Regarding Dave Moulton...

Know this right from the outset. I have the sensitivity of the average cinder block and as much subtlety as a punch in the nose.

Now, if you're thinking this is a case of one old dog honoring another's point, there's some truth in that. Those of us who write our opinions and post them in public have to be somewhat thick skinned. This was driven home for me when I posted what I thought was an innocuous piece in a local newsletter. Some of the responses were extremely rude, questioning my intelligence and even my children's parentage. People said things they wouldn't dare say in person, hiding behind a pseudonym or the ever-popular 'anonymous' post. One rule I've followed in all my posts – if you wouldn't say it face-to-face, don't say it on-line.

“Honest, officer. I was just cleaning my fist when it went off and hit him right in the nose!”

I've written about rights and responsibility as they apply to cycling. Let's extend that to writing. Each of us has the right to speak our mind, and in fact, I believe we have a duty to do so in some situations. And I believe conflicting ideas should be discussed, because conflict forces us to think, and thinking is a Very Good Thing. Merely shouting slogans at each other is not a substitute for dialogue yet it seems to be the most common avenue of discourse these days. We're poorer for it.

Dave Moulton wrote a piece about 'masculinists' and took a lot of flack for posting it. I'd read it in passing and although it was a bit different from his usual posts, I didn't find anything offensive in it. Some of the comments, though, read as if western civilization could end due to Dave's ideas. Some were huffy and immediately dropped their subscriptions to his blog. I suspect their underwear is a couple of sizes too small, but that's merely speculation on my part. Regardless, the implication was almost childish. “See things my way or I'll take my marbles and go home!”

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Here on CycleDog, you'll find a simple point of view. Much of the content is opinion, and like Dave, I'm old enough to speak my mind and not worry about the consequences. I'm not here trying to get laid or butter someone up for a job change. I really don't care if someone takes offense.

Engaging in a dialogue requires we adhere to some rules, the very first of which should involve treating your opponent with ordinary civility. Small courtesies are the grease and oil of our social interactions, serving to reduce conflict and engender respect. Dave allows anonymous posts. I do not. Partly that has to do with squelching comment spam, but it also enforces a minimum level of accountability. Just as we are accountable for the contents of our posts, any of you choosing to comment should be responsible also.

Dave wrote that American men have little style sense about clothing. It's true. Americans are slobs. If you need proof, just pick a spot outside a department store, a coffee shop, or a mall and count the people who dress nicely. They're a tiny minority. Don't pick a spot outside WalMart especially if you're already depressed.

Once long ago, I worked for an Austrian ski retailer. He was appalled at the slovenly Americans who trooped in the front door and he reserved his most scathing criticism for American tourists in Europe. Naturally, he didn't breathe a word of this while he smiled and took their money.

Even so, I can't get too worked up about it even though I'm a member of the slob majority. I'm usually in work clothes even when off-duty because I won't hesitate to get down in the dirt or slide under a car. Mary says I'm particularly destructive toward trousers and shoes.

Dave wrote - “But my old tee shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops, are comfortable, you say. Let me ask you this; how would you feel if women, started dressing in this fashion? No make-up, or hair style, no attractive shoes and clothes. For me the world would become a dull and less beautiful place.”

I'm really tempted to write something facetious about how women dress stylishly (for the most part) until after they get married. That's when they forego make-up, styled hair, and attractive shoes and clothes, especially if there are little children in the house. I know when my kids were small, we covered the essentials and struggled to get enough sleep. Mary's provocative lingerie went away a long time ago. When it's cold these days, she sleeps in one of my sweat suits. “They're warm and comfortable”, she said. These are about as sexy and attractive as, well, a sweat suit. But she stays warm and that's what counts.

I have old school habits, ones ingrained since childhood as yet another set of ordinary courtesies. I (gasp!) hold doors for women. I (oh the horror!) call young women 'honey' if I know them. I even reach for items on high shelves and offer to carry heavy stuff. Now before some of my more liberated female readers start having a hissy about my ingrained attitude reeking of male domination, let's make something perfectly clear. This isn't about you. It's about me. It's about treating people with ordinary courtesy, courtesies taught at a young age and allowing me to maintain a connection with those men and women who went before me. It's about honoring my father, my mother, and especially my wife. Opening a door or offering a hand when they get up from a chair isn't about showing my own superiority. Far from it. I was there when my children were born. Mary is tougher than I can ever hope to be, and while she's perfectly able to open a door for herself, I prefer to do it for her if only as a small way of showing my love and respect.

So, I'm an old fart with old habits that won't change easily. I don't respond well to attempts at pressure or intimidation. Let's put that down to having been a sprinter once upon a time, and sprinters, as you should know, are not noted for their anger management skills. The thin veneer of civility can be surprisingly fragile. But if I write something you find offensive, rude, arrogant, or simply wrong-headed, don't hesitate to comment about it. Just keep it civil.

