a mean right hook

Part I

My daily commute almost always takes me along this small portion of 16th Ave on my way to cutting across Civic Center park.



It’s a weird block because, as you can see, there is a bike lane and sharrows side-by-side on the road, coexisting happily, naturally as you please, as though this weren't an utter abomination.

What you cannot see in this picture is that one block back, there is a sign that says BIKE LANE ENDS.

That’s why the sharrows are there. The bike lane is a Shouldn't Be. And yet it persists. Cyclists are supposed to take the lane as the signage and the sharrows imply. And yet. That bike lane.

In direct contradiction of the signage, confoundingly, frustratingly, incomprehensibly, the bike lane doesn’t end at all. Like the cake, the end of the bike lane is a lie. It just stubbornly continues to exist. It hangs around like an unwelcome guest.

So this block is unique in that respect. Also of note is the vehicular traffic at this particular intersection. Coming from this direction, cars cannot go straight. (That direction is reserved for bikes and bus traffic.) The crossroad traffic is one-way, from the left to the right. The only thing a car can do is turn right.



You can see in the picture above the almost gravitational pull to the right that motorists experience. They want nothing but to turn right. Seriously, 100% of the cars here are turning right. And so, a cyclist camped out at the front of this Shouldn't-Be, Why-Is-It-Still-Here? bike lane is preventing the cars from proceeding.

This is doing it the wrong way. If you're on a bike in the bike lane here, you are doing it wrong, and are practically inviting the right hook.

Contrariwise, a cyclist positioned respectfully in the middle of the traffic lane, over the sharrows, creates enough space to the right of him for cars to continue on their merry way. This is doing it the right way.

99% of the cyclists I see at this intersection do it wrong.

99% of the cyclists at this intersection are both blocking traffic and putting themselves in danger.

One day I should say something to one of that 99%. (I'm an assertive rider, an angry blogger, but a timid person face-to-face.)

Part II

On 16th Ave, several blocks west of the intersection described in Part I. 

A couple of B-Cycle Bozos are tootling down the road in the bike lane. They, and me, and a car all come to a stop at a light.

The car has its right turn signal on. I'm right behind it. (Not in the bike lane because I'm turning left here.) I observe the bozos not observing the car to their immediate left.

The light turns green and the bozos are gabbing and gossiping, not paying attention, and not moving.

The car inches out and creeps forward. The bozos don't move, still gabbing.

The car honks its horn a few times to announce its presence and continues across the path of the bozos, executing a right-hand turn. The bozos never move. They don't even look up.

Those cyclists were oblivious to the other vehicles around them. That motorist was very aware of the bikes around it.

I think that was the most respectful right hook I've seen, and I can't think of a way I'd have done it better.

Good on ya, car.

Get your heads outta your asses, bike bozos.

Conclusion

Cyclists, myself included, rave about the treacherous right hook, about how they're avoidable if only cars would pay attention and be mindful of their surroundings.

But many times these situations are created by cyclists themselves through incorrect lane positioning, not paying attention, and dallying in bike lanes.

Opposing View Points: Bike Lanes

In favor: Bike lanes are awesome. They create a space in which the novice cyclist feels safe. It encourages cycling, and gets more people on the road. Plus, bike lanes feel fast because you don't have to worry as much about maintaining CONSTANT VIGILANCE regarding the traffic around you.

Opposed: Bike lanes infantilize a legitimate form of road transportation. As a cyclist and equal citizen of the road, I am entitled to all the privileges of the road. I don't need to be siphoned off into a special safety lane. Bike lanes also discourage cycling in the sense that a novice cyclist, used to the bike lane oasis, will not venture out onto new roads, and will feel discouraged from cycling if the trip cannot be made using bike lanes.

Where do I stand? I'm in favor of them being a resource to the beginning cyclist, but am leery of cyclists becoming dependent on them. I think bike lanes are good in that they remove an obstacle between the road and a curious cyclist; they serve the valuable function of offering a feeling of security. I also think that as cyclists gain experience and confidence in the bike lanes, they will venture out onto other roads that don't have bike lanes. And there they will gain vehicular cycling experience. Bike lanes are like training wheels for grown-ups.

