Opinionated Blogger Friday: Second Class Citizens

If you ever want to kill someone in New York, and get away with it, apparently the best thing to do is wait until they're on a bicycle.

At least that's the impression that I get from stories like this one, where the driver of a van deliberately struck a cyclist, and kept driving with the cyclist clinging to the front of his vehicle until traffic forced him to stop. In spite of multiple witnesses and a photograph of the vehicle (which clearly shows both the name of the company that owns the van and the license plate), police told the victim it "wouldn't be worth their time" to investigate the attack.

Now, road rage incidents do happen (because cars make you crazy) as do hit and runs, but this is a case where it seems like it would be fairly easy to track down the guy and press charges. But it seems like incidents with cyclists as victims are treated as pretty  low-priority by the NYPD, even in the case of fatal accidents.

This certainly isn't the case everywhere, but just reading about it can make a bicyclist feel a bit less secure out there. If aggressive drivers don't face any consequences for deliberately hitting you, what protection do you have? It's an uncomfortable thought. Are we really second-class citizens simply due to our mode of transportation?

Fortunately, on the national scale, bicycles are becoming more common and visible, and even non-cyclists are outraged when some aggressive nutjob tries to harm one of us. Still, it's saddening to see an incident like this fail to move the authorities to more constructive action.

Opinionated Blogger Friday: That Thing Drivers Sometimes Do When They Think They're Being Helpful But It's Really Kind of Annoying

After you've been riding with traffic a while, you start to get a feel of the flow of things. It doesn't take long, really, the human brain, being the amazing machine it is, starts to recognize relative speed and direction, and to start predicting where cars are going to be based on where they are.

After a bit more time, you start to time your own moves, like when you're about to make a left turn, you get over to the left side of the lane, look at the line of oncoming cars and slow down a bit, getting your own speed just right to hit the next gap that's big enough for you to safely ride through.

Then somebody comes to a stop to let you turn, and your rhythm goes all to hell, and you nearly fall off the bike. They give you a big smile and wave you through magnanimously, while you struggle to get your feet back on the pedals and wave a less-than-heartfelt "thanks" to them.

It would be one thing if there was an unbroken line of cars zipping along at 900 mph and your only hope for making a turn alive is that someone, anyone, slows down a bit a and lets you go, but with normal traffic there are plenty of gaps and the person who does this always seems to be the LAST person in any line of cars.

It happens when you're trying to cross a busy intersection, too, or when you're approaching a four-way stop sign. The last 99 times things went a certain way, and you took your turn as if you were operating any other wheeled vehicle, but the hundredth time somebody changes the pattern, you're thrown a curve ball and you swing and miss.

On the list of nuisances that can befall a cyclist, this ranks pretty low. After all, when there are homicidal middle-managers in SUVs trying to smear you against parked cars, or drunken frat boys lobbing glass bottles at your head, someone being nice to you hardly counts as much of a problem.

But, aside from the fact that it messes up your flow and therefore totally blows your carefully cultivated sense of cool, there are a couple of problems inherent in this kind of behavior.

First off, it belies a common flaw in the way many Americans drive, which involves treating the brake and accelerator as on/off switches. You're either driving the speed limit or you're stopped, there's no sense of adjusting speed to accommodate road conditions. Not everyone drives this way, nor is it exclusive to U.S. drivers, but it's far less common in places where the streetscapes are more integrated, with pedestrians, cyclists and drivers adapting to each other on the fly.

The other reason this behavior is a negative indicator is that it means that, in some folks' eyes at least, bicycles are still a special case, not a normal part of traffic. On a bike you're still a bit childlike, to be treated with extra care rather than expected to be a responsible road user. This, in turn, reinforces the idea that bikes don't belong on the road with "grown up" vehicles, and makes it harder for cyclists to be accepted.

Overall, though, I'd rather someone throw off my groove by doing something unexpectedly nice, like waving me through a turn, than by doing something unexpectedly obnoxious, like accelerating to keep me from turning in front of them, or cutting me off to get to a parking space. Enough of the latter happens that when someone's unexpectedly generous, I'm more frustrated by my own uncool flailing than I ever could be at the driver!

Opinionated Blogger Friday: To Helmet or Not To Helmet

Democrat vs Republican

Montague vs Capulet

Star Wars vs Star Trek

Madonna vs Gaga

Tastes Great vs Less Filling

For some reason, people like to get into pointless, drawn-out arguments that benefit nobody, and often wrap their self-image up in whatever side of the conflict they identify with, to the point that any argument for the other position seems a direct personal challenge. 

Cyclists, with a few exceptions, are people, and in spite of our obviously enlightened judgement in transportation choice, can be prone to the same pointless squabbling as other sectors of society. In particular, among those who ride for utility there has been a long-running and unnecessarily heated debate about whether or not to wear helmets while riding. 

