Heavy traffic

Cyclists are used to being at or near the bottom of the food chain out on the road. Even so, I'm more comfortable there than in the confined space of a path with multiple user types and lots of slower riders.

I seldom see other riders on my commute. When I do, it's usually another lone rider or a very small group of athletic adults. We sort out by pace with little or no conversation unless it's someone I already know, or a particularly loquacious stranger. That is one weird thing about riding: you're not in a sealed capsule. I'm no more inclined to get chatty with someone on my bike commute than I would be in my car. Mind you, I have a lot to say, usually profane, about the other drivers I'm stuck with, but I consider it a good thing that they can't hear me. The reverse is probably true. On the bike I care more about keeping my breathing nice and steady while I focus on safe maneuvering around tons of steel piloted by idiots and psychopaths that I'm trusting with my life. We casually throw great masses around at speeds no human could achieve 200 years ago unless they fell off a cliff. And road cyclists go out there throwing elbows with them. It's just another normal day.

On my way home last Wednesday, a rider I hadn't seen in a while was coming southbound as I headed north on Route 28. We exchanged waves. A little further north, near the top of a climb, I passed two other riders stopped on the side of the road. A man and a woman, looked to be in their twenties, wearing please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests, stood astride flat-bar hybrids, talking about something. I grunted a greeting with what breath I could spare as I made the last few pedal strokes to the crest. On the flats beyond, I saw two more riders, similarly kitted and equipped. Once I passed them, I saw two more another couple hundred meters ahead. Okay, nice summer day, and there's a small surge in touring interest.

Past the height of land I geared up and bore down a comfortable amount, relishing the tailwind. For an old fart, I was hammering. I had to laugh, though, at my memory of Tom (Thomas) Prehn looking over and saying, "You've got a higher gear still" as I tried to hang with him during time trail training in 1980. He was kind enough to ride with us local dubs for his long easy rides and the kind of interval training where we would quickly regroup. This was the first -- and only -- time I tried to stick with him when he was putting on a serious burn for ten miles. I was able to stay on his wheel, but he never bothered to let me pull through again. Rising through the grades in bike racing, the steps are exponential, not incremental.

The descent from the peak of 28 to the circle at Route 171 is about two miles. It levels off for a while, but the trend continues helpfully downward. A tailwind makes it even better. Coming off of two rest days, I felt about as good as someone my age can feel. Decades of habit propelled me. Habit maintains momentum on the flat quarter-mile approach to the circle. I back off a little so that I have reserves to deal with any motorist hassles going through it. Intersections are very stressful for a road rider. The circle has four of them.

From a quarter mile back I saw a thick congregation of please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests and helmets on what looked like about twenty riders heading through the circle. They extended from the inrun all the way to the exit continuing on 28 north. I saw no motor vehicles. I entered the chute at about 22 mph. The tour group was hugging the right line. I stayed well to the left and coasted down to about 18. Even at that, I passed them like they were standing still. I greeted the first few as I caught them, and said hey to what looked like the leaders at the front, before accelerating gradually away. At my age, acceleration is always gradual. But from the exclamations I heard from some of the tourists I must have seemed fast.

I usually hammer through the circle as fast as I can. Get to it, get through it, get clear of any motorist conflicts. This may be more or less stressful depending on how many motorists are actually there. They can arrive abruptly, speeding in from any of four directions, sometimes multiple directions. Then they might travel around a quarter, half, or three quarters of the circle at the best speed they can manage, because no one likes to linger in it, no matter what their wheels and propulsion system are. I might even be holding one back because they caught up to me too late for me to send them ahead of me.

The first riders to see me expressed astonishment at my pace. I'm no top tier athlete, but normal people are slow. On a competitive scale I'm solidly mediocre at best, but normal people don't care about the competitive scale at all. I don't either, anymore. I just have the residual benefits of having cared about it in the past.

I wasn't trying to prove a point. I was just trying to escape from the embarrassment of socializing and the delay of being stuck in their clot. I'm very happy to see people claiming their space on the road. I still want to maintain my pace and get home. Or to work, depending on the time of day.

