To arms, cyclists! The war is on!

“In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage.” 
― William Shakespeare, Henry V

Bike Joust by Karl Addison

In this morning's Post, Transportation writer Ashley Halsey III writes a response to a rash of recent columns about cyclists that have appeared over the past few days, in particular this tirade from Courtland Milloy which followed this one by John Kelly. And this piece by Rachel Sadon. And this one by Sarah Kaplan. And this one by Petula Dvorak. Looks like a busy time around the water cooler for the editorial staff at the Post. I can assure you, the Comments engine at the paper must be at near capacity.

These commentaries follow a firestorm created by an ill-considered tweet from NPR's Scott Simon, which prompted this extremely well articulated response from Carl Alviani on Medium which referenced a retort tweet from BikeSnobNYC. Suddenly cycling editorials are coming out of nowhere!

A casual observer might be forgiven for concluding from the histrionic rhetoric that there is a war in this country between motorists and cyclists. In some senses there is a war; if only for funding, for space, for equal protection under law. It's an engagement reminiscent of the great American Civil War, only now pedestrians are fighting for exclusive rights to the sidewalks, cyclists are fighting for equal rights to the road, and motorists are fighting to preserve their right to continue to slaughter over 30,000 people per year in what they term "accidents". Thankfully, the fight is so far limited to the Op Ed pages of newspapers and blogs with the occasional intrusion into transportation funding meetings. Oh, and of course on YouTube, the world's new public square. 

It would be easy to be discouraged by the insane vitriol spewed by people on both sides of this debate, but I have to say I find it somewhat promising. First, it's good to know that the most significant event the Op Ed columnists of the world can think to write about on a given morning is that goddamn bicyclist that jumped a stop sign on the way to work. Or that had the audacity to ride on the sidewalk in the extremely small area downtown where that behavior is illegal. I'd much rather read about that than about actual tragedies that happen when cars ride on the sidewalks and people actually die rather than just being annoyed and possibly inconvenienced. 

And that there are so many of these rant-a-torials must be an indication that cycling has reached a certain critical mass making it worthy of comment. Cyclists are now having such an impact on the comings and goings of our fellow citizens that we warrant being hated, which is a clear sign of significance. At least we are now sufficiently annoying that we must be reckoned with. And now that drivers are pissed off, maybe they'll want to do something about it, like vote to increase transportation funding so the bicycle commuters don't have to share the roads with their laughable Humscalades they bought to chauffeur their kids to school. 

Maybe now that all these nasty cyclists are forcing drivers to repeatedly press the brake and gas pedals and maybe turn the steering wheel more often, they'll have no alternative but to recognize that there are other human beings in the world, people with different priorities and lifestyles; fellow citizens whose admittedly conflicting rights need to be taken into consideration. Nah... what am I thinking? They'll just keep bitching and spending their ever-shrinking transportation dollars on their ever-expanding superhighways so we can all spend our entire, pointless lives sitting in gigantic vehicles going zero miles per hour on Interstate 95 between Springfield and Fredericksburg. Goddamn bicycles! 

Hope springs infernal

Paul Rosenfeld has an interview in The Atlantic with Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten entitled The Rise of the Bicycle in the Twenty First Century. It would be easy to write this off as just another example of yet another Northern European attacking America's love of cars and their associated dependence on petroleum. Just another viking preaching about a transportation model and an attendant quality of life that cannot and never will be implemented in the United States. That is it would be easy if the model had not already started to gain traction in communities across the US, including right across the river in good ol' Arlington, Va. And increasingly in DC, and even right here in Bethesda, MoCo, MD, USA.

If I didn't know better, I might just start to feel a twinge of hope that at least some Americans are beginning to recognize that suburban, car-dependent communities suck and that human-scaled environments with pedestrian friendly infrastructure and public transportation (formerly known as "cities") potentially offer a higher quality of life, reduced environmental impact and a general improvement in the well-being of our citizens. Yeah, right...

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