Get some use out of what's between your legs

As part of today's slate of errands, I noticed that the gas gauge in the car was finally a bit below a quarter of a tank, so I went to the gas station. Because I'm one of those guys who inherited the habit of logging fill ups in a little book in the glove compartment, I can see immediately how long it has been since the last one. In this case, without even getting to full bike commuting, it had been 23 days.

I'm not the best example of your potential savings, because I don't drive anywhere except to work and on necessary errands, like the grocery store. During the pandemic I have avoided combining grocery shopping with the drive home from work on days that I'm in the car, because the incidence of mouth breathers is much higher then. I don't need the aggravation.

My commute by car is about 28 1/2 miles round trip. By bike it's just over 30, because of route variations I use to avoid an unpleasant section of road. The direct route is okay on the ride in, because gravity is with me, and we're all going into town, where motorists have no choice but to slow down. No good choice, anyway. I have envisioned the Grand Prix de Wolfeboro, where we have a full-on, closed course motor race around town. In addition to the Formula One category there can be a "run whatcha brung" race for the locals. That might have to be broken out into further subcategories for rat rods, drift cars, soccer moms, monster trucks, and midlife crisis dudes. So far I have not lined up any sponsors. The people you see practicing are doing it on their own.

Once the weather gets more reliably mild, I routinely go a month without filling the gas tank, and that includes a few optional trips to nearby trail heads or boat launching sites. Your results may vary.

And now for the standard disclaimers: Bike commuting is not for everyone. Many people are unable to do it because of distances they have to cover, loads they have to carry, lack of changing facilities at work, and a host of other insurmountable obstacles. But don't let your privileged status discourage you if you realize that you could commute by bike, but don't, in sympathy with the true prisoners of motorized society. Every bike commuter is saving a parking space, and helping to bring gas prices down by reducing demand.You may not think your individual efforts will have an impact on the thick hide and monstrous body of the oil industry, but add yourself to the unseen multitude across the country who are doing the same thing. The more the better.

Beautiful day for a hit-and-run

Monday, February 24th was a dazzling foretaste of spring. The sun was bright, the sky clear, and the temperature surged up to the low 50s (F). In April and May, 50 degrees feels like a punishment, but in February it calls to the prisoners of indoor training and the cross-trainers starting to remember their road bikes.

I had almost gone out on my own bike that day, but decided that it was too early to commit. I went trudging up the mountain out back instead on my 30-year-old chore skis. Still, the road and the commute begin to beckon. Daylight relocating time begins this Sunday, putting the return leg of the commute into usable light. Motorists will be able to see me.

Yesterday, I soloed at the shop. El Queso Grande had been away since Friday, getting his heart worked on. I spent much of the day alone. The ski trails are all ice and dirt after more than an inch of rain on Thursday. Then the temperature dove back down to seasonable winter cold. That turned what could have been busy ski rental days into long vigils broken by brief visits by one or two people at a time, checking out the bargains among the remnants of our winter stock. No one was available from our rotating cast of fill-in employees to work on Sunday, but it didn't really matter.

The door alarm beeped. A single customer came up the back stairs. It was a  local road rider. He's a tall guy, a physician, very active, so in good shape. He does a lot of his own work on his Campy-equipped carbon road bike. I don't remember what brand it was, but it turns out that no longer matters. We exchanged greetings, and he said he was looking for a small item of apparel for his son. Then he said, "Hey, I was hit by a car the other day." It was that beautiful Monday.

He described the incident. For anyone who knows the area, or wants to look it up on their favorite map app, he came out of Dame Road and turned south on Ledge Hill Road, toward Tuftonboro Elementary School. There was no one else on the road. With no warning, blam! He was hit from behind.

"The next thing I knew, I came to in the ditch with some guy saying, 'don't try to get up.'"

The person who found him had been driving northbound on Ledge Hill and had seen a dirty white or tan SUV with the bumper torn loose on the right side. Then, just a bit further on, there was the unconscious rider and his crushed bike.