Almost every other time I've encountered other riders on my route, they have been competitive cyclists, even if they weren't in their active racing years, or experienced tourists. Their pace and bike handling reflect that. Even when I've passed casual riders they have not been in large groups.

This group had an advantage at the circle because their large group clearly held the territory. That could enhance their safety or it could inspire the kind of violence we hear about all too frequently, where a road-raging driver rams a group of riders with murderous intent. On Wednesday, however, the circle seemed miraculously deserted. I don't know if their luck held, because I resumed hammering and didn't look back. I generally figure the less people see of me the better.

At home, the cellist told me that she had seen a similar group headed north on Elm Street in the morning. She had hung back until they reached a straight enough stretch to allow her to drive past them safely. She thought one of the kids flipped her off. They seemed like camp groups.

She also asked me if I'd announced I was passing on their left or anything like that. It never occurred to me to do so. I don't talk to other road users in the course of a normal ride. The only talking that went on in road races was trash talk for the most part. Who had the breath to speak when launching an attack? I'm crap as a racer, but I'm in race/combat mode on the road, unless I happen to merge with one of the very few people I know, and our schedules and strengths allow for it. She said that the school where she works holds group ride training before their spring overnight tour, including communication. They also do much of their route on well-developed paths in the Wilmington, Delaware, area. They have to follow path protocols for courtesy and safety.

Courtesy and safety when riding among motorists is almost entirely nonverbal. I do my best to ride a smooth, controlled line that allows drivers to get by me and go bother somebody else. I figure the longer they have to stay behind me the more they'll hate me. Things go pretty smoothly on that basis. However, I can't control the drivers who for whatever reason feel obliged to hang back there for a ridiculous amount of time. It tickles the vanity to imagine they're admiring my power and expertise. How likely is that? Maybe they're just groping under the seat for the 9mm that slid inconveniently out of reach until they finally say "fuck it" and drive past me. I have no way of knowing.

I seem to have one secret admirer on Elm Street. Two or three times last year, a minivan hung back literally for miles, creating an unwilling audience of drivers caught behind them while they shadowed me through the dips and turns. I was feeling frisky on those evenings, doing a pretty good job, but hardly challenging motorist speeds for the entire distance that they stayed back. Then, last Friday, there they were again.

It started with a sense of presence. Their vehicle is not loud, and they don't follow closely. After a couple of minutes I heard someone laying on the horn, but it wasn't right behind me. I was riding fast, but hugging the right line, even in some rough sections. I didn't hammer any of the short climbs that interrupt what is basically a series of fast little downhills for three miles. I eased up on the sort of straight parts, hoping they would get the hint. Finally, they came through, followed by all of the unwilling participants. To their credit, none of them took it out on me. That has not always been the case.

Squeezers

 Dammit, I let them piss me off. Not bird-flipping pissed off, but spurred to foolish exertion.

Squeezers are always a problem. They squeeze past in narrow lanes. They squeeze through at intersections. One of the unwritten laws of driving is that a motorist gets to pass a cyclist wherever they want. Regardless of the real law, waiting behind a pedaler is completely optional. I'm used to it.

The law in many places, and traffic cycling methodology in general, supports riders who engage in traffic control measures to enforce safe passing clearances. Before these laws, I was already herding traffic. As the principles became more established, I experimented with its limits. For instance, cyclists may take a full lane to clear obstacles and prevent unsafe passing. For much of my route, passing is not technically safe. I tried shutting the gate in most or all of these sections. Motorists responded with annoyance, aggression, and more unsafe passing. Not all of them, of course, but the one or two willing subjects who would stay back inevitably corked up a flood of less happy drivers who would let me know how they felt when they finally got to pass. Most of the time, I only hold drivers back on the final approach to an intersection where I expect to roll through the stop sign ahead of them. They can then pass me on the next stretch with less stress to both of us.

