"I think of my bike as a very small bus," my wife told me shortly after we met. She meant that she viewed it as a form of transportation, and nothing more. That's changed substantially in the years since, and despite my own long-standing affection for all things two-wheeled, I recently needed a reminder from my wife that bikes, before all else, are fun. It's felt like a long winter and I've been pretty pragmatic about my bike. The reminder I needed came in the form of a brief and perfect weekend trip my wife planned to Buckhorn Springs.
We got a leisurely start on a Saturday morning, riding the Greenway south through the valley. The orchards were pink and white, and Bear Creek was flowing fast and clear. By the time we reached Ashland, we were ready for lunch, and we found an open table by Ashland Creek on the first warm Saturday of the year. Any meal is better when it's refueling a recent effort. After we ate, the Central Ashland Bike Path carried us smoothly through town. Beyond Emigrant Lake, we turned off the pavement and climbed into the foothills. The drainage narrowed as we followed Emigrant Creek up toward Soda Mountain, and there was a wonderful sense of enclosure that I miss in the wide Bear Creek Valley. We were the only guests that weekend at Buckhorn Springs, and when we walked our bikes around the gate spanning the driveway, it felt like we were entering a private garden. Our shingled cottage by the creek had been restored not to luxury, but to complete comfort.
The nap we took on arriving was more refreshing than some full nights of sleep at home, well earned as it was. We picked out a lone snag on a ridge for our morning hike and then passed a perfect evening of cooking, talking, and reading to the chatter of a mountain creek in springtime. When we woke in the morning, we couldn't understand the waves of tapping outside until we pulled the curtains aside to find sleet bouncing off the windowpanes. There wasn't a soul around to judge our laziness in climbing back under the warm blankets and settling for a shorter hike, later in the morning. We saved the lone snag for our next trip.
The precipitation returned periodically during our ride home that afternoon, but because it was frozen we stayed perfectly dry. I'll admit we did curse the weather briefly as we found ourselves pedaling hard against the wind even as we descended the hills we'd earned with our sweat the day before.
Approaching home, it struck me what fun I was having just riding my bike, even in the sleet, even against the wind. The next thing I realized was that I hadn't been aware of a lot of fun while riding lately. It had been months since I'd ridden anywhere but work or errands. On top of that, I'd been reading a lot of acronym-laden articles and blogs about how effective and important bicycles are as transportation. Mark Twain wrote that "Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions," and biking somewhere to spend money rather than earn it illustrated that to me perfectly.
The first time I ever rode to work was pure play. It was Bike to Work Day 2003, and I still remember how good I felt all day... all week, really. (Incidentally, Bike to Work Day 2009 is Friday, May 15.) But in recent months I had been focusing on my bike as a practical means of transport and forgetting to go play on it. I'd been thinking of it as a very small bus, and forgetting that it's also a really quiet motorcycle.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Among the hooves of warhorses (April 2009 column)
Most of you will understand this immediately, but it honestly took me years to figure it out. Riding my bike home from work one afternoon some years back, I slowed approaching a downtown stoplight, and seeing no cross traffic, carried on through the intersection. When traffic caught back up to me, I was taken completely off guard by the earful I got from a driver in the adjacent lane.
It didn't make any sense! I hadn't cut her off or given her a dirty look. I wasn't wearing a shirt with a self-righteous message. It seemed pretty clear that I hadn't inconvenienced her in any way—so why the abuse? I needed several years and a few thousand trips by foot, bike, and car to make sense of that incident. There I was, asserting my bicycle's status as a vehicle by riding on the road. I was relying on the operators of other vehicles to respect my rights on the road, but I was unwilling to be inconvenienced when it was my turn to yield. It wasn't any inconvenience that driver was objecting to, it was my hypocrisy.
Here's a fact: cyclists feel good about our choice to ride for transportation. We have a tendency to devour any study or article affirming cycling as healthy, brave, and important. We can quote you statistics about foreign oil and air pollution and life expectancy. All of which is entirely reasonable, but a danger arises when we conclude that our reduced impact on pollution and congestion, and the minimal threat we pose to others, somehow means our only responsibility in riding is to protect ourselves. It's as if we relish imagining ourselves the dogs trotting among the hooves of the warhorses. That's not only unambitious, it's inaccurate. The fact is that cyclists have an outsized impact on the drivers around us. We won't improve bicycle safety or relations between cyclists and drivers without acknowledging that impact.
