Moving into the coming quarter at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I’ll be picking up three more credit hours of class and expanding involvement with my team in the exciting world of bicycle entrepreneurship. Unfortunately this is going to make it next to impossible for me to continue to develop this blog, although this is exactly what I should be doing. The brand is something that I and my teammates have invested themselves in pretty heavily (Everyday Wheels), and I think that the blog would be an excellent complement to that. If there’s any hope I have for myself in the next 9 months, it would be to maintain the beat blog to build the brand of my entrepreneurial venture.
If there’s anyone reading this who actually considers themselves a “regular reader” of the blog, please keep me in your feeds. I’ll be pursuing ways that my team and I can continue to invest in this site. I hope to have another post by the first week of 2011. Happy New Year!
Pictured above: Ron Reagan and Nancy Reagan riding a tandem bicycle together. 4/22/81. Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Tom Bowden of Commute By Bike wrote a great article entitled “How to Talk About Cycling to a Conservative.” Tom reminds cycling advocates and enthusiasts that riding a bicycle is not just for liberal democrats, and that bicycle transportation can appeal to a conservative mindset if we tell the right story. Honestly I bristle when he marginalizes climate change and discards opportunities to discuss economically vibrant bicycle-reliant cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, but clearly he wants bicycle advocates to win the war of words.
Since I read the article, I wondered if there are two or even three stories for every bicycling talking point. There might be a conservative story, a liberal story, and an apolitical story. With that in mind, I’ll try to identify a few everyday moments and tell them three different ways.
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Substituting for a Car Trip
Liberal - “I’m reducing my carbon footprint.”
Conservative - “I’m reducing dependence on foreign oil.”
Neutral - “I’m saving money.”
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Building Bicycle Lanes
Liberal - “Better facilities promotes greater access and reduces car dependence.”
Conservative - “Bicycle facilities are cheaper than new roads and reduce traffic.”
Neutral - “Virtually every city with good bicycling has separated lanes.”
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What Bicycling Accomplishes
Liberal - “We need live more sustainably, and bicycling is a great way to do that.”
Conservative - “American independence is built on the freedom of movement.”
Neutral - “Obesity is a major issue in the United States.”
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This is just a starting point for this kind of conversation. I think my primary point is that there are hundreds of reasons to ride and build more bicycle facilities. The reason that this is true may depend on your perspective, but regardless of political alignment we all can see bicycling as an everyday activity.
Bicycling is the fastest growing mode of transportation in New York City, and there are now more than 185,000 riders in the city. As a cyclist, I spend a lot of time reading about what needs to be improved or what’s missing from bicycle transportation in the United States, and so it’s really exciting to see that there’s really good news for bikes too.
There’s even better news too: in the same period of growing bicycle usage, the number of accidents involving bikes dropped 40 percent! A major hurdle in bringing bicycling to a large population has always been issues of safety, and the combination of these two statistics support a long-held belief about the issue: the more bicyclists there are on the road, the safer those cyclists are. This safety-in-numbers principle is a challenge for cities who have few riders, because the early adopters face the greatest risk.
However as a daily rider who interacts with a large number of other riders, I have to say that the perception of safety on bikes is not in line with reality, at least in Seattle. Bikes are a safe way to get around and virtually all drivers are actively trying not to run us down. More good news, that.
image courtesy YoZeFiNe
I’m personally curious how the general public really feels about transportation cycling, and by extension I’m wondering what comment posts online mean in regards to those attitudes. I live in Seattle, which is supposed to be a really bicycle-friendly city, but reading the comments on the Seattle PI or Publicola would lead you to believe that the city is populated entirely by rabid anti-cyclists and hardcore cyclists who wouldn’t hesitate to strike a driver with a U-Lock.
I suspect (hope) that this isn’t the case. Reading the comments on the HuffPo here makes the United States seem like fanatic bike lovers! I think it can be hard to know exactly where people stand. Even when we’re deciding who will be the President of the United States of America, votership can seem depressingly low. In that context, how can bicycle advocates accurately judge the views of the public?
I’m working with a team that is planning a bicycle product offering for a marketing class, and we ran a survey to study attitudes towards riding. The willingness to ride a bicycle was amazingly high, shockingly high even, especially if you consider the actual number of riders. We experienced two levels of selection: those answering the study had to be connected to our group of people in some way, and also had to be willing to answer a survey. This can’t be thought of as a well selected sample population, but at least I know my friends and my friends’ networks like bikes. It’s a start!
Thanks to Lisa Berntsen at GeoEngineers, Inc.
I caught this post over at the Dutch Bike Co, about using zip-ties to make bicycle “chains” on the cheap. On the face of it, it’s just a really clever idea. Provided you’re good on fender clearance, this is an amazingly simple solution to a problem.
