If you were following the 24 hour news cycle about two years back you might have seen a small story about a neighbourhood in San Bruno, California. It blew up. The fire was so bad that everyone assumed a plane had crashed. Paint melted off cars. The wind-shields on the firetrucks cracked from the heat. Six people died. In the end no plane was found and people put together enough pieces to understand that there had been a gas pipe explosion.
Fast forward to the present and PG&E has been on it's best behaviour seeing as even in the US, exploding a town can be considered bad for business. Numerous repair projects and refurbish projects have come off back burners and are stopping traffic all over the bay area --- including up the road from where I live and along the section of Middlefield that I take to get to work. When they need to replace those big pipes there's nothing for it but to halt traffic and rip up the road. What does this mean for bicycles? Not a lot really. We skate along in our mostly empty skinny little lane and squeak around the cars on those occasions that our little bit of real estate gets torn up.
Two weeks or so back I saw the worst traffic ever, bar none, on Sand Hill Road. It was backed up from the 280 all the way to El Camino. Possibly further. It wasn't just slow but for much of the time the cars were not moving, a parking lot. Contraption Captain and I are hurrying home and we wonder what the deal is, so much traffic. Odd. Then we spot a broken down car being pushed. That must be the problem, we think. But no. It turns out that this car just lost it's mind in an agony of slowness. It's being pushed by two humans who are in an agony of back-pain but traffic is so slow that the dead car is not changing the profile around itself.
So what is it? PG&E working on their repairs. It was quite a snarl. It was such a snarl that I saw two helicopters hovering around ostensibly there to airlift the despairing Lamborghinis and Maseratis to safety. Porsches and Ferraris can go screw of course, those guys are a dime a dozen. Cars everywhere were sobbing quietly as they wondered where the open empty roads of their relevant car commercials were, who had sold them this bill of goods. They had thought themselves alone in the world! And yet here they were on roads that were positively infested with other cars.
I lol'd. It was so much traffic that at a certain point it just became amusing. My commute was (of course) the same as it ever was with two mild course corrections.
Course Correction 1: Cars in parking lot traffic will wedge a wheel into the bicycle lane even if the right turn they are making is four miles further up the road. This is annoying.
Course Correction 2: Cars stuck in this kind of traffic get really upset. They go through all the stages of grief. Denial "This isn't happening to me!" followed by Rage "This shouldn't be happening to me!" followed by Acceptance "Kill me now." And then, when the traffic finally clears, they reach a point that grief victims try and avoid: Retaliation as in "Those fucking bicycles are for it now. Zooming past me when I was stuck like that..."
So, be careful out there my friends. And if you are in a car stuck in traffic? Those bicyclists aren't mocking you, they're showing you the exit.
a now a song snippet for you, with apologies to Gotye:
Now and then I think of all the time I spent in gridlock
Always believing that a car was the only choice
But I don't want to live that way
Stuck in traffic every goddamned day
Now I leave, my car at home
I ride my bicycle, lost ten pounds plus I'm free to roam
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
didn't we almost have it all?
My week at work was absolutely horrible (send me an NDA if you want the disgusting and also boring details) but the bicycling was actually quite nice. It makes me notice, or re-notice, a few things. One is that most days no one comes close to killing me, that despite a media representation of bicycling being a mode of transportation best suited to people yearning for a (sometimes fast and sometimes slow but always painful) death... mostly it is pretty calm and uneventful. I pedal, I signal, I turn, I get back into the bicycle lane, I pedal some more, I stop, I continue I meet up with my husband I bicycle home lather rinse repeat.
The other item I notice is that there is a steady backdrop to my bicycling life that like almost anything you see every day is hard to notice. This backdrop is formed by my route. It is the changing houses, the 'for sale' signs that come and go, the work that is started and completed, the lights and decorations that get put up and then put away and it is shaped by the people I see and sometimes ride with. An almost never discussed (that I notice) quality of bicycling over the same route twice a day five days a week is that you get to know the people. Here are some of mine:
One of the pleasures of a big company (this week I'm thinking it is possibly the only pleasure of a big company but like I said, rough week) is having co-workers in other countries who like to bicycle. This is how I came to have staying with me, a few months back, a Dubliner who is a steady bicycle commuter when at home and "has never cared for cars all that much."
He picked up a temporary bicycle when he got to the US and pedaled home with me (nine miles or so) that night despite his having spent the entire day in what must have been tiring transatlantic travel. This is also how I know that UK area bicyclists shoal to the left --- not that surprising when you work through which side of the road they drive on but quite a surprise in the US where we shoal to the right.
