The Transportation

And then there is the transportation gang, often heard before they're seen with squeaky chains propelling haggard old bikes, for whom there is no choice...or perhaps the choice is to ride or hoof it, as the bicycle is their sole means of speedy A to B. Maybe they ride to work, maybe they're unemployed. Maybe they’re homeless, lost their license, or simply cannot afford the many hidden fiscal trappings of automobile ownership. Do they prefer to ride? No, no way; they are forced to by circumstance. To them the bike is a vintage tool, a rusty shovel among backhoes, a rake among leaf blowers, not a meaning-filled symbol or a recreational activity.

These three broad groups make up the majority of cyclists. Do they get along with each other? I don't think so. They sure don’t ride together unless it's incidental, but then again, they’re not really competing for resources, yet anyway...and that's a big "yet", I mean, if there were a world of just bicycles in the streets...would they eventually begin to flip each other off and relish in name calling belittlement? I’m all but sure this would happen, as space on the road would still be a premium and thus competed for. In fact, I was just talking to a kid working the front counter of a hotel in downtown Sacramento, Ca about his commuting on the bike I saw safely locked up out front as I checked in. I asked him how getting around town was, if the city was "bike-friendly", how the infrastructure was (bike paths and the like), and the general attitude of drivers toward cyclists. All where favorable but what he added as afterthought...musing that possibly more troublesome than the inherent hazards a cyclist's fragile body encounters whilst commingling with heavy automobiles on the street were the droves of club riders who often speed up from behind in large packs on the city's many established bike paths, rude with shouts of “on your left” and often squeezing him and his bike from the narrow pavement as they sped by.

When I heard this, I have to admit, I got a little defensive as I've been in those groups that have taken the path with shear speed and Lycra-clad numbers, but until that point never thought of my actions as rude, quite the contrary...but then again, I had never heard firsthand or imagined the consequences of my actions from another's point of view.

Think about it...just look at how your attitude changes when you sit in auto traffic. Blood pressure and Cortisol levels rise, anger creeps in, what little mindfulness you have goes out the window with an urge to shake your fist, road rage begets the “effenheimer” and the entire day starts out on the wrong foot because your once peaceful and unified "group" began infighting over a resource. You are very alone at that point, a group of one, competing with other motorists for your piece of precious pavement...


Look, here's the deal...bikes and cars? They're just two machines that got in the middle of the proverbial human condition simply by giving us another way to label each other. A human condition that's been brewing and evolving within us since the Miocene...a constant struggle between our reactive, animal brain and our thoughtful, processing, symbolic brain. For years, bikes and cars, taking the blame for something they have nothing to do with but, again, giving us another way to label one-another as different, to group ourselves, to pick sides. A mere separation of the two I'm afraid, without really understanding the root problem, will just pass the buck to a different arena.

Groupism is at the root of this problem. To solve it, I'm convinced we can, we need to see this bigger picture, leave bikes and cars out of it and work on the mess that's between our ears. Limbic System be damned...we must overcome.

The Recreational Cyclist

To another group within the group "cycling", the club riders and racers, the bike is a recreational activity; like hunting, fishing, or...er...umm...Irish road bowling. The problem here is, seeing the bike as a pastime and the paved road a playing field has with it inherent contradictions to the motor-dominated status quo, no?

As a recreational cyclist, you're not out there trying to get anywhere, or go someplace in particular; you're just trying to get some miles in, work off the bear claw you ate for breakfast***, and catch up on a weeks worth of gossip with your buddies. Many rides, whether organized events or off the cuff fartlek style, are very social occasions...and when harassed by an automobile in this social context, it feels like someone just streaked the pitch and stole the game ball before security could lay on a good tackle. Party-pooper. And from the driver's perspective, seeing someone constantly playing in the office when you're trying to get down to the business of work has got to be akin to a good slap in the face. Socialist pig.

But stepping back and seeing both sides here, one group seeing the road as a utility and another seeing it as recreational...you can really see how this dichotomy adds to the competitive roots of the conflict...we are after all, whether we realize it or not, competing over road space.

***Because you have the self control of a starving dog you chubby bastard...ah, self-deprecating humor is so fun.

Rick Derringer Said So

There are times however, 
when I’m on my bike, that I 
don’t feel welcomed by 
others on the road.

Sometimes, it goes well beyond 
a feeling of being unwelcome, 
it feels like loathing or hatred even. 
It feels…well…horrible.

Once, a while ago, someone 
threw a cup of tobacco spit at 
me from a car window. . . 
at that moment, I had 
some hatred myself.

I feel like if I were on the 
side of the road, putting along on a tractor…

…or a horse, that I would be 
tolerated…celebrated, even! 