Looking at it through my “everyday” lens, I’m still torn on the makeshifty-ness of bicycle transportation in general. I’ve had to “rig up” a number of different solutions on my bicycle to meet my needs of daily transportation. I can do that because I’ve been riding for years and I’ve got a mechanical eye. For people just starting though, even a simple problem like zip ties could be intimidating. Done wrong, you could probably lock up your front tire and take a nasty headfirst fall.
We never ask car drivers to “rig up” solutions to common problems. Attaching snow chains to car tires can be difficult, but the worst case scenario is generally going to be damage to the car, not damage to your person. This is the same problem when I put bags on my bike. Errant cargo could go into the spokes, or go half on the ground and half on the bike and in either case I could lose control. On a car? Trunk. Trunks are standard, even! Wow, that is so much easier.
I’m looking for that level of ease on bikes. The hardest thing about a bike should be the pedaling.
Cyclists and drivers have a difficult relationship. Cyclists and pedestrians have a difficult relationship. Cyclists and cyclists have a difficult relationship. Seeing a trend here?
As the number of bicycle lanes rapidly expand in land-crunched cities with no space for new car lanes, tensions between different modes of travel are increasing. Cyclists feel like their right to use the roads is threatened, and that their protection under the law is extremely limited. From their behavior we can guess that cyclists are independent-minded people who would rather use an uncommon mode of transportation (in the USA) than wait in traffic.
This independence doesn’t serve the expanding role of cycling in the United States, however. Advocacy groups used to empowering the small “League of American Bicyclists” style riders don’t necessarily meet the needs of everyday riders, and may not be ready for the large-scale meeting of the minds that’s necessary to bridge the gap between car users and bike users.
Probably the first problem is removing the identity distinction between the two modes. In the strict linguistic sense a car user may be a driver, but a driver is not an identity- it is merely the verb for the use. Many people who ride bikes also drive cars. Do they need some sort of dual-citizenship card? Shifting the brand identity of the cyclist to something more universal may be the single most important task for cycling advocacy over the next decade.
It has to happen somehow, because in terms of transportation facilities in big cities there’s really no other way. The simple truth is that our roads will be faster moving in congested areas when more people go by bike. It’s simply not possible to solve traffic problems in Manhattan with more roads: there’s no space.
There’s some interesting stories on the web right now about 20-24 year olds choosing to drive and own cars less than previous generations. As a 20 something myself, I have a story along those lines. I grew up and went to college in Arizona, a place where owning a car is synonymous with agency in the world. In fact, my graduation gift was a car. It said: here you are, young man, a car and a degree - this is what you will need to survive.
I moved to Seattle following graduation, wanting to reduce my dependency on automobiles and increase my access to bicycles and buses. After living here for four years, I recently sold my car and dropped some of the cash from the sale on a great bike, making the transition to being completely car-free.
This trend is very encouraging for someone like me who would like to see more people on their bikes for transportation, benefiting their health, their planet, and their wallet. In some ways this may be part of a larger trend among people my age who have given up many of the burdensome trappings of previous generations. I see fewer of them with cars, televisions, land-line telephones, mortgages, and of course children. We are waiting longer to settle down, and when we do so, we may not have the priorities that our parents did. Hopefully our priorities involve bike lanes, but I haven’t done an exhaustive survey yet. I’m hopeful, though.
And no I don’t mean too smart. The image above indicates what happens when a cyclist “goes crazy” with lights on a bicycle. This cyclist has several blinky lights positioned around the frame, in a addition to the “down-low” light.
I would personally endorse using fewer lights, and using a steady-on setting rather than an epilepsy blinker. Studies have shown that drivers are bad at evaluating distance with blinking lights - which is why a steady red is a better way to go. In fact blinking bicycle lights are not even allowed in Germany. Regarding the number of lights, anecdotally many riders I know feel they were seen better and treated better by cars when they had TWO lights each for the front and the back of the bicycle. There may be some sort of conditioning by drivers to see two lights.
Of course it’s up to each of us to decide how illuminated we want to be to feel safe on the roads in the USA, and being a stand-out on the road can be safer. However I feel that elaborate lighting systems and excessive reflective tape can encourage the perception that drivers will never see us if we’re not lit up like a circus, and furthermore that cyclists are endangered illegitimate road users. Furthermore it makes us look like electronic hobbyists, not people trying to get from one place to another. I don’t bemoan this man’s choice to light himself up like a Christmas tree, but I think there’s marginal returns on additional lights and I don’t want non-riders to think that his setup is MORE SAFE than having a sensible number of lights. I understand I may face some opposition in this perspective and I totally welcome the discussion and the possibility of being totally wrong. Thanks for listening.