The next day, after a nice breakfast, my Dubliner friend and the Contraption Captain and Rapunzel and I all set out on bicycle for our respective destinations, which involved pedaling Rapunzel to school first and then the rest of us to our respective offices. We rode pleasantly along and Dubliner said thoughtfully "Just like on the telly, really." When I asked him what he meant he explained that on television, American children are always portrayed bicycling or walking to school.
O RLY.
In the US, it is a minority of children who walk or bicycle to school. In some places it verges on illegal for a kid to bicycle to school. Unless of course they have a police escort and even then they may be sent home.
But European television is not entirely current (last time I visited) with American television which is why (last time I checked) the Europeans I talk to are also surprised that I am not blonde and that the family does not have a drawer full of guns in case we need to shoot someone.
But once it was true. Not the guns, but the bicycling. Once our kids walked and bicycled to school. We didn't even need special lanes for them. Schools were closer and cars were fewer. If at that time we had gone the Dutch route and started building bicycling infrastructure instead of the American route, add tons more cars and faster roads we might today really have it all. Instead we're fighting to take hold of just a few feet.
One more thought if you're still around. I'm subbed to a mailing list of area road bicyclists. Some part of the talk is area rides and another part is bicycle maintenance but a not insignificant piece is surviving the road so a person can live to ride another day. In such a discussion someone referred to the "bike lane" and then referred to times they find they must ride in the "car lane." A second person corrected them saying that there was no "car lane" there were public roads. Before cars there were public roads and people walked on them and biked on them and rode their horses or drove a coach and four or whatever. It was a road. You used it to get from point A to point B. And now? We have car lanes.
We almost had it all but then we threw it all away.
The other item I notice is that there is a steady backdrop to my bicycling life that like almost anything you see every day is hard to notice. This backdrop is formed by my route. It is the changing houses, the 'for sale' signs that come and go, the work that is started and completed, the lights and decorations that get put up and then put away and it is shaped by the people I see and sometimes ride with. An almost never discussed (that I notice) quality of bicycling over the same route twice a day five days a week is that you get to know the people. Here are some of mine:
- The network/software engineering guy whose company (you have not heard of it) was just acquired by vmware so his route has changed and we see each other only in passing. He is now fabulously wealthy. I noticed that he has not bought a new bicycle yet. Wonder if he will get around to that?
- Cheerful Guy who looks a little like Richard Gere, in fact Palo Alto being Palo Alto he might actually *be* Richard Gere. We have been waving fondly and calling "good morning!" to each other for some five years now. During that time we have never been bicycling in the same direction. We have seen each other carry kids on riders, trail-a-longs, and in wagons. In a weird very minor way, our kids have grown up together, they are all on their own bicycles now. Cheerful Guy is always happy, always smiling, in stark contrast to my often sullen self. I look forward to our high speed minuscule exchange of pleasantries.
- Sullen woman. Twice a day every day I see Sullen Woman. She rides a vintage something or another that I am pretty sure she bought when it was new. She never wears a helmet because helmets are for pussies, or maybe helmets are for the little people, donno. We do not acknowledge each other's existence but I'd definitely stop and trash the car that disturbed one thread of her Talbot's clothing.
- Guy who lives on Bryant and has a greyhound that he walks every day. At some point he had seen me ride my bicycle past his house often enough that he noticed me and now we wave to each other every day. His smile says "I never worry about bicyclists running over my dogs." My smile says, "It's cool that people still walk places."
- Big broad-assed woman (actually there are two of these) who wears too tight lycra shorts. Rides a road bicycle. Doesn't stop at the 4-way stops. Finally met up with her on a long straight away with no traffic lights and she trounced me anyways. Damnit.
One of the pleasures of a big company (this week I'm thinking it is possibly the only pleasure of a big company but like I said, rough week) is having co-workers in other countries who like to bicycle. This is how I came to have staying with me, a few months back, a Dubliner who is a steady bicycle commuter when at home and "has never cared for cars all that much."
He picked up a temporary bicycle when he got to the US and pedaled home with me (nine miles or so) that night despite his having spent the entire day in what must have been tiring transatlantic travel. This is also how I know that UK area bicyclists shoal to the left --- not that surprising when you work through which side of the road they drive on but quite a surprise in the US where we shoal to the right.
The next day, after a nice breakfast, my Dubliner friend and the Contraption Captain and Rapunzel and I all set out on bicycle for our respective destinations, which involved pedaling Rapunzel to school first and then the rest of us to our respective offices. We rode pleasantly along and Dubliner said thoughtfully "Just like on the telly, really." When I asked him what he meant he explained that on television, American children are always portrayed bicycling or walking to school.
