You’ve probably gathered from my writings by now that I think that bike riding is a good thing. Particularly as an alternative to driving, where appropriate. One such place where biking is in principle a perfect alternative is Los Angeles. Mostly flat, wide streets, perfect weather most of the year around. At this point in a conversation about this, people either burst out laughing, or look at me as though I am insane. I sigh. I try to point out that there exists a core (although small… but growing I notice) of people who get on with the business of cycling around this city instead of listening to the (mostly exaggerated and/or coming from total ignorance) stories about how dangerous it is supposed to be (supposedly not just from motorists, but apparently there are very bad men out there trying to do bad things to you). What I say mostly falls on deaf ears. I point out how many alternative routes there are in a city this well connected, so that you do not have to use the main roads if worried about willful or inattentive motorists. I point out how nicely bikes work in conjunction with the (yes, it exists) public transport in the city, since every bus is equipped with bike racks. These do not help either. I point out how much fun I’m having by not having to fight with other motorists every morning, pay an extortionate amount of money for parking, how much gas I save by essentially only driving on the weekends, etc, etc…. I recognise, yes, that it is not a choice that everyone in the city can make, but so very many could, even if it is just a matter of using your bike to nip to the shops for that pint of milk, instead of driving the car… Then I give up, shut up (mostly), and ride my bike. (Descriptions of one of my routes into work here and here.)
Anyway, I keep dreaming that one day that slow trickle of increasing numbers of cyclists I see out there will turn into a torrent, and somehow bikes (and public transport) will not be seen as a situation you must accept as a last resort due to reduced circumstances, but be seen as simply a really good choice to make. Maybe one day it will even become a mainstream hip thing to do (as opposed to the underground hipness it has now…I like to imagine), and increased bike use will be driven by people wanting to jump on that bandwagon. I don’t care how we get there, as long as we do.
To help with the dream, I look fondly at the greater bike use in other countries and cities when I visit them. Here’s a lovely article, by John Tagliabue, that came out today* in the New York Times about the Netherlands. It starts out:
With more than two bicycles per person and a landscape as flat as a pancake, the Netherlands is a cyclists’ Eden.
[…]
with greater affluence, more free time and even greater environmental concerns, the Dutch are turning to bicycles in ever greater numbers. Sales are booming, and there is a proliferation of designs for all sorts of purposes.
And further, there’s a description of a recently opened bicycle dealership that is one of the largest in Europe. The writer goes on a tour with one of the owners:
Leading a visitor through the warehouse, he pointed out touring bicycles, the way the Dutch like them; electric bicycles, from mountainous Switzerland; recumbent bicycles, whose riders look like they are on a two-wheeled gurney; and all sorts of three-wheeled models, for hauling groceries or tools or children. There is even a bicycle that folds up into a suitcase, for carrying on planes.
Oh, that latter reminds me. Yes, the Brompton gets a mention earlier in the article (the Netherlands is well known as the main place outside the UK where you see them quite often).
Furthermore, the dealer’s quoted:
Mr. van Oirschot, 37, a heavyset former software expert, said bicycles were increasingly seen as an expression of a lifestyle. “It’s, like, for hanging out, almost as a fashion statement,†he said, pointing to Phat Cycles from California, with their laid-back look reminiscent of the movie “Easy Rider.â€
(Yes, how ironic.)
And there’s a description of one of my favourite scenes in a city which is enlightened on such matters:
on work days the train stations here and in nearby Haarlem look like buildings afloat in a lake of bicycles.
At traffic lights, explosions of bicycles come forth whenever a light turns green. When day care is out, young mothers pick up as many as four children in comfortable wagons attached to the rear of their bicycles.
Like all Dutch cities, Ijmuiden has bike lanes on the sides of all its roads and bicycle parking places at all public buildings. At any given moment in the downtown area, with its quaint red-brick buildings, there are more bikes than cars on the roads.
Go read some more. It brings tears to my eyes…
-cvj
(*Thanks, John Branch.)
