Tagged: bicycle

Evening Harvest: December 28, 2012

Spencer Reece and Dar Williams: A Video Interview | Bloom

On late blooming being right on time.

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Bicycle Culture by Design: Mikael Colville-Andersen at TEDxZurich

Let’s design our cities like we design toasters or smartphones, following the desire lines of our citizens.

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The American Scholar: Let Us Now Praise Dover Books – Michael Dirda

Everett F. Bleiler! Even as a boy, I noticed that this Bleiler guy introduced many of the books I most cared about. He seemed to have read everything, and, as I later learned, he actually had. To this day, I keep The Guide to Supernatural Fiction and Ev’s two similar volumes about early science fiction near my bed for late-night browsing: They are among the world’s most beloved, and valuable, reference books.

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On the fourth day of Christmas … a free Nook screensaver set and story each day until January 5th!

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Some links from this week

  • Sex and Salter by Alexander Chee from the Paris Review: an appreciation of James Salter
    Reading Salter’s sentences, I saw what I knew of sex, that sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself.

  • Ariel casts out Caliban by Eric Michael Johnson: how our perceptions of our ape kin have evolved
    The common depiction of non-human primates in the West as representations of sin and the Devil, wickedness, frivolity, impulsivity and violence would ultimately say more about our own discomfort at being reminded of similar qualities in ourselves than their nature.

  • In seconds, a life coming into bloom was lost by Jim Adams: Audrey Hull, amazingly gifted and full of potential, died this week when struck by a truck while cycling (and my thoughts on claiming the lane…)
  • ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ and the Wonder of Words by Michael Chabon
    Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious—the most phantasmal—is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

The Conservative Case for Bicycling

The tinfoil-hat fantasies of Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes are only the most extreme example of conservative opposition to bicycle-positive public policy. Disparaging remarks from the likes of John Boehner and Patrick McHenry are depressingly common (though it should be noted that Ray LaHood, the most bicycle-friendly head of the Department of Transportation ever, was a Republican representative in a previous life).

I suspect that the Republican animosity toward bicycling is more cultural than it is economic. Bicycling culture in the United States has a generally liberal feel to it, perhaps because more bicyclists live in urban rather than rural or suburban areas, or because cycling instead of driving has a countercultural feel to it in our car-dominated society. Championing automobiles over bicycles, with their faintly European and therefore suspicious aura, is a way for politicians to signal their support for the “real” America.

This is a little curious, because a case can be made that bicycling actually fits many planks of the conservative agenda. My own politics are a little to the left of Leon Trotsky, so perhaps I’m not the best person to point this out, but maybe it takes an outsider to see the opportunities that conservatives are missing. So here are a few key conservative values–both cultural and economic–that line up well with cycling.

Self-Reliance

The bicycle ought to be an icon of rugged individualism. Few people tinker with their cars anymore–modern automobiles are black boxes which require highly specialized tools to maintain–but almost anyone can keep a bicycle running themselves. Bikes are relatively simple machines that can be maintained with a few wrenches and a screwdriver. And most bicycle commuters make their daily trips in all kinds of weather with no support system but their feet and their wits. Remember that rush of freedom you felt as a kid on your first two-wheeler? It’s like that every day for cyclists.

Conservatives love cowboys, but there are precious few of them left. Might I suggest the bicycle courier as the rugged individualist’s new hero? Out there on the edge, living by wits and courage, the bike messenger is the ultimate romantic loner. (Ignore for a moment that there are a good many anarchists in this niche.) Trade in your Stetson for a bike helmet, and your saddle bags for a courier satchel, and maybe get Alan Jackson to write a few songs about the brave and lonely messenger, riding in the tracks of the Pony Express. American enough for you?

Energy Independence

The Republican Party platform has touted energy independence for four decades, but they’ve done precious little to really encourage us to give up foreign oil. As long as we remain an auto-centric society, we’ll never be free of the negative consequences of depending on despotic and unstable regimes for our energy.

My bicycle isn’t entirely free of petroleum products–rubber tires and tubes, petroleum lubricants, and some plastic parts go into keeping it running–but it is a darned sight closer to energy independence than any car. There’s no need to invest in alternative fuel technologies, no need to drill for risky and inaccessible domestic oil; the bicycle is a near-perfect technology now, and an obvious part of an energy independence plan.

End Subsidies

Conservatives hate subsidies. Subsidies distort the market, redistribute wealth, and open the door to all sorts of social engineering aspirations.

And one of the most heavily subsidized aspect of our daily lives is the automobile. Whether through bailouts and tax incentives to manufacturers and dealers, or the proportion of general funds as opposed to user fees (license and registration fees, gas taxes) that go into infrastructure, or the hidden subsidies on parking, we pay individually far less for our cars than we pay collectively. If the true cost of our reliance on the personal combustion engine were borne by individual drivers, there would likely be many more people on bicycles or public transportation.