O RLY.
In the US, it is a minority of children who walk or bicycle to school. In some places it verges on illegal for a kid to bicycle to school. Unless of course they have a police escort and even then they may be sent home.
But European television is not entirely current (last time I visited) with American television which is why (last time I checked) the Europeans I talk to are also surprised that I am not blonde and that the family does not have a drawer full of guns in case we need to shoot someone.
But once it was true. Not the guns, but the bicycling. Once our kids walked and bicycled to school. We didn't even need special lanes for them. Schools were closer and cars were fewer. If at that time we had gone the Dutch route and started building bicycling infrastructure instead of the American route, add tons more cars and faster roads we might today really have it all. Instead we're fighting to take hold of just a few feet.
One more thought if you're still around. I'm subbed to a mailing list of area road bicyclists. Some part of the talk is area rides and another part is bicycle maintenance but a not insignificant piece is surviving the road so a person can live to ride another day. In such a discussion someone referred to the "bike lane" and then referred to times they find they must ride in the "car lane." A second person corrected them saying that there was no "car lane" there were public roads. Before cars there were public roads and people walked on them and biked on them and rode their horses or drove a coach and four or whatever. It was a road. You used it to get from point A to point B. And now? We have car lanes.
We almost had it all but then we threw it all away.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?
[I know, pics or it didn't happen. I apologize, I really should have a picture of this but for a lot of boring reasons I do not so you will have to take my word that this happened]
Lunchtime in my area is busy. There are a lot of companies in the area and a lot of employees and everyone has a different idea of where to go find something nice to eat. For me it's a chance to go for a little bicycle ride down one quiet street and then across a somewhat busier road and then around a few buildings to my favorite cafe.
I'm bicycling down road one when I see the traffic backed up in both directions on road two. I'm surprised. Road 2 is busy but not traffic jam busy. The cars are not moving either, it's a parking lot about two blocks from my office door.
I look to my left and see it when "it" is a giant 18-wheeler truck at an impossible angle. It had been driving without incident along road 1. It came to road 2 where it wanted to cross and turn left. It got the first part done ok, it spanned four lanes, and it kindof got the 2nd part done, it's cab was turned at a ninety degree angle parallel to road 2 and perpendicular to road one but here on step three, straighten out and keep going, it had come a cropper.
It was entirely dead in the water or I guess, dead on the tarmac. It had died in the perfect position to block four lanes of traffic in two directions. Cars being cars more arrived with each passing moment making it impossible for the already trapped cars to extricate themselves. This being California no one honked or said anything, they just sat there in eerie unhappy silence.
Ever read Winnie the Pooh? Remember the part where he goes to visit Rabbit and eats up all of rabbit's honey and gets so fat he can't fit out the door to leave?
Yeah that. But remember the part beforehand when Rabbit figures out that Pooh is stuck in his doorway and will probably be stuck there for weeks? That's the part where he shrugs and makes the best of it and uses Pooh's feet for towel-hangers.
Like Rabbit, the bicyclists made the best of it. Unlike the cars we are quite little and so when we got within range of the truck we slowed, considered, and then wormed our way through the parked cars, onto and off the sidewalk, around the police who had arrived but had nowhere to direct the traffic to and then back onto the road with the giant ungainly odd obstruction behind us.
When I was done being reminded of Winnie the Pooh I started thinking of The Empire Strikes Back where Luke takes down the AT-AT. Giant trucks are pretty scary when they're hurdling towards you at speed but once they get wedged in a spot of great tightness they look quite a bit less intimidating.
Lunchtime in my area is busy. There are a lot of companies in the area and a lot of employees and everyone has a different idea of where to go find something nice to eat. For me it's a chance to go for a little bicycle ride down one quiet street and then across a somewhat busier road and then around a few buildings to my favorite cafe.
I'm bicycling down road one when I see the traffic backed up in both directions on road two. I'm surprised. Road 2 is busy but not traffic jam busy. The cars are not moving either, it's a parking lot about two blocks from my office door.
I look to my left and see it when "it" is a giant 18-wheeler truck at an impossible angle. It had been driving without incident along road 1. It came to road 2 where it wanted to cross and turn left. It got the first part done ok, it spanned four lanes, and it kindof got the 2nd part done, it's cab was turned at a ninety degree angle parallel to road 2 and perpendicular to road one but here on step three, straighten out and keep going, it had come a cropper.
