Mass travel

This is the fourth week in which I've had to surrender my precious 3 1/2 day weekend to provide office coverage for those who are not retired, and who are on salary. The plus is that I've been commuting on the bike twice as much as usual, with concomitant brain fodder.

The local paper has hosted some especially vicious pro-and-anti bicycle rants in recent weeks. These closed with the observation of a columnist, who had been as vicious and anti as anyone, that "nobody hates all bicyclists." Hoohahahahaha.

Some do. Cyclists have to accept that, be on guard, and work to change it. Once again, ranting letter writers and columnists may not hate all bicyclists, but their words enable those who do.

Mostly, though, motorists haven't got a clue what to do in the presence of a cyclist. This leads them into actions that would bring on an accident or a citation if they involved another motor vehicle. Likewise, far too many cyclists have not the least idea what their responsibilities are on the road.

Or off. About half of my commute is over a reclaimed railroad bed. This was originally paved in rottenstone (as I grew up calling it). This is a fine gravel with a high clay content. It packs to a firm surface which muddies up only in a few low spots, and is hard enough to support skinny tyres. However, nobody thought to explain this to our Electric Department, which maintains the right-of-way. They've fallen into the habit of filling in the worst low spots with washed half-inch gravel, which is about the worst possible surface for a bicycle. It has no clay content, and unless rollered in, remains a loose and shifting surface for years.

The Salem end of the right of way is paved, with a centre stripe and elegant iron gates at each end. Having lavished all that money on this treatment, the Salem authorities then didn't have the money to reclaim the rest of the right of way, so their bike path is under a mile long. Rant out.

Whilst we're commenting that motorists bicyclists are equally incompetent at obeying traffic laws and sharing public ways, let us not overlook pedestrians. My town, with its maze of 17th century streets, has a great many pedestrians in the street. Locals are in the habit but at least move when they hear something on wheels. Tourists, I suppose, are astonished that a way not much wider than the average urban sidewalk actually has vehicular traffic, and are slower to move.

My peeve of the month, though, arises from a peculiar new behaviour on the right of way. Pedestrians, and even cyclists, are moving to the left rather than the right in the face of oncoming bicycles. The surface, remember, is fairly hard, and allows a good turn of speed. To someone trained for a lifetime to keep to the right on roads, in corridors, and in watercraft (the "port-to-port" rule is international), this conduct is disconcerting. Is this the pernicious influence of British drama?

Why can't we all get along?

Recent rumblings here and there have had me thinking over the extreme difficulty Americans have in sharing the road. I am a cyclist: also a motorist and a pedestrian when the occasion demands, and we'll come back to that. Twice a week, when I work an afternoon shift, I've been riding to work, about a nine-mile round trip, half of it on busy streets. Thursday was typical: no assaults or catcalls from motor vehicles, which in all honesty was more common when I started this, over 30 years ago, than it is now. However, three, that's three, jaywalking pedestrians walked in front of me in the space of a few blocks, all less than 50 feet away. Being especially careful to avoid pedestrians, I stopped for all three; not one showed any sign of registering my existence. I'm rather slower than I was in my salad days, which makes avoidance easier.

I believe I once before quoted bicycle activist Richard Ballantine on this subject. He advocated very defensive cycling, based on two assumptions. First, to most people you are quite literally invisible. Second, to those who do see you, bicycle=nine-year-old kid= five mph=no threat. Despite repeated experiences to the contrary, both observations hold true today. Even at my advanced age and relatively low speed, I represent a gross vehicle weight of over 200 pounds travelling about 175 feet in ten seconds. That means if you dart out 50 feet in front on me, I'll be on you in under three seconds. If I am alert, it will take nearly half that time to stop a bicycle going only 12 mph with four brake shoes smaller than a baby's little finger. If I am even slightly inattentive, that impact will happen and it will hurt, because I will hit you with a force close to 1000 foot/pounds. And you will blame me. If you are in a vehicle and do the same thing, the physics are the same, but I will sustain most of the damage, and you will still blame me.

The cycle of ignorance wouldn't annoy bikers so much if it were not they who are almost always at the end of the circle of blame. I have seldom met a pedestrian dedicated to carrying on a lifelong vendetta against motorists, or vice versa. Yet one can hardly bring up this subject without turning up both pedestrians and motorists who stoke and nurse lifelong hostility toward cyclists. Dig a little and one finds, often, that this rage stems from one incident some variable time ago. Pedestrians, yes, do have something to fear from collisions with cyclists, collisions both can usually avoid by purging their minds of half-century-old delusions. Hostile motorists, on the other hand, may want to consider anger management as well as education, since what they drive meets the legal standard of a deadly weapon. The number of drivers hostile to bicycles has been slowly shrinking over the last 30 years, at least in my experience, but the ones who remain seem dedicated to making up the difference with aggressiveness and noise.

The circle of pedestrian blaming cyclist, cyclist blaming pedestrian, motorist blaming cyclist, etc., ad nauseam, resembles nothing so much as Thomas Nast's noted 19th century cartoon of the Tweed Ring, with everyone pointing the finger of blame at their neighbour:




In fact, everyone should be pointing that finger at themselves.


Speaking objectively, what makes a certain portion of motorists so enraged at cyclists? Probably one part is an unwillingness to share the road: note that motorcyclists report similar experiences. It's a commonplace among them that noisy pipes are a defence mechanism: the loud exhausts make the presence of a motorcycle patently obvious. The pipes plus the leathers plus the reputation make motorcyclists too intimidating for all but the most psychotic of drivers to cross. This does not work for bicyclists.

Further, all drivers are sometimes pedestrians, and most pedestrians are sometimes drivers. Despite the trouble both have in respecting the other's space, neither can claim ignorance of the other's experience.

A much smaller proportion of the population are adult cyclists. Thus we have ignorance of rights and of physics; thus we have invisibility, and thus we have a eagerness to shift blame onto the piece of the equation most people do not understand.

No one around here should put on airs and compare themselves favourably with other road users. In global public opinion, everyone occupying Greater Boston streets is almost as hostile and homicidal as Boston drivers, whose hostility is legendary the world over. The average performance of Boston cyclists can only rise above the norm if all cyclists originated in another dimension. At times, everyone concerned seems to think this is true.

If I weren't writing this, I'd already have forgotten those pedestrians (and the wrong-way bikers who complicated my life a couple of days before). Even writing about them, I'll forget the incidents I've mentioned in a fortnight. Why then is it necessary to nurse these grudges against cyclists for months, for years, for a lifetime? Does life offer nothing better?