On the pro-helmet side, the argument runs that helmets reduce the severity of head injury in the event of a crash, and lower the risk of death or permanent brain damage. The anti-helmet side often argues that helmets don't actually do all that much good and may actually increase the risk of crash or injury. 

Probably where this argument gets the fiercest is in the debate about laws that would require adults to wear helmets any time they ride a bicycle on the road. People on the strongly Pro-Helmet side argue that it would lower fatalities and reduce the burden on society caused by hospitals full of brain-damaged cyclists. Those on the strongly Anti-Helmet side argue that forcing people to wear helmets will make people quit cycling in vast numbers and establish in the public eye that riding a bicycle is inherently dangerous activity like BASE jumping or juggling chainsaws.

 I think the degree of vehemence on either side of the debate is often a little bit silly. I've read numerous articles, reports and studies, which were then followed up by studies that claimed to contradict whatever the previous study had shown. Based on all this reading, and about a dozen years in the bike industry, I've formed my own opinion on the subject (and no, I'm not going to link to ANY of the bazillion articles or studies I'm talking about. With my luck this would be the one thing I ever write that gets read by more than six people, and someone would have to post a link to a study that contradicts what I linked. Then someone would feel compelled to link to something else to argue with that, and so on into full on Link Battle. If growing up in the 80s taught me nothing else, it's that link fights, like Tic-Tac-Toe and Global Thermonuclear War are games that nobody wins). 

I have written about my opinion on helmet use before, and I'll sum it up again here. 

 Helmets do seem to help in some cases, and may save you from serious head injury or death in some crashes. And it does seem that in a large number of fatal bicycle crashes, head injury is the cause of death, so if you're going to protect anything, the noggin it should be. 

On the other hand, life-threatening bicycle crashes aren't that common, and in a lot of cases (especially ones involving cars), a the forces at work may be beyond what a helmet can protect against. 

From what I've seen, both through firsthand experience and through my reading, is that the situations where a helmet is most likely to be useful are 

• Racing
• Off-Road riding
• Stunt riding
• "Sporty" riding (high speed road riding for example)
• Riding in icy or in slippery conditions
• Young children or inexperienced riders
• Riding WITH young children or inexperienced riders

(that last is because when you're riding with a kid, first you're setting an example, but you're also dividing your attention between where you're going and the wobbly, swerve-prone kid riding right next to you). 

Some situations where a helmet seems LEAST likely to be needed are

• Rides on dedicated bike paths
• Commuting on roads with bike lanes or relatively light traffic
• Leisurely pleasure rides

You may be completely safe riding trails without ever wearing a helmet (although I've managed to hit myself in the head any number of times with low branches, rocks kicked up by tires and on one occasion my own bicycle, so that's the LAST place I'd ride helmetless), and you may get yourself into serious trouble riding through the park (especially if you run into unruly dogs or the aforementioned wobbly kids), but generally, the more aggressive the riding, the more likely you are to crash, simple as that. 

Personally, I wear my helmet MOST of the time when I ride, especially if I'm out mixing with car traffic. I may ride helmetless for short jaunts around town or on hot days when I'm more worried about heat that crashing, but at this point it's a habit for me. 

There are other reasons I wear a helmet, which are not directly related to impact protection. First of all, I usually put some reflective tape on my helmet, so when I ride after dark it makes me a bit more visible. Secondly, in my mind at least, wearing a helmet and riding a well-maintained bike marks me as someone who WANTS to ride a bike to get around, as opposed to someone forced to ride because my driver's license was taken away. There's a very common perception, at least where I live, that the only reason you'd be riding a bike to work is because you'd been busted for drunk driving. 

The final, and perhaps saddest reason I normally wear a helmet has to do with perceptions of responsibility. Regardless of the truth of the matter, one of the signs of a "responsible cyclist" is thought to be regular helmet use. If, God-forbid, I should get knocked over by a car, and end up in court over insurance money or whatnot, one of the inevitable questions that comes up will be "were you wearing a helmet?" You an argue (correctly) that this is dumb, but that doesn't mean it's not often true. 

Personally, I'm opposed to mandatory bicycle helmet laws for adults. I think educating more cyclists about safer riding techniques (stay off the sidewalk, ride with traffic, etc), make much more difference. Educating drivers about how to behave around cyclists and putting a bit of money into infrastructure to make streets more bike-friendly will also go a long way to reducing cycling injuries, but those kinds of things cost money, as opposed to just yelling at cyclists for not wearing helmets.

But if you ask me outright, "do you think I should wear one?" I'll tell you yes.  I figure if you're on the fence about it, helmets are cheap and relatively comfortable these days, might help and won't do you any harm, so you're better off with than without.

But whether you wear one or not, just don't get all preachy about it.