It was entirely dead in the water or I guess, dead on the tarmac. It had died in the perfect position to block four lanes of traffic in two directions. Cars being cars more arrived with each passing moment making it impossible for the already trapped cars to extricate themselves. This being California no one honked or said anything, they just sat there in eerie unhappy silence.
Ever read Winnie the Pooh? Remember the part where he goes to visit Rabbit and eats up all of rabbit's honey and gets so fat he can't fit out the door to leave?
Yeah that. But remember the part beforehand when Rabbit figures out that Pooh is stuck in his doorway and will probably be stuck there for weeks? That's the part where he shrugs and makes the best of it and uses Pooh's feet for towel-hangers.
Like Rabbit, the bicyclists made the best of it. Unlike the cars we are quite little and so when we got within range of the truck we slowed, considered, and then wormed our way through the parked cars, onto and off the sidewalk, around the police who had arrived but had nowhere to direct the traffic to and then back onto the road with the giant ungainly odd obstruction behind us.
When I was done being reminded of Winnie the Pooh I started thinking of The Empire Strikes Back where Luke takes down the AT-AT. Giant trucks are pretty scary when they're hurdling towards you at speed but once they get wedged in a spot of great tightness they look quite a bit less intimidating.
nothing but bicycles
Despite my genteel restraint in my regular life (and as I write this, I acknowledge that the idea of me showing restraint is unlikely) most people who spend any time with me are aware that I dig bicycling and bicyclists. If these people spend even more time with me they come to an uncomfortable truth whose name is: I am not just a bicyclist, I do not like cars. If these people are bright enough to think outside of the automotive box then they finally figure out that they themselves, lovely persons that they are, deserving of everything wonderful and all sorts of special regard....these special people find themselves behind the wheel of a car? I do not like them. It's pretty personal and when you consider the love affair that people have with their cars (not to be confused with their hatred for traffic) you can see that someone might end up with hurt feelings.
I don't discriminate at all, I don't like people in cars with the possible exception of ambulance drivers taking critically injured people to the hospital. I...disapprove of cars.
And this disapproval...grates...and is ... annoying because in the grand scheme of cliques and jobs and social status? I'm nothing special. The thought that a podunk little network engineer (network! not software!) would be disapproving of their driving behaviors is frankly abhorrent. I don't make a big deal of any of this when I am away from the blog but there you go, I'm the Bartleby of bicycling in that no matter what car situation you find yourself in... I disapprove. I find myself in car situations at times and know what? I disapprove of that as well. Driving? I prefer not to.
Cars are done. Cars are dirty. I don't like cars. The reasons are endless but start somewhere with a paved planet full of flat black ugly parking lots and continues right through a steady stream of crushed animals with staring eyes and past flat birds with bloodied feathers and goes right up to children being backed over by SUVs and engineers killed by road rage-a-holics.
So it came to be that I was bicycling to work last week and thinking about a post someone had pointed me at where a woman driving an SUV wrote about harassing a bicyclist who she had seen run a stop sign. She cursed him out and he spat on her shiny car and then she tried to kill him or scare him at least to show him how bad he was and she reveled in the terror she inspired. I am so tired by her actions, by her car, by this driver's immutability... I'm tired of all of it.
It is about a year since the software engineer Steve Lacey was killed by a road raged car. And it it many years longer since family friend and future physicist Thomas was killed as he bicycled to his high school. It is I don't know how many year's since my friend A's brother died in an intersection, dead of a collision between two cars. There was the mom who died in the minivan with her twin babies.
I thought about this and more as I bicycled to work hoping that no one would get angry with me or just not see me and in a few moments end my life.
As I thought the soundtrack in my head rolled over to a new song. It played in my head only, since I can't listen to headphones when I bicycle as I might not notice something important. As the song played I imagined all of these accidents one after the other except just before the moment of impact, instead of impact, a beautiful and perfect CTRL-Z instead. A suspend. And in the moment of suspension instead of a car and a bicycle colliding, instead of two cars destroying their occupants, instead of a semi rolling over Lauren Ward instead of any of these terrible moments the cars are replaced by bicycles and two people collide largely harmlessly and fall off and roll over and pick themselves up and maybe argue or maybe laugh because they aren't dead. It probably sounds stupid to read that as I thought about this hopeless idea of bicycle collisions instead of car collisions I cried, and I cry as I type it out now because life is not a shell session and there is no such suspend. The cars collided, the bicycles were rolled over, and all of those people are gone.
I don't discriminate at all, I don't like people in cars with the possible exception of ambulance drivers taking critically injured people to the hospital. I...disapprove of cars.