The rider was miraculously intact for having been mowed down by more than a ton of metal and glass, piloted by a few pounds of idiot. He showed me the massive bruising on his legs, and said that he had some broken ribs. Seeing as he was unconscious for a bit, he has had a mild concussion as well. But until he told me that he was only six days out from such a serious crash I would not have spotted him as injured. He moved okay. Only after he told me the story did I see a bit of caution in his gait, particularly when he headed back down the stairs to the back parking lot on his way out. He will also find that he has the inescapable touch of PTSD. He can't get right back on the bike, because the bike was destroyed, and his next scheduled activities are more winter appropriate. It will be interesting to see how his mental and emotional state evolve when riding season does get here and he gets a new bike.

Mountain bikers and path riders are all nodding sagely at this point, and congratulating themselves on their wisdom in abandoning the road to the potentially lethal motoring majority. Gravel riders are wrapping themselves in their false sense of security because they ride on roads that they perceive as having little traffic. But the doctor was on a quiet rural road, and the vehicle that hit him was the only other user. There are certain gravel roads around here that I avoid because the motorists who do use them typically drive like they've got a trunk full of moonshine and a revenuer on their tail. Other gravel roads are as placid as you might expect. You have to know your area.

The driver of the hit-and-run vehicle, now thought to be a white SUV with Florida plates, did exactly the right thing to make this a perfect crime. The one witness, the approaching driver who got a glimpse before coming around the bend and finding the victim, was unable to provide enough information to proceed with much of an investigation. Get that bumper fixed, or just tear it the rest of the way off, let a few weeks pass, and plausible deniability will take care of the rest. Or just leave the area and you'll blend in with all the other down-and-outers driving dinged-up vehicles, with no one to wonder how it got that way. Add to this the fact that law enforcement seldom has the time or interest to investigate these things fully enough to conclude them. The doctor didn't die. Even if he had, it would have been just another unfortunate loss because he didn't have the sense to quit riding his darn fool bike around like some kid.

Kids don't ride anymore. In rural areas, they probably never did, although I remember in my two years in mid-coast Maine that we fourth and fifth graders would ride well outside the village limits to get to friends who lived on farms in the surrounding countryside. Then we would play in haylofts and abandoned quarries until it was time to ride home again for supper. But you certainly see almost none of it now.

Because the driver ran away, we don't know if they were malicious or negligent. Are they celebrating their coup, cherishing the memory, or are they horrified that the phone in their hand had distracted them, and deeply relieved that the rider lived, so no harm done?

As the years have passed, and drivers have become far more numerous, with more distractions and no reduction in hostility, I look forward less and less to the start of bike commuting season. But I depend on it for its economic and physical benefits when it's not interrupted by mayhem and assault. Most of the time, the worst that happens is an unprovoked honk, a close pass, a few Dopplered obscenities, perhaps a wildly inaccurate thrown object. The fear, of course comes from the ambush hunter who will strike from behind. While drivers crossing, entering, or turning too close present the greater hazards, the rear end collision is the hardest to defend against. I can't afford a fancy camera. A mirror only works when you're looking in it, not looking at the road in front of you. The swerve could happen between mirror checks. As for video, it seems remarkably ineffective as evidence in a prosecution. The authorities have to care enough to pursue it. And that's only after an incident has taken place. Close calls get you nothing but a range of advice that boils down mostly to, "quit riding your bike, you idiot." Or cover yourself with garish colors and flashing lights, which will do absolutely nothing to deter a malicious attack.

The videos that cyclists post to elicit outrage and sympathy for their cause elicit just as much reluctance on the part of non-riders to begin riding, and lots of pushback from drivers who hate cyclists, whose blood lust is heightened when they see how easy it is to engage in some wish fulfillment. Sadly, the best response is to keep riding as if nothing had happened, happy if you are undamaged. We can't win, because the opposition is too pervasive. Only the idea can win, if in some fantasy future enough people simply don't want to drive anymore, and don't want to act like assholes on the road in or on whatever vehicles they choose.

A troll on a comment thread a few days ago told me that I am a guest on the roads entirely paid for and owned by motorists. He told me to behave myself with appropriate gratitude and stay out of the way. He responded predictably badly to rational counterpoints. His rants attracted sympathizers, even though the overall majority in the comment thread were supportive of cyclists and seconded the rational counterpoints. The anti-cyclists soon resorted to all caps. I was long gone by then, knowing better than to continue down the gas-lit path to the Troll Kingdom. But that's who is out there, throwing their weight around, emboldened by their armored vehicles. You can't think about them. Your only sure defense is abstinence. They are simply one of the many modern hazards, like mass shootings, that might or might not impact your life directly, but constantly weigh on you. Freedom isn't free. But "defense" of it is never as straightforwardly confrontational as the usual users of that slogan would have you believe. Most of the time it's done by setting an example and proceeding with courage in things that should never have been burdened with such significance.