Response to Paul Dorn

(Sigh) Normally, I skip over the passive-aggressive aspects of condescension, and go directly to ridicule, mockery, and sarcasm. Why waste time? While it's certainly fun, it does nothing to shepherd an argument along. And I use the term ‘argument’ in the formal sense – a reasoned discussion. Besides, Mary gives me that over-the-top-of-the-glasses look when I indulge my low taste in sarcasm, so I suppose she's a moderating influence. I take pains to avoid the wrath of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

With that in mind, I discarded my hasty response to Mr. Dorn in favor of the following.

Apparently Mr. Dorn equates advocacy with facilities. "I support bicycle education. But it is no substitute for advocacy." Paint and pavers exist to 'give the people what they want' and what they want are bike lanes because so-called advocacy organizations have told them so for better than 30 years. They fear riding in traffic, and ‘advocates’ like Mr. Dorn reinforce their fears by telling them about our “hostile streets”. Most cyclists are totally unaware of bicycling education, and 'advocates' like Mr. Dorn - despite his LCI credentials - would prefer they remain blissfully ignorant. So it's more than a little disingenuous to suggest that vehicular cycling is an old way of thinking. Most cyclists have never been exposed to it. It’s a startling revelation when they discover that riding in traffic isn't a terribly fearful experience.


Facts, however interesting, are irrelevant.
The paint and pave types can't get through a paragraph without hyping the supposed danger of riding a bicycle. “The sad reality is that bicyclists in much of auto-centric America face hostile street conditions.” If it's so dangerous, where are all the bodies? They pick statistics very selectively to support their positions, or if the data doesn’t fit their predetermined outcome, it’s ignored. This isn’t confined to bicycling advocacy. It’s a common characteristic of advocacy groups. In the absence of hard data, there’s always a temptation to substitute anecdotes or analogies.

Studies of cycling risk have widely varying conclusions. The risk per mile traveled makes cycling look far more dangerous than riding in a car, yet the risk per hour of exposure makes it look less. We could try to compare the injuries and deaths per unit of population, but it’s hard to obtain an accurate figure on the number of cyclists in this country. I’ve seen estimates from 40 to 80 million, and in statistical terms, that qualifies as a wild-assed-guess. Frankly, I don’t know of a way to correlate the differing figures, but my seat-of-the-pants estimation – my own wild-assed-guess - is that riding a bicycle is a little more dangerous than driving a car because motorists seldom topple over, but it's far less dangerous than riding a motorcycle. Still, hyping the danger serves no one, unless you're a so-called advocacy group using fear to drive up membership and grab a bigger slice of publicly funded pie.

Mr. Dorn linked bicycling education with this: “…note the "success" of motorist education--42,000 deaths a year and counting.” It implies that education is ineffective in reducing injuries and deaths. Yet even a casual study of cyclists finds that experienced cyclists have far less chance of crashing than young cyclists or novice adults. Presumably, Mr. Dorn read this in Effective Cycling when he received his LCI certification. Perhaps he’s forgotten.


It’s not about the money…
A friend and vehicular cycling advocate was on her way into a meeting with an elected official when she was stopped by some paint and pave types who advised her to keep quiet during the meeting, so they could get the funding they wanted. Whether their pet projects were a responsible use of public funds was a question they didn't want to answer. As citizens, we demand that government use our money wisely. If a public project is intended to benefit only a small portion of road users, and its intended for the exclusive use of those users, is it a responsible use of taxpayer’s money? If we built a road for the exclusive use of Lexus drivers, the taxpayers who paid for it would be justifiably outraged. Bike lanes are no different.


Build it and they will come....
When a new bike lane is established, facilities advocates happily announce it increased cycling in the area. But did it actually increase the number of cyclists, or did it merely attract existing cyclists from nearby streets onto the new facility? As far as I’m aware, there are no studies that quantify the issue. Until such studies exist, claims that new bike lanes increase the number of cyclist are just so much supposition.


Money vs. numbers of cyclists.
There was a small increase in cycling deaths in 2005. Some shrill voices were raised decrying the increase. Is this attributable to increased numbers of cyclists (presumably due to sharply higher fuel prices)? Is it a normal variation, or is some other factor responsible? Paint and pavers hype the increase without looking for the underlying cause. It’s irresponsible, but it's another example of selectively using statistics.

In the 1990s, spending for bike/ped facilities increased tenfold yet the number of cyclists remained relatively flat – if we assume (always hazardous in statistics) that the number of cyclists in the US is reflected in the number of new bikes sold. Why didn't spending more money on facilities cause a corresponding increase in the number of cyclists? The build it and they will come argument is a fallacy.

One definition of insanity is performing the same actions over and over, expecting different results. If spending more and more money doesn't result in more cyclists on our streets, why do we continue spending the money?


San Francisco’s modal increase: a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” argument…
Mr. Dorn touts the increase in modal split in SF as evidence that bikelanes increase the number of cyclists on the street. “…San Francisco, which is the only city in the US to have seen a doubling of bicycling for transportation according to U.S. Census Bureau.” On the surface, this would appear to be true, but it ignores other contributing factors. For instance, the cost of living in SF is very high. It was once the most expensive city to live in, but may have been surpassed by Boston and DC. Still, when you have to cover housing and food, automobile transportation comes in a distant third. When you consider the availability of public transportation and the headaches of parking, a bicycle becomes a far more attractive transportation mode. So touting bike lanes while ignoring simple economics may be misleading.