And this disapproval...grates...and is ... annoying because in the grand scheme of cliques and jobs and social status? I'm nothing special. The thought that a podunk little network engineer (network! not software!) would be disapproving of their driving behaviors is frankly abhorrent. I don't make a big deal of any of this when I am away from the blog but there you go, I'm the Bartleby of bicycling in that no matter what car situation you find yourself in... I disapprove. I find myself in car situations at times and know what? I disapprove of that as well. Driving? I prefer not to.
Cars are done. Cars are dirty. I don't like cars. The reasons are endless but start somewhere with a paved planet full of flat black ugly parking lots and continues right through a steady stream of crushed animals with staring eyes and past flat birds with bloodied feathers and goes right up to children being backed over by SUVs and engineers killed by road rage-a-holics.
So it came to be that I was bicycling to work last week and thinking about a post someone had pointed me at where a woman driving an SUV wrote about harassing a bicyclist who she had seen run a stop sign. She cursed him out and he spat on her shiny car and then she tried to kill him or scare him at least to show him how bad he was and she reveled in the terror she inspired. I am so tired by her actions, by her car, by this driver's immutability... I'm tired of all of it.
It is about a year since the software engineer Steve Lacey was killed by a road raged car. And it it many years longer since family friend and future physicist Thomas was killed as he bicycled to his high school. It is I don't know how many year's since my friend A's brother died in an intersection, dead of a collision between two cars. There was the mom who died in the minivan with her twin babies.
I thought about this and more as I bicycled to work hoping that no one would get angry with me or just not see me and in a few moments end my life.
As I thought the soundtrack in my head rolled over to a new song. It played in my head only, since I can't listen to headphones when I bicycle as I might not notice something important. As the song played I imagined all of these accidents one after the other except just before the moment of impact, instead of impact, a beautiful and perfect CTRL-Z instead. A suspend. And in the moment of suspension instead of a car and a bicycle colliding, instead of two cars destroying their occupants, instead of a semi rolling over Lauren Ward instead of any of these terrible moments the cars are replaced by bicycles and two people collide largely harmlessly and fall off and roll over and pick themselves up and maybe argue or maybe laugh because they aren't dead. It probably sounds stupid to read that as I thought about this hopeless idea of bicycle collisions instead of car collisions I cried, and I cry as I type it out now because life is not a shell session and there is no such suspend. The cars collided, the bicycles were rolled over, and all of those people are gone.
Friday, August 10, 2012
an invitation
I've been trying to write about this for weeks and now here it is, do or die time. I have much I want to complain about but I have to get this idea of an invitation off my plate before I can move back to kicking the tires of passing cars and hurting my long-suffering feet.
Awhile back I read an article in Salon with the dubious title of Are urban bicyclists just elite snobs? I died a little inside when I saw the title. I'm so tired out by the sentiment there, the shrill postulating about snobs and "bicycle entitlement." For the record: Yes. I feel entitled. I feel entitled to bicycle to work or the shops or a soccer game without being mauled by a behemoth SUV. Sue me if you think that makes me a snob.
But the article was nothing like the title and I loved what I read which was thoughtful and articulate and which ultimately answered the question asked in the the way I'd want it to be answered: "No. Not elite snobs. Just trying to get somewhere in one piece, same as you."
The article has stayed on my mind, at times distractingly so, for one particular bit:
Like many of today’s bicyclists, I started riding when my city striped a bike lane near my apartment. It was the Prospect Park West bike lane, which became ground zero in New York’s bike wars. The lane was what made me first realize that biking to work was an option — I didn’t feel forced, but I did feel nudged, as if the city was suggesting that maybe I’d like to give this a whirl. I think this is the true power of bicycle infrastructure: It’s an implicit message that bikes are real transportation, and an advertisement for biking that runs right through the city in bright green paint.
I keep thinking about the above because I had never realized the truth of it before. Bicycle lanes act as an invitation to people, they are an explicit statement to everyone that here is a place where a person could be bicycling. It is not just the bicycle lanes that create the implicit message though because if those lanes never had any bicyclists in them they would eventually become just another invisible piece of road art, kindof like those stupid Share The Road signs that every car sees and no car pays attention to. Build bicycle lanes and the bicycles will come, when the bicyclists start showing up they draw other bicyclists and this is the way commuting to work changes from a dirty dangerous race to something that can be sublime and beautiful and at the last which doesn't leave flat animals in it's path.