Summer brings higher traffic volume. After 36 years riding the same route, I have all of the corners dialed in, not just for fun but to preserve my momentum. Summer traffic breaks the flow. So last Friday, as I pushed hard to make it to work on time, I felt the strain of matching my speed to the fluctuations of the crowded lane beside me on the way in Center Street to the right turn onto Lehner Street. Great corner, but you have to watch the drivers from all four directions, plus possibly turning into or out of the gas station on the corner. Then settle in for the long, gradual grind to Glendon Street with its three-way stop.

A lot of drivers who want to get onto Main Street take a left at Union Street rather than going all the way to Glendon. Not on Friday, though. The one driver close behind me passed cleanly heading for the stop sign. The next driver waffled until we had reached that critically awkward distance at which I swing left to cover the lane. I swung left. Waffly swung further to the left, but still hung there, edging up on me. They ended up in the left lane, alarming the oncoming driver in that lane who had every right to expect that it would be clear. Meanwhile, I slipped into pilot fish position on the first vehicle at the stop sign and flowed through the intersection onto Glendon Street. Waffly came through behind me, so I had to push a larger gear than I liked, to prevent him from doing something rude and dangerous before I could snap a right turn onto Depot Street and get onto Central Avenue. These are grand names for pieces of road that are anywhere from forty to 140 meters long. More or less, anyway.

I'd already been squeezed by a dump truck towing a slightly oversized flatbed trailer with a piece of heavy equipment on it, out in the bendy part of Route 28 where it narrows passing the old boat museum. That guy was whizzing along at 45-50, and not too concerned with passing clearance. I was a little fired up. Then I had to manage speeders on Center Street coming down to 190A and the rail trail crosswalk. Now I merged into the stop and go traffic on Main Street, still chasing the clock.

I learned the hard way years ago not to blaze through slow or stopped motor traffic as fast as I can possibly go. It doesn't impress anyone or turn them into cycling advocates, and it can put you in the hospital, or worse. But I do flow through when the motorists jam each other up completely. With all the crosswalks, unpredictable pedestrians, and on-street parking in downtown Wolfeboro, the Death Slot to the right of the travel lane can be a perilous venture. I moved forward a couple of slots at one crosswalk, getting onto a new shark for a few yards to the next full stop. Just ahead I saw a dump truck (no trailer) with that nice tall tailgate offering a draft for the rest of the way to my turn at Mill Street. We might not reach drafting speeds, but that big shark would control the lane nicely. The vehicles right in front of me were sitting at the crosswalk long after it was clear, so I slid past to sprint after the truck.

Unfortunately, the truck must have been empty. It accelerated away from me as I stomped impotently on slightly too big a gear, with my front derailleur cage rubbing on the chain, grind grind grind, a pathetic old fart on a heavy bike, losing a sprint in front of the sidewalk cafe audience. The cars I had passed queued up behind me as I tried to make it look as good as possible going into the Mill Street corner. It wasn't good.

One of the tricks to survival out there among the fire-breathing beasts is to ride within your limits. Good cadence, a little reserve acceleration, relaxed climbing, all present an image of control. Absolute speed is not as important as smoothness. If you let yourself get ragged, drivers will sense that you are at your limit. They'll react as any predator or competitor will when they sense weakness. As long as you seem like you have something in reserve, they have no idea how much. By blowing up in a failed sprint, I threw away all of that. It bugged me for the rest of the day and all night.

Representation matters. Every rider on the road represents all riders. The idiots, the hotheads, the weavers and wobblers and whiners, each one is all of us to the motoring public, who simply see someone on a two-wheeled vehicle with pedals and think, "there's another one." Maybe they differentiate between the kitted-out racer types who need to get a different hobby, and the chaotic grungy ones who just need to get a better job, but I imagine that admiration is the last thing they feel. Nor should that be a goal, when all we really want is the modicum of respect that lets us use the road for our own purposes. I really prefer to go unremarked, insofar as that is possible. See me enough to avoid collision. That's good enough. You can ride slowly with dignity. Not too slowly... at some point, traffic riding as we allow it here and now is too risky for a rider who can't put out a little heat when needed. But you don't need to give up and run away as soon as you no longer have a 35 mph sprint on tap.