When things go boom

When I stumbled back into the bike business in 1989, the shop was selling a mix of road and mountain bikes. There was a citizen road racing series around New Hampshire and nearby Maine. Mountain bikes were a strong and rapidly rising category. Local riders seemed to be open to both. The last fade of the 1970s bike boom was dwindling away, while the roar of the onrushing mountain bike boom was winding up like a big jet on the runway.

By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.

The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.

"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.

From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.

Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.

Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.

Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.

When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.

In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.

When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.

All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."

The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.

Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.

Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.

Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.

Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.

Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?

Thrill seekers and thrill avoiders

Yet another former road rider came in yesterday, looking for a bike to use on dirt roads and mild trails. She doesn't want a sit-up-and-beg path bike, with high handlebars and a bar stool seat, but she doesn't want the current version of a mountain bike, with high-volume, low-pressure tires and lots of suspension travel. She also explicitly said that the "gravel grinder" category hadn't attracted her. We discussed some options and she went off to do more research. What she ends up riding is not as relevant as her motives for buying it. She is surrendering, retreating, and regrouping away from the battle zone that the roads have become. She makes an interesting comparison to a rider who came in about a week ago.

A pleasant, friendly, lean and muscular tattooed dude came in to check the shop out. He asked about trails in the area. I gave him the rundown on local attractions, from the rake-and-ride stuff in Sewall Woods and Abenaki to the professionally built course on Wolfeboro conservation land off the Cotton Valley Trail just beyond Fernald Station. He asked about "features." I directed him to the Wolfeboro Singletrack Alliance website, where he found pictures. He summed up the riders in the photos as "kind of lycraed-out, but okay." He liked what he saw of the features. The designer and builder of the trails has ascended to trail builder heaven in Bentonville, Arkansas, which gives you some idea of his capability.

We moved over to the sales floor. He looked at our modest selection of mountain bikes, priced at only a little over a thousand dollars, and slightly higher. For all of its reputation as a money town, most of the year-round residents in Wolfe City are scraping by like everybody else. Somehow we've all let ourselves grow accustomed to the shrinking dollar, so a thousand dollars doesn't raise an eyebrow the way it used to. Forget whether it should. It doesn't. We do have less expensive bikes, but they wouldn't hold up to much really sporty technical riding. Thanks, bike industry!

As we talked about the bikes on the floor and riding in general, he seemed to be trying to appreciate our similarities more than focus on our differences. He talked about the rush of surviving scary maneuvers on the trail. I talked about holding my line on the commute with a tractor trailer inches from my shoulder. He equated the adrenaline rushes, but he seeks his, whereas I am just as happy not to have any. I've never been much of a thrill seeker, even when I was taking risks. I deal with them when they're sent my way, but I don't miss them when they aren't. If he sees a commonality, it does improve relations. It does no good to belabor the wasteful extravagance of purely recreational riding -- no matter how ballsy -- on a trail to nowhere.

Am I judging? A little bit. But I remind myself that human existence is entirely pointless, so how individuals spend their brief span is up to them. I happen to ask myself what the social costs are, whenever I do anything. That does not mean that I am able to eliminate them from my own activities, merely that I note them and try to balance my personal gratifications with a nebulous concept of the greater good. I've noted before that we tend to compare our pastimes to the whole menu of available gratifications, and find our place based on how bad they are for the public more than how much actual benefit they provide. The recreational riders support their position by saying that they offer more potential bait to get a sedentary species out of its chair and into some physical activity. To that extent they are doing good. I look beyond that, though, to the ghettoization of cycling, chasing us off of the public right of way and onto closed playgrounds, where we can be a good little special interest, rather than a tool of general well-being and the humanization of the developed landscape.

On my initial road rides this season, drivers have been totally mellow. But I have not gone on the worse roads yet.