On the bike I feel…
dare I say…un-American? 

History

Heeding my...err...bike's advice I started to snoop around, do a little research, and found the following...

Early automobile history is fraught with controversy, patent disputes, and in-fighting...so wading into that soal too deep could be all-consuming, deadly and thick black bottom mud holding you fast, and still yield no actual truths.

I mean, knowing how subjective any history is, the quest for a past reality becomes more of a personal soul-search than a hunt for absolute facts. We believe what we want to believe, see what we want to see. It takes a very strong person to search for something, find that something counter to their established beliefs, and not dismiss it outright... cognitive dissonance hard at work. This being said, it's pretty obvious then that the brief history put forth in the pages that follow is knowingly arguable depending where in the argument you yourself stand...but, either way, it does make one step back and begin to frame a bigger picture of what I believe my bike wanted us to see.

Anyway...

Shortly after the word “bicycle” was being tossed around for the first time in the 1860’s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and Germany’s Gottlieb Daimler was dreaming of something bigger than mere pedals and leg power. His golden dreams eventually took a physical form with cylinders of cast iron and steel directing the work of oxygen, petroleum, and spark toward a final drive, together shaping the basic structure of the modern gas engine. Engines and motors of all shapes and fuels were popping up well before this, most notably the steam-driven and electric varieties, but in 1885 Herr Daimler was the first to patent the gas-driven design that set the precedent for today’s powerful, internal combustion engines. He was also one of the first (arguable of course) to slap an engine on a wooden framed bicycle, creating a motorcycle that same year.

In 1886, Daimler’s countryman Karl Benz got the first patent for the gas fueled car and these two, Daimler and Benz, eventually started making the precision machines of the now-legendary Mercedes-Benz.

What was known as the “safety bicycle” was patented in 1885 in England by a chap named John Kemp Starley. This was not the first “bike” in the world but became the template for modern bicycle design. Indeed if you were to put the very first safety bicycle next to the latest two-wheeled offering from any big-box superstore, they'd look strikingly similar.

The safety bicycle was preceded, most notably, by a couple of non-chain, mechanically driven machines in 1839 and 1863 and then, most famously, the evidently not-so-safe, high-wheeling, directly-driven penny-farthing in 1871, so called because it resembled those two disparate-sized coins laid side-by-side. These machines had front wheels better than 50 inches in diameter and mounting pegs above the rear wheels just to get up on the saddles. A modern "10-speed" road bike by comparison has wheels about half that size. Lord knows that isn’t safe, but, lots of folks rode them none-the-less.

Prior to those mechanically driven designs, the bike really had no propulsion system, some very early on even lacked a simple steering system, sporting just two wheels on either side of a seat that you pushed around scooter-style with your feet, like Fred and Wilma. The chain and sprockets of the safety bicycle made all of these other designs old-fashioned and eventually obsolete. Now with pedal power, chain driven torque, and a gear ratio, bicycles became utilitarian, a safe and efficient means of travel across Europe and the USA.

So, the gist of this historical babble, there was really only a year between the English invention of the safety bicycle and the German Karl Benz’s patent, and no difference between that and the 1885 Gottlieb Daimler invention of the modern gas engine.

You see, modern bikes and cars were born of the same Victorian era inventiveness from a marriage of pure necessity to move faster about the landscape and the organic human ambition to build, to invent, that which is only dreamt of or imagined; to bring into the real that which only exists in the mind. Bikes and cars? Heck, these were fraternal twins destined to change the world as we knew it.

The Basics

There is a war out there on the streets, a little war for sure (if there is such a thing), but a war none-the-less with it's fair share of casualties. 2009 showed something like 630 deaths and close to 60,000 related injuries. Statistics aren't really kept up to date on the subject on a federal level and the ones that are kept are only the serious incidents; there are no stats on the finger-flipping, effenhiemer spewing near misses and the like. But if I can extrapolate from my own experience, violence in the streets related to bicycles and automobiles in the United States is nothing short of an epidemic. 

I've been thinking about this for quite some time and have come to the conclusion that any lasting peace will have to do more with a subtle change in our perception of the users of the road, a new mindfulness, and not just the addition of wider shoulders and bike lanes.  

I'm convinced that the vitriol in the streets experienced by both cyclists and motorists is a ubiquitous, but not always recognized, artifact of our human evolution. It is but a mental fossil that might have done us well as cave-dwelling troglodytes but, in this day and age, we'd all be better off without...like our appendix or wisdom teeth. 

This blog is dedicated to exploring this idea...to spread the mantra "Just another user of the road" like a vaccine. Join me, I welcome any comments or feedback.

MH