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Ok. I’ll admit it- I bought the helmet after I suffered concussion from crashing without one. Beat some sense in me, it did.
Hills aren’t really a problem. Basic physics- you end up at the same altitude you started at.
As for helmets, mine has a nice gash from the day I misjudged the angle on some railroad tracks. That could have been my head.
In the summer of 1992, i rode my bike to work – about 9 miles, every day, in downtown Boston. As i recall, there were some 42 potential stops – you know, cross streets and such. By the end of the summer, i was averaging about 21 MPH, with a max speed of 22 MPH. The bicycle was, by far, the fastest way across town.
Boston is fairly bicycle friendly. There are long sections, for example, up the Orange Line, where there are public walk ways, with bike paths. I also rode up Mass Ave and Dot Ave, with traffic. I had a speed advantage on these streets. Cars can not go 20 MPH on Mass Ave. Yes, i wear a helmet. I’m also very aware of what traffic is doing and not doing.
The job i had was also very bicycle friendly. There was a locker room with showers. I parked my bike, not outside where it could be stolen, molested, and rained on, but inside, next to my desk. I have these things at home too.
In the summers of 1994 and 1995, i rode to work in downtown Philadelphia. It was about 6 miles. This is not enough exercise, so, sometimes, i’d take a longer route home. There were no showers at the office, so my speed going to work was much, much lower. My bike had to be parked outside. I removed my seat, bike bag, and locked both wheels and the frame. And the bike suffered abuse still. I made the mistake of borrowing a bike one day. I was run off the road by a car. Some clueless driver could not decide to pass me, could not deal with my passing her. She caught up with me, and decided to take a right turn directly into me. No real damage. She pretended to only know spanish, but changed her mind when i started speaking spanish. The incident would not have happened on my own bike – which has a working rear view mirror, and has me sitting upright, with my hands by the brakes, rather than haunched over the handlebars with nearly unreachable breaks. A stupid setup, and i should have known better.
My current commute is over 40 miles. Impractical for biking.
ah, yes… the figs….. post coming. Just got to find the time….
-cvj
I don’t know you, so I’m not yelling at you.
Clifford: I was referring to a cornellian’s comment, ‘I always wear one and yell at anyone i know who doesn’t.’ I certainly don’t think you were yelling at all!
Anyway, it’s time to go make dinner — hope those figs met a productive end!
Hi Candace,
I for one was not yelling at you. If you don’t want to wear a helmet, it is really up to you. Your head, not mine. I choose to do so, for that one time when I might need it.
Cheers,
-cvj
Ha! From that BBC article, the solution is obvious: Wear a hairy helmet! Drivers will see it as a wig, so give you more room, while you still get protection from falls. (I wonder if that works for pedestrians…)
Well, chaps, I don’t see helmets as being very common in the Amsterdam that we all aspire to. What’s the difference there?
Here’s a good link that sums up the whole helmets debate:
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/
I suggest arming yourself with some objective facts before coming over here and ‘yelling’ at me. Like everyone else, I have fallen over. I have slid on wet asphalt and eaten pavement. I have even been hit by a car. In some of those instances, I was wearing a helmet, in others I was not. I simply don’t regard it as a life-preserver, because in a lot of circumstances, it’s not — and that’s not just my personal opinion based on anecdote. So…sometimes I wear one and sometimes I don’t.
On cycling in general and how they are treated here, Zoe Williams has a go:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1871017,00.html
a cornelian (you put your message up while I was tying mine, so I missed it). We seem to have made similar points.
Cheers,
-cvj
Hi Candace… thanks for all the lovely info!
