-destructive self expression. Instead, we clap the deviants in irons, pretend that good and evil are absolute and wait to be surprised by the next incident.

I just wish we could be honest about the whole thing, rather than burning down the entire village to eradicate the witches and pretending the purge will make us pure again.

Vélo Versitalis

Riding a bike is many things to many people. It is a professional sport, a form of practical transportation and a leisure activity for millions of people around the world. I guess golf and baseball and ice skating and synchronized swimming all double as both sports and leisure time activities… okay, synchronized swimming is really more akin to conceptual art than sport but, you know, tell that to the Olympic Committee… but to my knowledge they aren’t practical forms of transportation. There are sports that share cycling’s versatility, but I maintain that none quite equals the accessibility of cycling. Take cross-country skiing. I presume for the people of Norway, strapping two boards to your feet grabbing some poles and shuffling forward has long constituted a sensible method for getting from Point A to Point B, but you gotta have snow to ski, which will apparently soon be relegated to isolated parts of Great Britain by global climate change. I guess when the snow stops coming you can always roller ski, but I’m going out on a limb and predict that we will not be seeing large numbers of roller ski commuters on the streets of America’s cities any time soon.

Is that you Uncle Bob? 

Likewise, though bobsledding, kayaking, canoeing, sail boating, hang gliding, wind surfing sail boarding may technically qualify as vehicular transportation, none offers quite utility of the simple bicycle. Where, for instance, can you mount panniers on a luge? 

No leisure / sport / transportation type can match cycling for efficiency and convenience; with the possible exception of motor sports, though the internal combustion engine and even electric engines are dependent on large quantities of fuel, whereas the average trip on a bicycle can typically by fueled by an apple and about 16 ounces of water. 

All of which is by way of saying that in these days in which it seems the professional sport of cycling is hell bent on self destruction, we need to remember that the profession of cycling, the sport of cycling, the industry of cycle racing is but the smallest, least consequential aspect of the bicycle. I am a fan of the sport and am deeply troubled by the devastation currently being wreaked on the sport; a sport about which most Americans will never know anything other than what they are reading in the current headlines. The association most people will derive from the current state of the sport is Cycling = Doping. What a shame.

And more’s the shame because the wounds now being suffered are entirely self inflicted. But I take some comfort in the idea that maybe now that professional cycling has decided to debase and demoralize itself and its fans, now that cycling is seen by the general public as the strict province of degenerates and reprobates, maybe the industry that underwrites it, the manufacturers and the cycling press and the event organizers will take the opportunity to reorient away from their intense focus on super humans performing impossible feats toward regular people having fun on bikes and using them for practical purposes.

I oughta have my head examined

Cyclechic Ferrara

Today I want to talk about bicycle helmets. Brain buckets. Skid lids. Cranium catchers. This Sunday past I spent a bit of time riding around the neighborhood dialing in a newly installed pair of Gran Compe 610’s. I was basically just tooling around, stopping to adjust, tooling some more, etc. As the point was not explicitly to go for a ride and as my average speed was likely to be (and in fact was) not more than 10 miles per hour, I didn’t bother with my special clickity shoes and my special stretchy clothes and my special cranial protection.

I zigged and zagged through the neighborhood, wending my leisurely way through the restaurant district, stopping at the art supply store to pick up a paint pen (I’m planning on pinstriping the lugs on the Fuji) past the school where the farmers market sets up, and out past the neighborhood where the One Percenters live. The brakes were now perfectly adjusted, the bike was riding smoothly, the weather was fine, and I was in a great mood. Remembering that I had promised the Managing Partner that I’d do a few things around the house before day’s end, I decided to take the bike path home. Not my favorite way to get around, but it draws a straight line back to the neighborhood and provides a tunneled crossing of Wisconsin Avenue. 

So it was that I came to a stop by the Barnes & Noble, waiting to cross at the light behind the mommy with the stroller and the elderly ladies on their beach cruisers, when a guy on a MuurMart mountain bike crossing in the opposite direction decided to call out to me, “you ought to be wearing a helmet.” What a your-favorite-curse-word-here-wad. I have ridden thousands of miles per year for over a decade. I own several bikes and several helmets. I belong and contribute to several bicycle advocacy organizations. I have read every book about practical cycling penned in the last forty years. I download (and actually read!) lots of those wonky papers about transportation and actually write a blog that’s mostly about bikes and cycling. 

And this t-shirt wearing weekender is gonna tell me to wear a helmet! Feckin’ douche. And I’m sure he congratulated himself for conscientiously educating the guy on the “old fashioned” bike about the need to wear a helmet. I don’t mind that he wanted me to understand the value of bicycle safety. I mind that the dipsh*t feels comfortable playing the nanny without actually having the first idea about bicycle safety.

And Numbnuts’ attitude is quite common. Think about the last time you saw a headline about a cyclist getting run down by a car. Every such article is sure to note, “the cyclist was/wasn’t wearing a helmet.” What the hell does that have to do with the fact that a car ran down a cyclist? Does not wearing a helmet mean I deserve to be run down by a car? No, it does not. It is an irrelevant fact used to dismiss the rights of cyclists. Note that Nanny didn’t tell the mommy pushing the baby stroller across the street while juggling a cell phone and a Vanilla Frappumochaccino to wear a helmet. 

Many European cities have vastly higher modal share for bicycles, as the transportation weenies say, than anyplace in the US. And you will almost never see a single helmet in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. I’ve personally been to several Italian cities where the share of trips by bike hovers near 30%, and never saw a single helmet on any of the senior citizens riding their bikes. 

But surely, given the accepted dogma that helmets save lives, the streets of Ferrara and Lucca must be strewn with the corpses of the bici-victims, right? No. Why? Because Europeans are used to seeing bikes. They have invested in bicycling infrastructure and have made a concerted effort to get people out of the cars that destroy the quality of life in their cities and cause the deaths of thousands of people per year. In 2010, over 30,000 people died in the U.S. because of cars. In the same year 618 cyclists died. So who should be wearing helmets?

There is even reason to believe that forcing people to wear helmets discourages them from riding bikes at all. Places with mandatory helmet laws have notably low ridership levels. But if you don’t believe me perhaps you will believe the New York Times. And with the massive success of Washington, DC's Capital Bike Share and hopefully others like it in cities around the country, we should expect to see a lot more helmetless heads on our streets. And when we do maybe we'll realize that bicycling is a safe, healthy way to get around, not a life threatening activity for which we need body armor. And maybe we'll start designing our communities on a human scale instead of being beholden to the mighty automobile, and then start holding cars responsible for sharing the road with cyclists and pedestrians.

Well, anyway, I’m not going to change anything here. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to wear a helmet, great. Strap one on. I usually do. But if you see a grown up tax-paying citizen riding his bike around town without a helmet, why don’t you just keep your righteousness to yourself. Go ahead and feel superior. Just keep that warm feeling inside. It might just be the case that other people are able to make informed choices for themselves without the benefit of your superhuman concern for our well being. 

Further Reading

http://chasingmailboxes.com/2012/10/10/you-wear-a-helmet-dont-you/

http://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html