Serious ruminations on urban cycling
For whatever reason, there’s been a lot of biking-related articles and posts on the ol’ Intertubes. Up here in the Hub, the Globe ran a story about Boston’s plan to institute a bike-sharing program. Perhaps in response to the anti-biking firestorm that erupted in the comments section, the Globe ran a piece a week later lambasting Boston cyclists for their bad habits and lawlessness. Tsk tsk tsk!
Bostonist did a serviceable takedown of that particular story, so I won’t rehash all of the arguments that make drivers sound as wacky as tea-bagging town-hall protesters. I could very well have put up my little GIF buddy and shook harder are car operators (I actually probably will eventually, but whatever), but instead, I’d like to address what I see as the most substantive issue in the whole drivers vs. bikers standoff.
Ryan Avent touches on it here. Money quote:
The other thing to think about is that cyclists typically have no natural place on the road. Pedestrians have sidewalks and cars have their lanes, and a cyclist must navigate his way between the two, which isn’t easy or comfortable.
I remember when I was a kid, graduating from riding-my-bike-around-the-block-for-fun to riding-my-bike-to-get-places, I was amazed and a little frightened to learn that bicycles are supposed to be ridden in the street. Why? Because it’s just not intuitive. Here I am, flesh and bone, on 30 pounds worth of steel and rubber, riding cheek to jowl with Civics, Suburbans, and 18-wheelers. That’s just dangerous! Which leads me to the question at the heart of this post.
Why are bikes and cars governed by the same laws?
Has anyone seriously addressed this issue? It makes so little sense. Cars are faster, larger, and less nimble than bikes. Just saying that these two wildly different classes of vehicle have to share the road doesn’t make them equal. It strikes me as a lazy, cheap, and unimaginative way of dealing with the very real problem of bikes and cars coexisting. It doesn’t require lawmakers to either a) come up with a reasonable set of parallel regulations to govern bicyclists, or b) pony up for the infrastructure that would make bicycling safer. As it stands, bikes inhabit a little-policed no-man’s-land between driving and walking. It’s really the worst of all worlds for bicyclists and drivers alike.
Bicyclists aren’t scofflaws, by and large. I’ll parrot what most bicyclists who have written on the subject have said about the “lawlessness” of bikers: most of the time, when a cyclist breaks the law, it’s to pursue what they see as the safest or least absurd route.
I say safest because sometimes, riding on the sidewalk is safer than riding on the road. I ride on the sidewalk, the wrong way, down Martha Road every morning to get to the Museum of Science. Why? Because going the right way on the road would take me into fast moving traffic. My rolling at half a mile an hour down the sidewalk is a much better option for everyone.
And I say least absurd because, honestly, when I’m sitting there at a red light with the rest of the cars on the road, and I’m watching pedestrians cross the street because there’s no cross-traffic, what’s the point? If I were to hop off my ride and walk it through from corner to corner, I’d be entirely justified and within the boundaries of the law. (In fact, the City of Boston advises bicyclists to use crosswalks if traffic is too heavy to make a left turn.) Why wouldn’t I roll through a red light if there were no cars coming?
Now, I understand, the law is the law. But there’s a powerful cognitive dissonance here. And I also understand that if cars acted in the same way as bikes, there’d be chaos.
Which leads me to this recent post from Matt Yglesias. The main thesis:
The basic idea of traffic rules—separated uses, painted lane markers, giant signs, etc.—is to make it safe for the drivers of cars to drive their cars very quickly. That’s an okay design principle for a highway, but its nearly-universal adoption as a design principle for urban roadways is arguably very misguided.
Yglesias has a tendency to throw radical ideas out there and let his commenters hash them out, and this particular case is no different. No one expects Commonwealth Avenue to become a wide-open free-for-all of walkers, bikers, and drivers. But it’s been done elsewhere. And it’s at least worth thinking about how we can develop more effective, and more safe, ways of bikes, cars, and pedestrians sharing the same space.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 13th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Bicyclists are a despised and marginalized portion of society.
The other day, when I was riding my bike to the bank, I found myself going the wrong way on a one-way street with cars parked on both sides (it was the street the bank was on, I had little choice). In an effort not to get killed or cause a multi-prius pileup, I swerved onto the sidewalk. I safely and slowly rode on the sidewalk for two blocks, before a contingent of pedestrians formed a human chain to force me off the sidewalk, and into oncoming traffic. Over the screeching of my brakes and my shrill cries of “ohmygodohmygodohmygod,” I think I heard one of the evil pedestrians say, “You have to obey the rules too, you know!” So yeah, these people I didn’t know were willing to see me splattered across a windshield because they didn’t want to share the concrete with me. The twist is that according to DC law, unless you’re downtown (as in the White House area), you’re allowed to bike on the sidewalk.
Like, why do people hate bikes? They are not obtrusive. Bicycle riders know that they are not encased in a ton of metal with side-curtain airbags, and are therefore more cautious and more likely to get out of the way of motor vehicles. Cyclists also walk, from time to time, and understand the needs of the pedestrian. Take the goofy helmet off, and cyclists are just like any other person trying to get from point A to point B. Rolling through a stop sign on a bike does not equal rolling through a stop sign in a car. If you’re on a bike you can easily swerve or break quickly if an iPod-wearing walker distracted by the latest Imogen Heap darts out into the crosswalk. Cars, not so much. And even if a bike couldn’t stop, and you bumped the pedestrian, the worst they’ll say is, “Ow, you squinged my toe.” If it’s a car doing the bumping, they’ll say, “Ow, my femur and tibia are horribly mangled.”
Like so many things, I understand that there is widespread fear and dislike, but I don’t understand why.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Preach. Ignorance of the laws is a big problem, substantively and psychologically, for both bicyclists and drivers. The sidewalk thing is a case in point. In Massachusetts, you can ride on any sidewalk outside of a business district, unless local laws prohibit it. (Boston laws prohibit it. Cmon!) You can also ride two abreast, as long as you’re in a single lane. Most people are of the opinion that bike law means “stay out of the way of cars and pedestrians.” It’s a lot more nuanced than that! If everyone actually understood the rights and responsibilities of bicyclists w/r/t the rules of the road, we’d all be better off. That should go without saying, but it doesn’t!