I personally wear a cyclist for reasons that have nothing to do with motorists. I like my head, and (most of) what’s in it. I don’t want it bashed on the ground. Like everyone, I make mistakes when cycling, and I know how easy it is for those mistakes to happen at the wrong time. I once had to make a last second adjustment to avoid something and then lost my balance on a turn and fell off. May never happen again, but who knows? I come down a steep hill at speed every morning… I hope it never happens, but if I lost control, had brake failure, etc…… I’d rather be wearing a helmet. It is so trivial to bring it along when you cycle, why take the risk? None of this has anything to do with drivers, who I doubt are examinign the cyclist in enough detail to react to them differently depending upon their safety equipment. As for safety equipment making people behave badly in London….. I’m not convinced. I love London, and I love Londoners and my countrymen in general, but I have to say that bad behaviour seems to be becoming the norm in so many public venues there (witness the city centers in the UK in every town and city on a Friday or Saturday night)…. I don’t think that any excuse is really needed.
-cvj
I am definitly not on the fence about helmets…I always wear one and yell at anyone i know who doesn’t.
The reasons are pretty simple. One of my friends little sissters was biking did something and ended up going over her handle bars. The result of this is she landed head first on a walmut sized stone and is rather sevearly paralized as a result. I know a professor here who has a helmet in two peices from when he went over his handle bars.
On a cite athority note, the your de france requires cyclists to wear helmets except for the last 3 miles of climb if the race ends at the top.
As to this “I shouldn’t have to dress defensivly” meme, balderdash. You are betting your life on someone else’s competence. Would you leave balancing your check book to a random guy you pulled off the street? Alternately think about what happens if you do get hit by a car and it was the cars fault. Great you feel morally supior because it is their fault. This does not change the fact that you were hit by a car and are most likly pretty screwed up. I was hit, as a pedestrian, by an eclipse going ~30 as he ran a red light. It’s all the drivers falut, they covered all my medical and gave me a settlement, however none of this changes the fact that I can’t run competativly anymore because my knees were too damaged in the accident or the fact that one of my fingers hurts when ever the weather changes or i try to make a tight fist.
and riding in the snow is just more challanging than riding the rest of the year….
Point the first:
Wearing a helmet may give drivers a false sense of security when interacting with a cyclist, and they may not give them enough room or care when passing. An article graced the BBC about this very subject a few days ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/5334208.stm
Anyway, if you want to start a hilariously predictable flame war on any cycling message board, walk in and make a grand pronouncement about helmets. Personally, I’m on the fence about this issue, but I usually do not wear one unless I’m on longer distance jaunts. I believe they probably do afford some protection, but I also believe that the onus should not be exclusively on me as the cyclist to ‘dress defensively’. This is also why I don’t wear a high-vis jacket, which is quite common in London. I also fear that helmets give the cyclists themselves a false sense of security and in turn encourage the truly appalling cycling I see here. If I had a choice between equipping every cyclist with a helmet or a copy of Cyclecraft (wonderful book), I would choose the latter (except in the case of children).
Point the second:
London, I think, is well on its way to acheiving a critical mass of cyclists. I feel like perhaps it’s at a critical point right now, since there is tension in the media about cycling everwhere you look. Politicians ride bikes to look trendy, and the Daily Mail exercises some truly horrific anti-cyclist hatemongering of Jeremy Clarkson proportions pretty much every week or so. The behaviour of cyclists in London is pretty abysmal, but I think it’s in reaction to the behaviour of the peds and motorists, equally abysmal at times. I’m not sure what will come of it, but sometimes riding to work feels like going to war. I love cycling here…but I also hate it. TfL is currently running a two-pronged media campaign: to get cyclists to obey road rules on one hand, and to get motorists to give cyclists some room and respect on the other. I look at the continent’s cycling culture with envy, and it seems to me like simply changing a few laws (like the consequences of killing a cyclist on the road due to careless driving) and doing some widespread cyclist education would go a long way to defusing the tension.
Point the third:
The World Naked Bike Ride graces our fair streets every summer:
http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/
I have to say, I have not participated 😉
Hi Yvette… interesting point! It is all so easy to just fill up a giant shopping trolley without thinking. When I have my bike I do indeed think a great deal more aboout what I take to the checkout. (Although, even thought I’m only getting a basket’s worth of goods, I still use a trolley since I usually put my bike in the compartment underneath while shopping.)