Mandatory registration sweeping the nation!

The year 2011 is barely two weeks old, and is already proving to be quite challenging for cyclists and for personal liberties.

1. January 4, 2011: the LA Times runs a story about $400 in fines levied against one teenage boy for operating a bicycle without a license.
2. January 12, 2011: New Jersey Assembleywoman Tucker proposes legislation requiring a $10/year registration for all bicycles and a $100 citation for each offense.
3. January 13, 2011: Tucker back-pedals and withdraws her proposal.
4. January 14, 2011: the New York Post runs a story about a legislator from Queens proposing similar registration laws.

And today, the city attorney of Santa Monica is proposing to the city council an ordinance that will require bicycle registration for all residents of Santa Monica at a cost of $4.00 per bike, and which sets the fine for operating a bicycle without a license at $10.00.

Click through to the summary report and full-text of ordinance.

In response, local (to Santa Monica) inter-blogger and pedal-masher Gary has written a letter raising several logistical concerns about redundancies and enforcement that bureaucrats and politicrats will likely find more ponder-worthy than my ideological "bikes are like libraries" flight of fancy.

Click through to Garyridesbikes

Some of my favorite bike personalities—bloggers, photographers, advocates—are in and around LA, so I'm anxious to see the coverage of the meeting and reactions to the outcome.

And as for things on the home front, I'm a little nervous about the spread of this apparent anti-bike brush fire. I would feel confident that bike-friendly Denver, home of the country's first bike share program, would be immune from the craziness if it weren't for two things.

1. Dan "It's A Plot" Maes is headquartered a stone's throw away in Evergreen and his influence, if felt from New York to LA, is surely felt here in his back yard, and
2. Even Portland, where cyclists hope they go when they die, is suffering from restrictive bicycle legislation! This proposed law would prohibit, with the threat of a $90 fine, children under the age of 6 being carried on bicycles.
   
   
   
   Click through to oregonlive.com story

Basically, I can't take it for granted any longer that this couldn't happen here. I denounce this kind of legislation, and I need to make sure my legislators know this.

The Bike Lane Is Nice To Ride On!

There doesn't really need to have been a story written. Just look at the picture, and you pretty much know what's going on.

click through to nytimes story

People Holding Signs always stirs in me a certain proud, teary-eyed emotion. You can't be any more honest or true than you are when you stand up and hold up a sign in support of something in which you believe.

Especially when said belief is as simple and pure and innocent as this one is.

I'm eight years old, and this I believe: THE BIKE LANE IS NICE TO RIDE ON!

Sometimes dismounts just happen

Six days ago, we got our first "for reals" snow of the year, followed by days of thoroughly iced, utterly scary roads.

I was not hardcore enough to bike these roads. I saw other people biking these roads and I celebrated them in passing, thumbs-upping if we caught each others eyes.

Four days later I decided to try out the roads. I mounted up, made it two blocks, turned around, went right back home, and put my bike away. Still not hardcore enough.

Funnily enough, an Internet Cohort of mine successfully completed a ride that same morning, but he did declare it to be scary in the "holy crap" levels.

click through

So this morning I decided to try out the roads again.

And here, in an unsorted list, are some reasons that it was still too soon to brave the roads!

• I fell off my bike!
  
  It happened really fast. The road looked clear, but apparently there was a well placed patch of ice that kicked my bike right out from under me. I was instantly put down, gently, on my side on the road, and I think I even continued to pedal air for a second before I realized I was no longer upright, much less no longer on my bike, which lay about a foot to my left.


• A truck slid towards me on the ice!
  
  The truck approaching from my right was going slowly and only slid probably six inches, and successfully stopped at its stop sign as I continued through the intersection. Still, I think that's one of the most nerve-wracking things you can see while on a bike.


• The bike lanes were full of slush and unrideable!
  
  This was the first time I noticed how badly the city bus tears up the bike lane! At nearly every bus stop, a wide pile of slush and ice had been smeared and frozen across the lane where the bus had pulled back out into traffic.
  
