Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

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.

I haven’t read Spider-Man comics in a while, so I don’t know what the context is here, but my pal passed along this link featuring pages from Spidey’s recent jaunt up to the Hub of the Universe. How fun!

Not sure if you heard me complain about the weather up here in the Hub of the Universe for the past month or so. I do my best to have an Epictetus-esque stiff upper lip when it comes to the weather, but this past June just weighed on me, as it did most people around here.

Why? Because it’s been like, a hundred years since the last time Boston had a more miserable June. The good folks over at the Boston Globe put together this nifty interactive calendar to show you just how ridiculously crappy the weather was. Look at it! Only 27 percent of the suns rays shined on us last month! On a third of all June days, there wasn’t even enough sunlight to cast a shadow!

That’s not weather. That’s a month-long sojourn into a hellish nightmarescape of sodden dread. You had to be here. It’s not even that the sun didn’t shine. It’s that the cold, damp atmosphere actually fed on the dreams of an already existentially disturbed populace. It was terrible.

And then it was sunny and in the mid-70s last weekend, and everyone just moved on. It’s amazing what actually getting your daily supply of vitamin D can do for the spirits.

So I bought a bike this weekend, in order to ride to work in the mornings. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, dating back to when I lived in Allston. Problem is, I never had anywhere to put a bike. I never felt good locking one up outside in Allston, and then when I moved to the Theater District, I lived on the fifth floor of a walkup in a crummy neighborhood. Now that I’m in the North End, I can store a bike in the basement of my building. I rode it around yesterday, and I tested out a route to work today (and went to the grocery store). It was pretty good!

Here’s a map of the bike path I’m going to use for most of the way. I picked it up at the Museum of Science, and took it all the way to Western Ave. in Allston. I took Western to Market Street, then made a right onto Washington at Brighton Center, then onto Foster Street to Commonwealth. I gotta say, I think I hit every hill possible once I got away from the river. I might try to get onto Commonwealth a little earlier. We’ll see.

But the bike. Here she is.

<3 <3 <3

Isn’t she beautiful? Nice wide saddle. Rack. Fenders. Oh, those fenders. She’s just a gorgeous bike. I’ve got a pannier (that’s bike-speak for “bag”) that fits right on the rack, and fits a decent haul of groceries. I’ve got a good lock, lights, the whole nine. I’ve got that opium-like high that only comes from owning new stuff, and I gotta tell ya, treasured reader, I’m bustin’.

So the Globe this weekend ran a list of the top 100 New England books, and by that they mean books about the region, or books written by New England writers. I clicked on the link on boston.com, ready to mock all the provincial literary choices collected therein, but I have to say, it’s a pretty solid list. I was anticipating a few generous reaches (John Dos Passos went to Harvard, and the USA trilogy is, ostensibly, at least a little bit about New England, technically, right?), but it doesn’t appear that the rules needed to be bent too much to get a good list going. It’s also funny when you can see Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and The Call of Cthulhu on the same best-of list.

They also have a fun little interactive feature where you can check off books on the list that you’ve already read, or would like to read. You’ll be proud to hear, treasured reader, that I was able to check off 17 books from the list, which doesn’t sound like a lot, especially coming from an allegedly voracious reader like myself, but consider that I more than tripled-up the average of 5 books by the 1,300 odd folks who have gone through the list at press time. A lot of those people are probably actual New Englanders! And they probably all loaded up on the kids’ books. (EVERYBODY has read Charlotte’s Web. Who’s got The Trumpet of the Swan under their belts, eh?)

I was pleasantly surprised by how I’ve read all of these books, too. There were enough selections that I read in high school (The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, Our Town, etc.), but only one that I’d read in college (The Rise of Silas Lapham). A whopping three were books that my book club read (Little Children, The Emperor’s Children, and my go-to book recommendation, The Secret History). I read The Last Hurrah purely because I felt like it. And, full disclosure, I haven’t actually completed Common Ground or On the Road, but I have every intention to, so I felt not problem with checking them off.

Yay books!

Quick, let me buy some time!

# This is an article by Official Friend of DD&U Kevin Armstrong, a writer at Sports Illustrated. (For real! I have actual like, writer friends.) It’s about the golden age of sportswriting in Boston, when greats like Ray Fitzgerald, Will Mcdonough, Leigh Montville, Peter Gammons, and Bob Ryan were all regulars on the Boston Globe sports pages. Even if you’re not at all familiar with late-70’s Boston sports journalism (which I’m definitely not), read the whole. There’s a sepia-toned, old-school quality to Kevin’s piece that’s really enjoyable. We came up together on The Heights (the Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College), he the sports editor and I the news editor, and it was always apparent that he was going to do what he was doing then for a pro outfit someday. He’s a student of sportswriting, and sports and writing to boot. This is all to say that you’re in good hands with him. Enjoy!

# Something this crazy has got to be true!

# I find this to be incredible. The MBTA is floating the idea of raising fares on the T 15 or 20 percent, and at the same time, some plutocrat is paying $300,000 for an outdoor, uncovered parking spot. Amazing! What a world we live in!

Why was I able to see my breath on the walk home this evening? It’s June! ! ! !

Is there anything more disappointing than noticing a nice-looking, happy, clearly-going-on-a-college-tour family on the B line, only to see them get off at bu Central?

Holy smokes. I was subjected to Dennis Eckersley’s unvarnished bias when he filled in for Jerry Remy as a color man for the local Red Socks broadcast earlier this season. Now, when I’m watching the Socks game in Boston, I expect unabashed, baldfaced homerism, and Eck failed to disappoint. However, comma, when I’m watching the national broadcast of the game between the Yankees and the Indians on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, I expect a baseline level of objectivity. You don’t have to sing the Yankees’ praises, but be fair! Eckersley has spent all afternoon absolutely KILLING Phil Hughes. “He doesn’t have any offspeed stuff. His curve doesn’t have any bite. Blah blah blah.” The guy gave up four runs on five hits and a walk in five innings, with six strikeouts. That’s not a terrible game! Listening to the commentary, you’d think he was loading the bases every inning! You can’t tell from the shots in the booth, but I think Eckersley might actually be wearing red socks today.