Bicycle infrastructure, by comparison, is incredibly cheap. And because bicycles cause so much less wear and tear on roads, bike lanes are cheaper to maintain. (We Minnesotans know that Republicans hate maintaining infrastructure almost as much as they hate subsidizing it…)

There are still plenty of left-leaning reasons to ride a bike, too: environmental, social, and economic. But that doesn’t preclude conservative support for cycling. The fact that liberal and conservative policies can converge on cycling just means that, like motherhood and apple pie, bikes are a good thing that ought to belong to neither end of the political spectrum.

Maryland sets a price on bicyclists: $313

A Maryland motorist, Kathy May Lee, who killed a bicyclist, has been fined $287.50, plus $25.50 in court fees. This is an amount that the average motorist could probably budget for; you wouldn’t want to kill a bicyclist every day, certainly, but for an annual, or even monthly, cost of operating your vehicle, it’s certainly reasonable. I’m sure it can’t be much more than a Hummer driver spends on fuel in a month.

The motorist had failed to clean her windshield (she “had cleared a portion of the left windshield of morning dew but left the fogged up right side to be cleared by the car’s heater”), and was fumbling for a cigarette lighter, when she struck the bicyclist from behind. In her defense, the prosecutor noted that “there were no indications that Lee was sending a text message or otherwise using a cell phone when the collision occurred”–apparently the fact that she wasn’t engaged in one of the current bugaboos of distracted driving is a mitigating circumstance.

Also “mitigating” the incident was the fact the bicyclist was not riding all the way over on the right side of the road. “[A] bicyclist is required to ride on a roadway’s shoulder if it’s usable or as close to the edge of the roadway as possible,” so apparently all bets are off if you try to use more of the lane than the strip by the curb.

There are many things that are obscene about this:

  • The punishment hardly rises to the level of the offense; it’s not much more than a parking ticket. At the very least, this should have resulted in the revocation of the driver’s license; this certainly looks more like “vehicular manslaughter” than “distracted driving” to me.
  • There are many good reasons that a cyclist would not be riding in the gutter: road conditions (I don’t know about Maryland, but in Minnesota the gutter is where dangerous debris piles up), lawful maneuvers (such as positioning for a left turn), or avoiding a hazard (parked cars’ doors can be as deadly as moving cars). Being in the middle of the road is a perfectly valid place for a bicycle.
  • Once again, the sacred bull has been given a pass. Motorists need to understand that they are operating a potential deadly device every time they get behind the wheel; particularly as our roads become increasingly crowded, motorists must be responsible: attentiveness should not be the sole reserve of cyclists and pedestrians. The onus should fall on the person who could most easily kill someone in a collision.

It’s nice that “distracted driving” has gained some attention lately, with a focus on texting and cell phone usage; but those are such incredibly obvious derelictions that there should be no debate about them. On my bicycle commute through St. Paul, I’ve seen any number of motorists fumbling for things in the cab, shaving or applying makeup, eating and drinking with both hands, even taking advantage of a stop light to do a little knitting. None of these behaviors should be acceptable: when you’re driving, you’re driving, and that’s your primary responsibility. Anything you do (or fail to do: winter in Minnesota brings out a lot of cars with a tiny porthole scraped in their icy windshields) that distracts you from that responsibility should not be tolerated.

Cyclists’ Special, 1955

This short film is the perfect bucolic antidote to the cold, slush, and wind of the last week here in Minneapolis, December 2009. The weather forecast for next week looks to bring more of the same, at least in the first couple days; I’m hoping to squeeze a bike ride into the narrow window of Monday morning, but fear that the roads won’t be clear again until Thursday. Though these cyclists on their solid old bikes with their stiff upper lips would probably not be dissuaded by a little ice.

“There’s a bit of rough weather about; we can take it if we have to.”

Indeed!

roadside memorials

Every morning, I ride past the “ghost bike” at Snelling and Summit, where Virginia Heuer was killed on September 27, 2008. It’s a stark reminder that even a relatively safe route like Summit Avenue can be treacherous, and that bicyclists and pedestrians fare very poorly in tussles with automobiles. I keep my wits about me when I ride, pay attention and obey the rules of the road, but 25 pounds of bicycle are no match for a ton and a half of car.

Most roadside memorials are a mixture of the public and the private, erected out of personal grief but also telegraphing the cost of highway fatalities as tables of statistics cannot. We have become largely numb to highway deaths: the CDC estimates about 3,900 deaths from H1N1 between April and October; 300 U.S. soldiers and Marines have died in Afghanistan this year; 37,261 people died in traffic accidents last year, down a bit from the previous year but still far too high.