The bicyclists is the invitation. If you are on a bicycle, you are an invitation. The lunatic bit is that even a middle-aged mother with a bad attitude can be an invitation to the people around her to get a bicycle and try and bicycle in to work. This is because people respond to people they can relate to and some of the people out there relate to a surly failed roadie like myself because all invitations are needed and it is impossible to tell what particular invitation will work on a person. Mothers and father, young studs and pretty fashionistas, little kids and old ladies, recumbents and tricycles and road bicycles. All the bicyclists need to be represented out there because every bicyclist has a car-driving doppelganger waiting to be inspired.
Bicyclists are so accustomed to feeling invisible (unpleasantly so) that it is easy to forget that to a certain population we are incredibly visible --- the people who are thinking about bicycling see us and study us and imagine themselves on a bicycle riding along. They wonder if they could do it. They wonder if we have a magic pill that protects us from the SUVs. They wonder if they'd get sweaty and if their co-workers would make fun of them. They wonder where to buy a nice bicycle and if they can afford a nice bicycle. They wonder if they would finally lose that 15 pounds they put on after college or after the baby or whatever. When they see us, it starts them wondering.
A woman up the street told me that she sees the Contraption Captain and I every day as she drives to work and we pedal to work. At the intersection of the Alameda and Sand Hill she sees us leaning our heads close together as we talk and laugh and kiss each other. She told me: I see you and I think "I should be bicycling with my husband, that would be good." She tells me this and I agree "You should! Why not ride in with him and then run some errands?" I watch her as she thinks about the idea.
Guy across the street is a fabulous runner. I asked him if he biked to work and she shook his head saying that he did not. His bicycle doesn't really fit quite right and it seems like effort and and and. I told him "it will improve your times, it's easy, and for crissakes get yourself a bicycle that fits." Then one day there he was, in my rear view mirror, scanning the traffic at an intersection and looking ten years younger for some reason and when he caught up to me he smiled and offered "This is pretty good, isn't it. I like this."
On the way home from work I stop at a stop sign and then turn left and bicycle past a long line of cars waiting to get onto the 101 which is so backed up that they can't even get on the highway without waiting. Every single driver, I kid you not, turns and looks at me as I bicycle away in the other direction. Some are thinking "I'd hit that" and some are thinking "She's not hot" and some are thinking "What a crap day I had" and some are thinking "bicycle helmets are so dorky" but one or two of them, maybe more are thinking "How far is it into the office? I could do that. I should do that. One of these days, I'm going to do that. I'll be the one outside in the California sun pedaling past the cars that are stuck in traffic."
Awhile back I read an article in Salon with the dubious title of Are urban bicyclists just elite snobs? I died a little inside when I saw the title. I'm so tired out by the sentiment there, the shrill postulating about snobs and "bicycle entitlement." For the record: Yes. I feel entitled. I feel entitled to bicycle to work or the shops or a soccer game without being mauled by a behemoth SUV. Sue me if you think that makes me a snob.
But the article was nothing like the title and I loved what I read which was thoughtful and articulate and which ultimately answered the question asked in the the way I'd want it to be answered: "No. Not elite snobs. Just trying to get somewhere in one piece, same as you."
The article has stayed on my mind, at times distractingly so, for one particular bit:
Like many of today’s bicyclists, I started riding when my city striped a bike lane near my apartment. It was the Prospect Park West bike lane, which became ground zero in New York’s bike wars. The lane was what made me first realize that biking to work was an option — I didn’t feel forced, but I did feel nudged, as if the city was suggesting that maybe I’d like to give this a whirl. I think this is the true power of bicycle infrastructure: It’s an implicit message that bikes are real transportation, and an advertisement for biking that runs right through the city in bright green paint.
I keep thinking about the above because I had never realized the truth of it before. Bicycle lanes act as an invitation to people, they are an explicit statement to everyone that here is a place where a person could be bicycling. It is not just the bicycle lanes that create the implicit message though because if those lanes never had any bicyclists in them they would eventually become just another invisible piece of road art, kindof like those stupid Share The Road signs that every car sees and no car pays attention to. Build bicycle lanes and the bicycles will come, when the bicyclists start showing up they draw other bicyclists and this is the way commuting to work changes from a dirty dangerous race to something that can be sublime and beautiful and at the last which doesn't leave flat animals in it's path.
The bicyclists is the invitation. If you are on a bicycle, you are an invitation. The lunatic bit is that even a middle-aged mother with a bad attitude can be an invitation to the people around her to get a bicycle and try and bicycle in to work. This is because people respond to people they can relate to and some of the people out there relate to a surly failed roadie like myself because all invitations are needed and it is impossible to tell what particular invitation will work on a person. Mothers and father, young studs and pretty fashionistas, little kids and old ladies, recumbents and tricycles and road bicycles. All the bicyclists need to be represented out there because every bicyclist has a car-driving doppelganger waiting to be inspired.