You might expect cyclists, often enough marginalized on the roadways, to treat pedestrians with the utmost of deference—the way we wish drivers would treat us. But to hear some pedestrians tell it, our track record perpetuating the cycle of disrespect is dismal. Cars, at least, don't chase them onto the sidewalks and greenways. Cars, at least, don't sneak up behind them. Cyclists have been slow to embrace pedestrian rights as first among transportation rights; that is a major failing.
It gets messy sometimes, when we start thinking in groups and resenting the others. One way of counteracting that tendency is mixing up the way we get around. It's hard to delay a line of cars while biking, knowing that this weekend I'll be one of those delayed drivers. I'm less likely to step off the curb mid-block in front of a cyclist knowing firsthand how frustrating it is when a pedestrian disregards me like that. And my tendency to mindlessly blow past a pedestrian at a crosswalk has dropped off considerably since I've started walking to the grocery store a couple times a week.
I recall another interaction I had with a driver, and this one completes the lesson of the story I opened with. I understood its significance immediately. I was picking up a few things at the grocery once when a man stopped me. "Was that you out there on the bike?" I told him yep, that was me. "I can't believe you used hand signals! That was so great! Man, I wish all bikers would do that." I'm convinced that interaction, like the one after I ran the red light, had little to do with any inconvenience or service given to the driver. In both cases, what made an impact was the root attitude I was revealing.
If we are serious about extracting ourselves from this slough of auto dependence, we'll need more than technology and planning and infrastructure. Every one of us who sets foot out our front door will need to be aware that our travel impacts other people. And for that awareness to mean anything to us, we'll need something more basic still: we'll need respect.
It didn't make any sense! I hadn't cut her off or given her a dirty look. I wasn't wearing a shirt with a self-righteous message. It seemed pretty clear that I hadn't inconvenienced her in any way—so why the abuse? I needed several years and a few thousand trips by foot, bike, and car to make sense of that incident. There I was, asserting my bicycle's status as a vehicle by riding on the road. I was relying on the operators of other vehicles to respect my rights on the road, but I was unwilling to be inconvenienced when it was my turn to yield. It wasn't any inconvenience that driver was objecting to, it was my hypocrisy.
Here's a fact: cyclists feel good about our choice to ride for transportation. We have a tendency to devour any study or article affirming cycling as healthy, brave, and important. We can quote you statistics about foreign oil and air pollution and life expectancy. All of which is entirely reasonable, but a danger arises when we conclude that our reduced impact on pollution and congestion, and the minimal threat we pose to others, somehow means our only responsibility in riding is to protect ourselves. It's as if we relish imagining ourselves the dogs trotting among the hooves of the warhorses. That's not only unambitious, it's inaccurate. The fact is that cyclists have an outsized impact on the drivers around us. We won't improve bicycle safety or relations between cyclists and drivers without acknowledging that impact.
You might expect cyclists, often enough marginalized on the roadways, to treat pedestrians with the utmost of deference—the way we wish drivers would treat us. But to hear some pedestrians tell it, our track record perpetuating the cycle of disrespect is dismal. Cars, at least, don't chase them onto the sidewalks and greenways. Cars, at least, don't sneak up behind them. Cyclists have been slow to embrace pedestrian rights as first among transportation rights; that is a major failing.
It gets messy sometimes, when we start thinking in groups and resenting the others. One way of counteracting that tendency is mixing up the way we get around. It's hard to delay a line of cars while biking, knowing that this weekend I'll be one of those delayed drivers. I'm less likely to step off the curb mid-block in front of a cyclist knowing firsthand how frustrating it is when a pedestrian disregards me like that. And my tendency to mindlessly blow past a pedestrian at a crosswalk has dropped off considerably since I've started walking to the grocery store a couple times a week.
I recall another interaction I had with a driver, and this one completes the lesson of the story I opened with. I understood its significance immediately. I was picking up a few things at the grocery once when a man stopped me. "Was that you out there on the bike?" I told him yep, that was me. "I can't believe you used hand signals! That was so great! Man, I wish all bikers would do that." I'm convinced that interaction, like the one after I ran the red light, had little to do with any inconvenience or service given to the driver. In both cases, what made an impact was the root attitude I was revealing.
If we are serious about extracting ourselves from this slough of auto dependence, we'll need more than technology and planning and infrastructure. Every one of us who sets foot out our front door will need to be aware that our travel impacts other people. And for that awareness to mean anything to us, we'll need something more basic still: we'll need respect.
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