  I eventually settled into a pattern of riding mostly in the traffic lane, and periodically sliding over into the odd patch of clear bike lane to let traffic pass.

Over all, the ride was manageable. I'll probably keep doing it and am glad I'll be able to get some riding in until the next time it snows and freezes. After two or three days in a row, I just get to feeling uncomfortable being boxed into having to use the car.

Mariposa Bike Lanes

Another ceremonial ribbon cutting for another new bike lane! This one was on Mariposa Street, and was based out of Lincoln Park, which is just a little bit outside my sphere of familiarity: I've only ridden past Lincoln Park once or twice.

A crude map of the area in question.

BikeDenver's announcement of the event.

The ride started just outside Lincoln Park with the ceremonial ribbon cutting.



Note, first of all, the thin red carpet spread across the width of the bike lane. This is BikeDenver.org's all purpose red carpet. It has been rolled out at pretty much every function of theirs I've been to, even if it's just bike parking. It is awesome.

And now, a closer look at who the folks are in the photograph.

1. Me. Behind the car and outside the frame of the picture.


2. John Hayden, Denver realtor and member of the mayor's Bicycle Advisory Committee. He was at the ribbon cutting for the MLK bike lanes.


3. An especially Nordic looking member of the Denver Housing Authority. This picture doesn't do him a lot of justice; he was the size of a small car.


4. Councilperson Judy Montero, whose write-up of the event can be found here.


5. Ismael Guerrero, Executive Director of the Denver Housing Authority.


6. Somebody I thought I recognized, but it turns out now that I don't, but I had already labeled her in the picture, so ... sorry.

The ride itself was pleasant. It showed riders recommended ways to get from Lincoln Park to downtown to the high school to the Light Rail and back to the park, where there were Clif Bars and cupcakes.

I fell in beside a jolly old couple at one point in time to hear the gentleman exclaim that it is easier to bike in Denver than in Asheville, North Carolina! I have visited Asheville and thought it was lovely, so I chatted with him about the area for a moment. He turned out to be Senior City Planner Emily Kreisa's dad, in town for a visit.

If during the course of your job you get to go on a nice, slow bike ride through downtown with your mom and dad, then you've got a pretty sweet job. Well done, Emily. And, your folks are cute. I liked it when your mom was noticing out loud which foot everybody put down when they stopped.

---

And then towards the end of the ride, a funny thing happened.

The peloton had just come to a four-way stop when this car behind us whipped over across the double yellows and into the opposing lane.

Ironically, he had his left turn blinker on, in full dutiful compliance with the traffic law. While sitting on the wrong side of the road, in flippant disregard of that traffic law. It was obvious that the driver was of two minds when it came to following the rules of the road, and that he couldn't be trusted.

So he was intent on executing a left hand turn, but so were we. The peloton, taking advantage of the right-of-way to which, as law abiding citizens of the road, we were entitled, began its left hand turn. The driver, should he simultaneously execute his turn, would have to continue driving down the English side of the road until he had passed the entire group, at which point he could merge--probably while signally properly--back into the proper lane.

Unfortunately for him, he never got that far. When he initially pulled up to the intersection, he unbeknowingly pulled up alongside the two bike cops who were leading our ride, one of whom immediately shouted a stern and impressively coppy "HEY!" and corralled him.



I rode on, swept down stream by the bike current, and didn't see the conclusion of that interaction. I doubt he was ticketed because I saw the cop again shortly thereafter, but I believe the motorist won't soon be repeating that maneuver!

Distracted driving

It's a hot topic. It was described in shocking detail in Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic.



And, I mean, it has its own dot gov site.



A dot gov website featuring, naturally, the most celebrated and multi-modal friendly Secretary of Transportation of all time, Ray LaHood.



And this year, congress declared April National Distracted Driving Awareness Month after passing a resolution introduced by Colorado's own Betsy Markey.

Most discussion of distracted driving concerns drivers of automobiles. Which is fair to a degree because the most gross examples of it are kind of unique to automobiles. Meaning, you can't fiddle with the stereo while shaving on a bicycle.