Bicyclists are so accustomed to feeling invisible (unpleasantly so) that it is easy to forget that to a certain population we are incredibly visible --- the people who are thinking about bicycling see us and study us and imagine themselves on a bicycle riding along. They wonder if they could do it. They wonder if we have a magic pill that protects us from the SUVs. They wonder if they'd get sweaty and if their co-workers would make fun of them. They wonder where to buy a nice bicycle and if they can afford a nice bicycle. They wonder if they would finally lose that 15 pounds they put on after college or after the baby or whatever. When they see us, it starts them wondering.
A woman up the street told me that she sees the Contraption Captain and I every day as she drives to work and we pedal to work. At the intersection of the Alameda and Sand Hill she sees us leaning our heads close together as we talk and laugh and kiss each other. She told me: I see you and I think "I should be bicycling with my husband, that would be good." She tells me this and I agree "You should! Why not ride in with him and then run some errands?" I watch her as she thinks about the idea.
Guy across the street is a fabulous runner. I asked him if he biked to work and she shook his head saying that he did not. His bicycle doesn't really fit quite right and it seems like effort and and and. I told him "it will improve your times, it's easy, and for crissakes get yourself a bicycle that fits." Then one day there he was, in my rear view mirror, scanning the traffic at an intersection and looking ten years younger for some reason and when he caught up to me he smiled and offered "This is pretty good, isn't it. I like this."
On the way home from work I stop at a stop sign and then turn left and bicycle past a long line of cars waiting to get onto the 101 which is so backed up that they can't even get on the highway without waiting. Every single driver, I kid you not, turns and looks at me as I bicycle away in the other direction. Some are thinking "I'd hit that" and some are thinking "She's not hot" and some are thinking "What a crap day I had" and some are thinking "bicycle helmets are so dorky" but one or two of them, maybe more are thinking "How far is it into the office? I could do that. I should do that. One of these days, I'm going to do that. I'll be the one outside in the California sun pedaling past the cars that are stuck in traffic."
Friday, July 20, 2012
mind your manners
Conveniently located across from the over-priced Stanford Mall is a (also over-priced) retirement-senior living complex called Vi. [Ob.joke: Emacs is up the street and it's more feature rich but will set you back additional memory.] I've had my hassles with the elderly folks of Vi. Some of them bicycle but way more of them drive behemoth cars and stop for no person and bicycle lanes? Those skinny little things? Clearly it's the part of the road designated for over-sized loads, right? So yes. I get it. Old people can be annoying.
Yet even so most of us agree that certain proprieties should always be observed, and one of these is that it is not okay to threaten to run over Grandma when she doesn't move out of your way fast enough.
The Contraption Captain and I were at a red light. Grandma, a skinny bent little old lady with a poof of white hair was positioned on the far side of the intersection from us. Grandma begins to make her slow somewhat tremulous way across the street. She is about halfway across when she encounters a problem that plagues California bicyclists at a variety of triggered lights, specifically, the light had not been timed for her speed and so it turns green before she has completed traversing the road. Welcome to our world, Grandma!
Traditionally people wait for grandmas to complete crossing the intersection in these circumstances but the car to our left must have been in a hurry because her car jumped forward the moment the light turned. Grandma, no fool, tried to hustle. Watching a bent 80-year-old lady try to run is not a very happy sight in my humble crabby opinion. I know you'll be excited to hear that the sedan decided not to run her over. Speaking for myself and the Contraption Captain, we don't like starting our day off with an ambulance and a police report.
So after this is over and Grandma heads home for a scotch-whiskey Contraption Captain and I start pedalling up the street and I say, "Wow, did you see that guy nearly take out that grandma??"
Contraption shakes his head. "That wasn't a guy, that was another old lady. It was one old lady nearly taking out another old lady."
I think he's wrong, I'm sure it was a younger guy with stubble and I say so. Fortunately, there is a second red light half the way up the next block and Mr or Mrs "I am in such a hurry to get to the next red light that I'd kill grandma to do it" is waiting there. "Good news, Captain! We can check."
We pull up and peer into the open window of the car. I start laughing. "Well, it's not a guy."
Contraption Captain is smug. "It's an old woman."
I shake my head, "That woman is not old. She's middle-aged."