-cvj
I couldn’t justify a car for college, particularly in a flat state like Ohio, so biking works rather well hereabouts until the snow flies. I went to Europe this past summer to visit relatives and carefully selected a bicycle basket while over there (you can’t get good ones in my area if you’re over the age of six), a situation which amused my relatives so much that they got me a new bicycle bell as a going-away present. As a result of these new additions, my bike is the most (in)famous on campus just because of the sheer novelty of being a standard European-style one.
I’d also like to note that after several trips to the grocery via bicycle where you can’t carry anything that doesn’t fit in your basket or in a backpack, I think America could solve its obesity problems if everyone had to do something like this. You really start to think about what you buy when you’ve got to ferry it all home on your own power.
Clifford–I’m glad you appreciated that article. For me it was almost like reading an account of a dream. In fact, this morning I daydreamed about living in such a place.
For most of the past 10 years, in two different cities, I’ve only ridden for recreation (public transport is how I’ve gotten to work), but I’ve gotten the same kinds of responses you have: expressions of surprise, concern about danger, etc. I don’t have anything to add to your account except this: in New York, I’ve had a lot of near-collisions with people on jogging paths and in Central Park on weekends when the roads are closed, whereas in my relatively limited riding about on the city streets I haven’t encountered much dangerous and unpredictable behavior, simply because people drive in lanes.
My favourite bicyle protest was not long ago in london…. I was walking along near Trafalgar Square and out of the blue came about 40 men and women of all ages – and shapes and sizes – totally naked on their bikes. I can’t recall what they wre protesting, but they certainly got a lot of attention. Of course, if I recall correctly, I did not have my camera…. so could not do an interesting blog post about it. Sigh.
-cvj
Oh, there are even bicycle protests. Really!
Yeah, my Canadian family was literally shocked when seeing the bicycle lanes.
The abundance of bicycles comes with a price though: They are still quite interesting objects to steal. Most of the stolen bikes also end up quite depressingly at those parking places, picking up rust. Or end up in canals.
But yes, it’s rather a bicycle walhalla. 🙂
Warren… Oh yes Helmets! Why don’t people use them? And lights! And obey the traffic rules…..!!! Don’t get me started…..
-cvj
Yes, Jude, I agree. I think that people are really difficult to get to do something “unconventional”. The conclusions is that there is simply something wrong with the person who chooses to walk a different path, even for something so simple, where that path is being walked elsewhere. Odd.
-cvj
I live in a small town in Colorado. I don’t currently have a functioning bicycle, but unless I’m buying groceries, I generally walk. It’s a 5-minute walk to the school my sons attend, so for the open house last night, I walked (my son biked). His was the only bicycle in the rack. I feel certain that everyone else drove. They had to fight their way out of a crowded parking lot while we just walked away. I’m certain that we could have beat most of the drivers to their homes.
I think it’s great that you’re biking in L.A. Ray Bradbury has lived there his entire life and biked or walked everywhere. He was considered odd for doing so, so he wrote a story about his experiences–“The Pedestrian.”
I’m not sure what it is that inspires people to drive inefficient vehicles in traffic jams, but if you can’t get people to take a 5-minute walk in a safe small town when gasoline costs a lot, then I’m not surprised that bicyclists are rare in a large city. Is it laziness? I think so. But I also think that a lot of people simply haven’t given it any thought. They complain, but they can’t see the simple solution right in front of their faces.
I don’t drive my kids to events–we walk or they bike. Sometimes, though, I walk to the school and meet my sons so that I can carry their instruments or backpacks. People have questioned why I’m carrying their things, and I respond, “I don’t give them rides anywhere, so this is how I spoil them.” Their dad, on the other hand, used to drive to the fitness center he owned, work out for 3 hours, then drive home for lunch, drive back to work, drive to our house, back to work, then home–all of which were within easy biking distance. He *drove* to his workout. No logic there, is there.
It has recently been pointed out to me that bike riders in the Netherlands don’t wear helmets. Furthermore, 20% of all traffic fatalities there are bicyclists.
Not exactly Eden, but 20% < 80%. (And if someone could just get them to wear helmets…)