Picture your bike here:
Photo credit: Cotton Valley Trail Committee
Riding in on the Cotton Valley Trail on Sunday morning, I studied the faces of the pedestrians walking toward me, or glimpsed from the side as I tried to overtake them courteously in the extremely narrow confines of the poorly designed trail. Nearly every one of them displayed annoyance. I've seen the same thing every time I encounter walkers on the trail. Some are relatively cheerful about maneuvering past each other. Others radiate hostility.
The previous day, the station area teemed with railcar users, queueing up to roll out toward Wakefield. They eyed me as if they knew I was the one who had written critical blog posts about the trail for all these years. The first one, in 2009, got some blowback. Now they either don't see or don't bother to swat the fly that can't hurt them.
On the narrow sections of the Cotton Valley Trail, whether constrained by the rails or hemmed in by unkempt vegetation and eroded or overgrown edges, I'm not too happy to see a cyclist either, and they don't look too happy to see me. We can't even share a commiserating glance, because we each have to focus exclusively on holding a straight, smooth line while we teeter next to a rail and a dropoff.
The non-cyclist answer to any situation in which the riding is dicey is to tell the rider to dismount and walk. In their vision, the bike vanishes as soon as the rider is no longer on it. On a wider trail, a rider would have room to walk the bike, but a wider trail would also allow the rider to stay mounted and still give more clearance to walkers and other pedalers. When traffic is heavy on the path, a rider would be on and off the bike more often than a cyclocrosser in training. And a rider next to a bike essentially becomes two people walking side by side. The only way to fit in a narrower space would be to pop the bike up on the back tire and wheel it in front of you. That might look alarmingly aggressive to the more sensitive pedestrians, especially dog walkers.
At the first railed section toward Wolfeboro from 109, I heard the motor of one of the small rail cars. As if to prove a point after my post on August 13, the club suddenly got the urge to make a foray on the section they hardly ever use. I had nipped onto a pretty side trail for a brief personal errand, so I simply delayed my re-entry onto the main path until the motorized overlords had passed. Unlike on most multi-use paths, where cyclists still yield to everyone, but pedestrians are the top dogs, on the Cotton Valley Trail, all non-motorized users are playing on active rails, where the trains have precedence over all:
These rules mean that anyone who gets caught in the middle of a causeway or other railed section -- a cyclist towing kids in a trailer, a family pushing a stroller, a handicapped person on their electric scooter or muscling along in their wheelchair -- is required to get off and scramble down the embankment or reverse rapidly so as not to impede the passage of the motorized vehicles that are the primary trail users. So that bottom line on the rules, stating that no motorized vehicles are allowed except for motorized wheelchairs, is actually untrue. Only competing motor vehicles are forbidden. All other users are subordinate to the motorized rail cars.
These are the rules. You don't argue about the rules. Just understand the agreement you have accepted. These terms of service are a lot shorter and more clearly stated than the average agreement we all check off blithely to download free apps or sign on to secure websites that handle all of our finances. You're playing on the railroad tracks. Trains are rare, but they are also not required to follow any kind of fixed schedule around which you can plan. Be ready to dive into the swamp or scramble down the rocks when required.
People tend to be more sympathetic to families with kids. But if you are an individual adult rider, expect no courtesy, even if the railed section is short and you clearly established yourself in it before the rail car arrived at the lower exit to it. And even a trailer full of offspring or a stroller similarly laden is no guarantee. According to the rules, they owe you nothing.
2 comments:
Human misery increases with the square or the group size, if moving then by the cube. Misery guaranteed.
The sooner the schools are back the better, roll on autumn.
The trail is a great resource for people who want to do something non-motorized and fairly tame. It also cuts a handy corridor for people to use for transportation. Unfortunately, its design flaws hamper its usefulness for both transportational cycling and for play. Traffic plummets after late August... but it doesn't go away completely until darkness and cold clamp down. Then encounters with other people tend to be more unsettling than sociable. Not that they're very sociable now, when a cyclist gets the hairy eyeball from every other user. But light and life are more cheerful than frigid isolation. Sometimes I want nothing more than solitude. Other times I wouldn't mind if it was a little less stark and indifferent.
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