But that doesn't mean even a little bit that distracted driving is limited to drivers of automobiles. I've seen bikers doing it, and it seems I'm noticing it more and more. Others are noticing it too; several states with laws regulating cell phone use in cars are considering extending those restrictions to cyclists.

Which makes sense. It would be consistent with the expectation that the rules of the road apply to cyclists and motorists in equal measures. I don't see any downside to saying you can't text while biking. It's a little invasive, but so are seat belt laws.

And it would prevent the scene I saw yesterday.



That's a photo I took with my one-of-a-kind handlebar-mounted MS PAINT GOOGLE MAPS camera. It's a photo of a dude on a bike flying down the new bike lane on MLK Blvd. He exhibits perfect posture. And he has both eyes and both hands on his cell phone.

Clearly this is distracted driving. And it's happening on one of the busier streets you're likely to come across in this area.

And it's happening because of the false sense of security of the bike lane.

A couple months ago, there were no bike lanes on MLK, and you rarely saw a cyclist there because of the thick, fast traffic. Now there are bike lanes and the shift from scary to bike-friendly was almost instantaneous. You see a ton of cyclists on it. They obviously now feel safe on this road.

It takes a certain amount of hubris and a certain feeling of invulnerability in order to engage in distracted driving, because it is a willful choice to fish your phone out of your pocket or to start putting on your makeup. Bike lanes, similar to being nestled deep within three tons of steel, can provide such a false feeling of security that you see things like the above gentleman, oblivious to his surroundings and flying down one of Denver's busiest streets.

Vehicular cyclists, who take the lane and otherwise share the road with motorists, must be actively engaged with their surroundings in order to survive their rides. It's unlikely for them to engage in distracted driving.

So if you want to reduce distracted driving among cyclists, and assuming a primary function of bike lanes are to make novice cyclists feel more comfortable on the road, take the funds set aside for installing new bike lanes and divert them to classes aimed at making the novice cyclist feel more comfortable on the road.

MLK B-LANES

So some new bike lanes went up on MLK Blvd a while ago. When they first went in, I was critical of them. "MLK is so busy, and cars just fly down it." Also, 29th Ave is bike route D6, a nice wide enjoyable route. (MLK is effectively 32nd Ave, only three blocks north of 29th.)

I hadn't ridden these bike lanes, and no plans to before hearing about the "Bike Lane Unveiling" that was planned one Friday morning. (Bikedenver's announcement here.) It sounded like it would be a hoot, so I turned out in Stapleton the morning of the event.



The Denver Bikerati were out in scores. Attendees and special guests included the Bike Depot's Chris Dunn (whose infant son wore the tiniest helmet and sunglasses, and had a kick-ass handlebar seat behind a large protective windshield), councilpersons Carla Madsen and Michael Hancock (both of whom rode b-cycles during the ride), bikedenver's Piep van Heuven (who is always awesome and fun to chat with), Senior City Planner Emily Kreisa, and others.

Clif Bar and Starbucks were both there handing out their wares. Some Stapleton neighborhood group was giving out bananas.

There was a lady there promoting a local car share program. She had a large beautiful dog next to the car, and I have to admit I felt as though I had been mislead when she admitted to me that the shared cars don't all come with large beautiful dogs. DANG!

There was also somebody there leading the crowd, which initially consisted of but one person, in pre-ride yoga exercises.


Councilperson M. Hancock on the left. Co-worker o' Mine D. W. on the right.

Incidentally, there was a five year old in the yoga crowd who could yoga the hell out of some yoga. All the adults were embarrassed of their own yoga when they saw this five year old busting out his own kick-ass yoga. He was like the Michael Jordan of basketball yoga, and everybody else was the Michael Jordan of minor league baseball yoga.

Some speakers did some speakin', during which it was spelled out to me what was significant and special about about the MLK bike lanes: they create the only continuous, newbie-friendly route between downtown Denver and Park Hill/Stapleton.

Once it was explained to me that way, I immediately ceased being critical of the MLK bike lanes. Suddenly, I was appreciative of them, and I admired them, and I valued them. They suddenly became awesome.