New York State Senator Joe Griffo has recently called for a uniform memorial marker to replace the “flowers and other makeshift memorials” left by family and friends at the site of a fatal crash. While Griffo’s campaign has a reasonable origin–the recent death of a Henrico, Virginia woman laying flowers at her granddaughter’s roadside memorial highlights the risks they can pose to mourners–it also has a feeling of normalizing something that should really be abnormal and shocking. Standardizing the horrible, making mundane the tragic, seems like entirely the wrong direction to go.

To the extent that roadside memorials jar us out of complacency, remind us that the people who die on our roads every day have families and friends, that the vehicles around us are in fact occupied by fragile and mortal humans just like us, they might even be considered a safety feature. At the very least, an occasional memento mori does wonders for the soul.

I’m glad that the “ghost bike” movement places these stark reminders at the scenes of tragedy; I only hope they don’t have to place any more.

Murder Most Foul: how our roads might have been

I discovered J.S. Dean’s 1947 pamphlet Murder Most Foul: a study of the road deaths problem by way of a great series of articles about the fear of bicycling at Copenhagenize. The entire piece is available here; Howard Peel’s summary is required reading for anyone interested in how we get around our cities these days.

Dean was writing at an important turning point in transportation history: the automobile culture had not yet claimed dominance in the UK, and was still in its early years in the US: the first section of the M1 motorway opened in 1959, and construction on the Interstate Highway System began in 1956. Traffic on the roads was still mixed: not only trucks and cars, but also pedestrians and cyclists, shared the same paths. Dean documents the ways in which traffic law, supported by lobbyists for the automobile and transport industries, gradually usurped the dominant position on the roads until now pedestrians and cyclists are largely segregated into “safe” zones and many places can be reached only by car. He also draws chilling comparisons with Nazi Germany, called by the British automotive press before the war “a motoring paradise.” (Many quite disturbing quotations from British periodicals about the glories of Hitler’s Autobahn can be found here.)

The automobile has given us many things that we take for granted: mobility and freedom unknown before in human history, the ability to move goods over vast distances, economic boons in terms of manufacturing and construction jobs. The car is a wonderful tool not only for travel but for shaping culture and society in ways that we barely even notice anymore.

Which is why it’s often difficult to see the costs associated with cars. They’ve shaped our residential geography into vast ribbons of sprawl; they’ve contributed to social anomie by giving so many of us self-contained spaces in which to travel without interacting with our neighbors or our surroundings; they’ve alienated us from our geography and from the other modes of travel available to us; they’ve sped up the flattening of our regional cultures into a national culture, arguably as much as television and radio. Not to mention costs of environmental and aesthetic degradation, social dislocation as whole neighborhoods (like St. Paul’s Rondo) were razed for highways, dependence on fossil fuels, and the health impacts of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. On balance, the trade does not seem to have been beneficial to us in the long run.

What’s most striking is that the trade off was a choice, sometimes active and sometimes passive. We chose to push bicycles off the main roads and onto paths better suited for leisure riding than practical travel; we chose to engineer our roads for the efficient movement of cars and trucks rather than for pedestrians and bicycles in a mixed environment; we chose to create neighborhoods segregated from work, play, and commerce. Though we imagine speed to be our telos, it’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy: as our roads became increasingly inhospitable to non-automobile traffic, the disappearance of people walking and cycling has made higher speeds and blank distance the norm. These decisions have sometimes tragic consequences: the suburbs can be a deadly place to travel outside a car, leaving people isolated from the world or dependent on the automobile; indeed, as a University of Virginia study found, the suburbs can be even more dangerous than the city in terms of traffic deaths.

Dean’s pamphlet encourages me to imagine an alternate past, one where the arguments against the automobile won out and the car didn’t come to dominate our lives. It’s a past where the decision was made to encourage the most efficient means of travel for the task at hand: cars have their place for inter-urban and cross-country travel, but cede the ground to buses, trolleys, bicycles, and feet in the urban core. The landscape of such a place would be very different than what we have now: more vertical, perhaps, than horizontal, with more open space around denser cities.

Of course, alternate pasts aren’t of as much use as alternate futures; and we need to imagine our way out of the world we’ve created: sprawling, dangerous, and increasingly unhealthy. There are models available, like Copenhagen’s extensive bicycle infrastructure and Makkinga’s “shared space” experiment. Any change is likely to be met with resistance and skepticism, because changes to how we travel will likely lead to changes in how we live. But surely it’s time that we recognized the choices we continue make, and the consequences those choices have, and accept that we are, so to speak, in the driver’s seat.

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