If I recall correctly, the US Census indicated that 3% of all trips in Oklahoma are made by bicycle. Personal observation causes me to question that, since if it were true, I’d expect to see several hundred bicyclists arriving at the maintenance base each morning. Yet there are only a handful. How did the Census arrive at that figure?


Conclusion…
“In reality all cyclists do both, change and cope. They cope with existing conditions as they endeavor to change them. But clearly the path to a more bicyclist-friendly U.S. is to pursue change.”

I think that Mr. Dorn and I share a common goal – to see more cyclists using our streets and roads. We differ widely on how to achieve that goal, yet we’d agree that change is necessary.

It’s easy for an advocacy group to point at a strip of concrete and tout what they’ve accomplished for cyclists. It far more difficult to point out some cyclists and tout their bicycling education as an accomplishment. Changed behavior is far less obvious than that concrete slab. The existence of the concrete is a memorial to the efforts of the paint and pave groups, not unlike a tombstone. Ten years from now, let’s hope that those crumbling tombstones are all that remain of paint and pave advocacy.

Marsha and her chainsaw...

Wouldn’t you know it? I haven’t been on the commuter bike for about 10 days, not since the winter weather rolled in on November 29^th. The ride home that day was cold and wet, directly into a stiff north wind. The bike sat in the garage on the floor stand since then.

Naturally, when I went out to the garage to ride it to work today, it had a flat tire! Now, why didn’t I notice that last night as I cleaned and lubed the chain? It was a minor annoyance. I simply swapped the front wheel from the Bianchi and set off for work.

This morning I had a moderate headwind from the south. The temperature was an almost balmy 55F and I was working hard – and sweating hard – within a few miles. My anorak billowed like a parachute, adding even more drag going into the wind. To make matters worse, I had the theme from “The Brady Bunch” going round and round in my head. It was irritating and slightly maddening, but the tempo fit with my cadence as I ground along, and it distracted me from the effort a little bit. I toyed with alterations to the lyrics, some of them definitely obscene and others quite gruesome.

“Mrs. Brady – liked her brandy – and she downed it by the gallon every week.”

The roads were still wet in places, with treacherously slick railroad tracks and water-filled potholes. I had to pay strict attention to them too, and again, that helped get my mind off the wind.

When I finally arrived at the north gate, there was a brand new guard standing in the roadway glaring at me. He insisted I slow down almost to a stop so he could scrutinize my identification badge. Motorists, of course, just hold their badges up to the windshield and get waved through, but you never know when some pesky cyclist could be a terrorist.

“Just then Marsha – got out her chainsaw – and she hacked him into little tiny bits.”

Regardless, I made it in on time.

Not all my time was spent on the fun-filled lyrics, however. I thought about the dependency that’s fomented by some of our so-called advocacy groups. There were a few items I’d read over the weekend that kind of percolated for a while. One was written by a cyclist who bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t get from A to B on her bike because there were no bike lanes connecting the two. So she was ‘forced’ to drive somewhere to ride her bicycle. There were a couple of pieces with the usual ‘you can’t ride ABC Street because it’s too dangerous/too fast/too narrow/ too whatever’.

Many cyclists think this way and too many of our alleged advocacy groups encourage them to do so. They hype the danger of riding in traffic because their agenda calls for bike lanes on every street and roadway in the nation. Never mind if this is good for the community, good for cyclists, or good for the taxpayers. It’s VERY good for the organizations involved. Thunderhead Alliance, Bikes Belong, and sadly, even the League of American Bicyclists endorse such projects.

These bike lane proponents claim to have the needs of cyclists in mind when in fact their projects are mainly beneficial to motorists. Bike lanes do not serve the real needs of cyclists because they encourage a timid, subservient attitude in the cyclists who use them. Organizations who endorse such projects reinforce the attitude that cyclists are not meant to use our public roads and that cyclists have an inferior right to those roads. In the civil rights era, they would have been referred to as ‘Uncle Toms’. For those of you too young to remember, that’s an epithet – not a nice thing.

So the message here is to know your place, and don’t expect much more. That is, don’t expect much more unless you join the organization and send in your dues. It really does revolve around the politics of fear. In this case, the fear comes from riding in traffic, and rather than try to overcome the fear, these organizations prefer to pursue government-funded facilities. That’s fine, but the ever-increasing amount of TEA-21 money has not produced a corresponding increase in the number of cyclists. It’s money that could go to other projects that benefit today’s road cyclists.

Imagine for a moment that bicycling education programs received even a tenth of the TEA-21 money. We could reach into the schools with something like “Road User Education”, a curriculum to educate students regarding motor vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians, in effect providing them with the information regarding the proper way to share our public roads. This would involve multiple perspectives including all modes of travel. It’s very true that the world changes when you see it through someone else’s eyes.

OK. I’m done ranting for today. I’ll go back to contemplating Marsha and her chainsaw.