Can you afford to have fun?

 A few years ago, as the local mountain bike organization -- to use the term loosely -- was getting more aggressive about building engineered trails, one of their spokespeople would say that developing the trails would attract "people with more disposable income." This spokesperson does competent work with a tractor and a chainsaw, but doesn't depend on them for his very survival. He has always seemed like someone who doesn't have to worry about his personal finances, if you know what I mean.

"Disposable income" is another way to sort people and sift out the undesirables. Whoever they are, they have failed to measure up as potential customers. That's the only yardstick that matters in the US economy.

Bicycles started out as luxury goods way back in the 19th century. Manufacturers were surprised at the volume of sales driven by working class customers who scraped together the coin to have a mode of transportation that extended their shoe-leather cruising range and didn't require oats, hay, water, and shelter, not to mention veterinary care and eventual body disposal. Someone who lived in a boarding house could probably find a place to shoehorn in a bicycle. And bikes were built to last back then, because manufacturers mostly didn't know any better than to make something as solid as they could, and build their reputation on quality rather than marketing. Disposable income wasn't an automatic weeding system.

Most of us would prefer not to ride an ordinary, with its tall wheel -- usually the front -- and tricky handling. Nor would we gravitate to an early model of safety bicycle, with its single fixed gear and substantial weight. But the vehicles evolved rapidly into lighter, more nimble machines still built to withstand the challenges of rough roads and long distances. From their beginning, they evolved from the simplest form, without even pedals, adding each level of complexity a bit at a time to preserve the durability of simplicity while improving comfort and handling. The best of them were relatively expensive, but standards changed slowly enough that a hobbyist or someone who merely appreciated the craftsmanship and ride quality could buy a high-end bike and ride it for decades.

As Wolfeboro shifts to summer mode, I scan the vehicles using our parking lot and the people getting out of them. The vast majority of cars parking in our lot at any time of year are not there for us, and seldom for any other business in the complex. They're poaching to go downtown. With the coming of the second home crowd and their guests, the value of some vehicles can exceed the value of my house.

Disposable income is here to visit. Biking draws a fraction of the participants it did in the 1990s. The seasonal residents and visitors bring with them fashionable bikes in road, gravel, and mountain categories. Sometimes they even bring them in. Overall I see fewer people than in the 1990s to the very early 2000s. When people come in and say the town is busy I want to ask them if they were in a coma from the mid 1980s through 1999. The crowds have definitely shrunk.

Mountain biking thrived because people wanted to ride away from the roads. It died because the industry pandered to the tech-obsessed stunt performer demographic and let prices get out of control. Riders might have had other reasons to cut back on their bike use as well. The transition was blurred by the surge in road riding that bridged the transition from the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st. The industry had to re-learn how to make enticing entry-level road bikes and fill in the mid range. But then riders discovered everything that had intimidated and discouraged them about riding on the roads, and the numbers flaked away.

Various forms of road bike hinted at the possibility of the gravel category. But once cycling broke up into very specific categories, prices had to creep higher because no one was making it up in volume.

A cyclist in any category will be disposing of a lot of income to play at all, multiplied by the number of different category bikes that rider chooses to use. Tubeless tires and DOT fluid hydraulic disc brakes use highly perishable fluids that can damage the systems in which they are supposed to work. Regular maintenance draws a certain amount of money. Or you could wait for the tires or brakes to fail completely and then pay to clean up the mess they've turned into. Or quit cycling at that point, or just buy a new bike. Hard to say where you'll get it or who will work on it by that time.

I asked AI whether working in a bike shop was a good job. It basically said "no." It mentioned the chronic low pay, seasonal work load, and the suicidally thin margins that shops have to live on. I asked it how much the tools would cost for a rider to work on their own bike and it gave me a range of $30 to $1,000. It had more details about specific options, if you want to get into fixing your specific suspension system for instance. You will also have to hope that you can get parts when you need them.

The disposable income crowd is a competitive club. You're welcome to try to keep up. If you can't, they won't miss you.