Some red string--perhaps it was a ribbon--was strung across the front of the podium where all the speakin' occured. Eleven or eight Important People were given tiny scissors, and together they cut the "ribbon" and the bike lanes were "opened."

The lanes had been painted and dry at least a week prior, and the cutting occurred several blocks from the beginning of the lanes. But nobody thought it appropriate to mention such things, and we all clapped and cheered instead. Hooray!

Then, soon, it was time to mount up (it means "get on your horses") and ride from Stapleton, down MLK and eventually along Champa, where we would end at Curtis Park. (Event map.)

It was a ride largely parallel to my daily commute, so it was familiar. But it was in orders of magnitude faster than usual. The reason being that we had a three car police escort through town, stopping cross traffic and ushering us through intersections. I guess that's the kind of service you get when city councilpersons are leading your bike ride.

Immediately I became accustomed to the VIP treatment, and every ride I have taken since then has been comparatively inferior and decidedly spoiled by the lack of fanfare and flashing lights.

The ride down MLK was fine. Somewhere between Steele (halfway through the phantom projection of City Park, blocks to the south) and York (exiting the phantom park) the bike lane ends and is replaced by a couple of sharrows. Which is fine for any experienced rider. But assuming these bike lanes exist for the novice Stapleton commuter, it might be somewhat unnerving to suddenly be thrust into traffic that heretofore had been driving mindlessly along without having to think of or otherwise consider the bikes that had been sectioned off and segregated in their own special private little bike lanes.

I don't recall seeing any "Bike Lane Ends" kind of sign. I think drivers and cyclists alike could benefit from one at that point.

When we arrived at Curtis Park, bikedenver had a booth set up with freebies and good will for all. There was also a cupcake truck! (I had the chocolate one because omg chocolate.)



Bikedenver unveiled (as far as this blogger is concerned) their new logo and branding. I told Piep it looked awesome, and she responded thankful that a macho dude such as I didn't find the cool blues too feminine.

So there ya go. A clear shot from downtown to Stapleton now exists.

The next question I have now is when will Stapleton get its first b-cycle station?

Don't want to use them, but don't want them to go away

As winter approaches, I begin avoiding bike lanes because they tend to fill up with snow, slush, leaves, and other debris.

But I don't want to contribute to the notion or to any statistics about bike infrastructure not being used.

How to I reconcile these two conflicting desires?

Hazards of the separated lane: bikes go in the street!

Today's ride left me feeling like I should from time to time carry a broom and a dustpan with me on my commute.

There was so much broken glass at so many points along the way.

On roads where there were bike lanes, it was in the bike lane. On roads where there was no bake lane, it was in the furthermost third of the road where bikes tend to ride.

It was like there was a bottle smashing party last night!

It made me think about the approaching winter, and how when after it snows around here, the plows shove all the ice and snow and slush directly into the bike lane, rendering it useless in its inaccessibility.

Which is I guess what must happen to some extent now, with broken glass being the snow and regular traffic being the plows.

The regular flow of traffic probably contributes to all that crap being deposited in the way of bike traffic.

Which leads me to the ultimate conclusion that bike lanes just aren't the best thing for cyclists or for motorists.

Cyclists get a false sense of security from a piece of infrastructure that tends to act as a gutter on the side of the road, and motorists get the false—and dangerous—assumption that cyclists go on a special little section of the road, not on the "real" road, and so they don't have to watch out for them as much. And that they're not any more a part of traffic than rollerbladers or joggers.

I don't agree with John Forester about everything, but I do agree that bikes belong on the road, proper. And not on special bike lanes.

---

Incidentally, one of the guys at Salvagetti said that when he realizes he just rolled over some glass, he swings his foot out and lets his shoe rub on the tire for a few revolutions because "it's not the initial contact with the glass, it's the grinding it in that happens next."

I'm dubious of the actual effectiveness of this, but I keep doing it. Mostly because it gives you something to do. Otherwise, if you don't immediately dismount and check your tires for punctures, you just groan and swear and keep riding.

I'll tell you what, it's a feat of contortion to do that with fenders!