By this time we have attracted the attention of the driver of the sedan. She listens to us debate whether she looks more like a man or more like an old woman and then rolls up her window. I consider her face. I decide that with a scowl like that you really do end up looking like an angry old guy wearing a dress.
The moral of the story: In a town with a lot of bicyclists and a lot of traffic lights, there is a high degree of confidence that one of us will notice if you drive like an asshat. Unless you want to be mocked and discussed through the next three intersections, cool your jets and let Grandma cross in front of you in peace.
Yet even so most of us agree that certain proprieties should always be observed, and one of these is that it is not okay to threaten to run over Grandma when she doesn't move out of your way fast enough.
The Contraption Captain and I were at a red light. Grandma, a skinny bent little old lady with a poof of white hair was positioned on the far side of the intersection from us. Grandma begins to make her slow somewhat tremulous way across the street. She is about halfway across when she encounters a problem that plagues California bicyclists at a variety of triggered lights, specifically, the light had not been timed for her speed and so it turns green before she has completed traversing the road. Welcome to our world, Grandma!
Traditionally people wait for grandmas to complete crossing the intersection in these circumstances but the car to our left must have been in a hurry because her car jumped forward the moment the light turned. Grandma, no fool, tried to hustle. Watching a bent 80-year-old lady try to run is not a very happy sight in my humble crabby opinion. I know you'll be excited to hear that the sedan decided not to run her over. Speaking for myself and the Contraption Captain, we don't like starting our day off with an ambulance and a police report.
So after this is over and Grandma heads home for a scotch-whiskey Contraption Captain and I start pedalling up the street and I say, "Wow, did you see that guy nearly take out that grandma??"
Contraption shakes his head. "That wasn't a guy, that was another old lady. It was one old lady nearly taking out another old lady."
I think he's wrong, I'm sure it was a younger guy with stubble and I say so. Fortunately, there is a second red light half the way up the next block and Mr or Mrs "I am in such a hurry to get to the next red light that I'd kill grandma to do it" is waiting there. "Good news, Captain! We can check."
We pull up and peer into the open window of the car. I start laughing. "Well, it's not a guy."
Contraption Captain is smug. "It's an old woman."
I shake my head, "That woman is not old. She's middle-aged."
By this time we have attracted the attention of the driver of the sedan. She listens to us debate whether she looks more like a man or more like an old woman and then rolls up her window. I consider her face. I decide that with a scowl like that you really do end up looking like an angry old guy wearing a dress.
The moral of the story: In a town with a lot of bicyclists and a lot of traffic lights, there is a high degree of confidence that one of us will notice if you drive like an asshat. Unless you want to be mocked and discussed through the next three intersections, cool your jets and let Grandma cross in front of you in peace.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
omfg! so digusting! almost died!
Do you know how, when you are on a bicycle and riding in traffic you pay a lot of attention to noise and movement around you as you try and predict if someone is about to run you over? Yeah, that. So yesterday I am riding home and I hear this loud honking noise and I look to my left and see:
A Guy in a shoddy red 4-door sedan with driver side window rolled down has blown his nose into his hand and before I can tear my bleeding eyeballs away I see him proceed to lick the results of this nose-blowing off his hand.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
PLEASE people, have a little consideration? I was so grossed out that I pedalled the rest of the way up Charleston (not the safest road under the best of circumstances) with the dry heaves. I didn't barf but it was a near thing.
And, I decided, once my stomach had stopped turning over, that's it. I quit. The cars win. I'm going to throw in this whole bicycling thing. I'm going to purchase the biggest Hummer I can find and paint all the windows black. Then I'm going to drive navigating purely by GPS. Sure I figure I'll go over a few people but if it saves me from ever having to see someone blow their nose into their hand and lick up the snot afterwards I think it is totally worth it.
A Guy in a shoddy red 4-door sedan with driver side window rolled down has blown his nose into his hand and before I can tear my bleeding eyeballs away I see him proceed to lick the results of this nose-blowing off his hand.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
PLEASE people, have a little consideration? I was so grossed out that I pedalled the rest of the way up Charleston (not the safest road under the best of circumstances) with the dry heaves. I didn't barf but it was a near thing.
And, I decided, once my stomach had stopped turning over, that's it. I quit. The cars win. I'm going to throw in this whole bicycling thing. I'm going to purchase the biggest Hummer I can find and paint all the windows black. Then I'm going to drive navigating purely by GPS. Sure I figure I'll go over a few people but if it saves me from ever having to see someone blow their nose into their hand and lick up the snot afterwards I think it is totally worth it.
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