Friday Group Ride #170

I think about a future without cars. Mainly I think about it as I’m being squeezed into the narrowest, graveliest part of the shoulder by some four-wheeled behemoth whose pilot is happily chirping away on the phone. My desire for fewer (or zero) cars is selfish, about my own safety and convenience, and it disregards the great conveniences that come to me by automobile. For example, I always take the car grocery shopping.

Wanting cars to go away is just my infantile reaction to hating pollution and crowding and the constant threat to my safety. Too many folks need to move their families around. Too many folks live in decentralized living situations. The car is too useful to go away. I am not sure I really want to live in a world without them, but I think about it.

Obviously, the car is going to change, as it has already started doing, as the bike continues to change. Perhaps it (again, like the bike) will become increasingly electric. Perhaps solar electric. I see cargo bikes in the city now, some two-wheeled, some three. I have seen them with electric assist. I see more and more people dropping their kids off at school with trailers and other multi-person pedal craft. Are cars and bikes already converging?

We are mainly road cyclists here. Many of us commute by bike. Many of us use the bike for errands. Regardless we are cyclists. We have talked a little lately about the soft edge of the cycling population, those who might not feel all the way comfortable in lycra and tippy-tappy shoes, and I tend to think this is precisely where the future lies for both car and bike. These are the people who will be driving/riding future vehicles.

With oil going away and the atmosphere warming, the cycling population has to grow. It has to, right?

This week’s Group Ride asks, what does the future look like? Are there really more people on bikes? How many more, orders of magnitude, or just a few? How does it change how we cyclists get around? Will things get better or worse? Does anyone even have a clue?

Image: The Big Dog

Through the Jungle Very Softly Flits a Shadow*

Fear is a hairy beast with razor claws and dripping fangs. It is there in the dark, and it is there in the light, and it is there in the rain, sun, sleet and snow. Fear spills off station wagons swerving wildly with cell phone gesticulations, and it drops heavily off of box trucks, threatening to swallow the lane. It lurks quietly in potholes, and swings freely on the hinges of driver’s side doors. Fear will eat you if you let it. It never stops being hungry.

Two weeks ago I got bumped by a Ford Explorer pulling up to a stop sign. Its driver thought that he and his vehicle could get around me before reaching the end of the street. He yanked his wheel to the left, veered into the other lane and gunned his engine, swerving back into my lane at the last possible moment. At best he’d have cut me off. At worst, he’d have run me over. I was lucky simply to have been bumped.

I stayed upright. And angry.

Having been in this situation before, which is to say, uncomfortably close to another human being playing fast and loose with my safety, I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to get over it. The driver, in fact drivers generally, are not bothered when they do things like this. They simply drive away, maybe shaking their heads in disbelief at the folly of those of us who would dare to ride bikes on public roads. Occasionally I come in contact with a driver who is willing to take responsibility when he or she makes a mistake, but for the most part, those who drive badly do so because they are unwilling to be responsible for their actions.

If bad drivers don’t care about their close calls, why should I? Should they be able to driveway carelessly, while I am left behind to simmer and stew, to spew profanity and froth in impotent self-righteousness? No. The thing to do is accept what’s happened, swallow it whole for what it was, and then move on. A wise person told me that nursing resentments of this sort is like allowing morons to live, rent-free, in your head.

So when I am well-adjusted and fully in control of my faculties (very seldom) I can balance the need to beware of large moving objects with the need to continue riding, for transportation, physical health and sanity. The trick, and oh, what a trick it is, is to remain consciously blind to the danger that surrounds you, and simultaneously hyper-aware of every hard bit of pavement or sharp bit of metal that enters your air space. This is the Zen koan of riding your bicycle on the road.

As is typical, I have had difficulty letting go of these near death encounters. It is a thing much easier said than done. Since the encounter with my not-friend in the Explorer, I have been on edge whenever I have been on my bike. I have been quick to anger, even when I’ve been consciously resisting the impulse. This, it would seem, is the order of events. I simply have to wait until the feeling subsides, until I feel relatively safe again.

Last night, it was pouring rain. The light has recently fled our evening commute, so we’ve added darkness to the joy of being soaking wet. Stubborn git that I am, I pulled on my rain gear and disembarked from the office. Within a few moments I was enduring the gritty spray off Volvos and Subarus. With the verge entirely swamped, I tried to take a little of the lane to prevent myself from having to ride through 4 inches of standing water. My road companions in their cars mostly failed to yield any space. I was buzzed by a Chevy Suburban and then by a minivan.  I began to seethe, and then to feel sad. To feel such little disregard for your bodily safety can be massively discouraging.

When I arrived home, my wife knew exactly what I was thinking and feeling. What a relief to be able to come home to someone who understands. Is this what inspired Dylan to write Shelter From the Storm?

I have to let these things go. I have to take responsibility for my own part. I choose to put myself in harm’s way. Traffic is traffic. You can complain about it. You can wish for people to change, for things to get better, but mostly those things are achieved at a glacial pace, and I intend to keep riding. Come hell AND high water, I intend to keep riding.

So I hug my wife, and I sit down to dinner with my kids, who talk too much and play with their food rather than eating it, and all is right and well with the world. And I return to the Zen koan of riding with both a keen attention to life-threatening danger and a blissful disregard for the monsters that lurk round every corner.

 

* Taken from Kipling’s Fear.

Follow me on Twitter @thebicyclerobot.