Years ago I made the choice to expend my aggression and fitness on transportation cycling, regardless of where life took me. It was pretty easy in a small city with commuting distances under eight miles one-way -- sometimes well under. In many ways, my best apartment was the grubby, unheated slum I lived in for a year, less than a mile from where I worked, with no hills in between. I could do my time in the salt mine and then sprint home to eat my unimaginative meals and forage in my imagination for what I hoped would be popular ideas. Now the riding distance is much longer, the terrain vastly more challenging, the meals slightly more sophisticated, and the ideas still elusive. Transportation cycling provided a baseline of riding even if I didn't have time to train for racing or take a tour. I didn't have to make time for a separate activity. I merely got to expand my riding when time and finances allowed.

Road cycling should not be a separate thing. Rider accommodations should be fundamental to road design and driver education. We've let the roads turn into motor speedways. I understand the addictive appeal of driving like an asshole. I don't have to drive for very long to turn into a complete asshole. Mind you I probably have more of a pre-existing tendency that way, but I can tell from the behavior of other drivers that I am not a rare case. It's so easy to punch the throttle. Peer pressure joins the weight of your foot, easing the gas pedal down harder. Time is short, risk is cumulative. Go faster just one more time to get where you need to go. Everyone else is doing it. You have no choice unless you insist on it.

As someone naturally combative -- regardless of whether I am good at it -- I tend to persist. Stick an elbow out. If someone passes you closely, lean in to block the next one. But it's not a war. The car has the clear advantage in actual combat. It's a contest of wills. And it shouldn't even be that.

Extravagance

One question has been at the back or the middle of my mind since the 1970s: What is the morally justifiable average lifestyle worldwide? Given that we keep lining up more people to consume pieces of the Earth pie, the slices have gotten steadily smaller.

Technology has helped us somewhat in the past, but never as much as we thought. It was easy to accept creature comforts and entertaining diversions affordably marketed in your technologically advanced society, and take a soft-focused view of those other countries where people still lived in more primitive circumstances. What did we owe them? Not much. And that may be true by some measures. Some genuinely primitive tribes famously repel attempts by modernists to come in and upset their balanced lives. In other cases, the locals would welcome a bit more in the way of comfort and respect.

From primitive to modern is another continuum. Unfortunately, once you accept some technology, you rely on whatever spawned it, and you will feel pressure to go further, even if you were satisfied at the previous level. And our technology has failed to make us better people, even though it hasn't really made us worse. Except that it has, in the critical sense that it makes us more voracious consumers of resources, while numbing us to the awareness of that fact.

A lot of technology uses resources more efficiently, reducing waste. But a growing population in developed nations consumes more resources in basic lifestyle amenities than a smaller, more stable population living off of more direct use of natural resources: hunting and gathering, and small-scale agriculture.

If I had to live at a primitive level, I would definitely do it where I didn't have to wear wool next to the skin. I'd be down in loincloth territory, preferably near some nice beaches, too.

When I got into bikes, and later into the bike business, I considered it a benign use of technology, infinitely expandable without negative consequences. Any number can play, and it only makes things better. It was true then, and it's still true, of basic cycling and a limited amount of recreational riding. Bicycling as it is practiced today has moved away from that. It is now an extravagance of the developed world, fed by glossy magazines, up-to-date websites, social media, and partnerships with other consumer pleasures, like beer and coffee.

Beer and coffee are food groups. My perfect world includes them. Even in primitive cultures, most of them have developed some kind of recreational beverages. I'll defend that one. But the performance side of bike culture has become increasingly resource-intensive, not just in its use of materials and substances to make a functional modern bike, but in the demand on riders to be able to afford it. What do you have to do for a living to generate enough income to spend it on each of the expensive category bikes you will need to fully enjoy "cycling?"

Some economist will point out that prices adjusted for inflation end up coming out the same as, or lower than, prices for what passed for performance equipment in decades past. Pick your decade. There's an economic index to show that things are no worse now. The critical difference is not the up-front cost of equipment, it's the cost of properly maintaining that equipment in all of its complexity. You'll go through a lot of tire sealant, brake fluid, cartridge bearings, and shock oil if you follow the instructions that came in all of the owner's manuals you got with your new bike. Parts you wear out, like chains, cassettes, and tires, are all more expensive, and the chains and cassettes are more prone to wear because there is less metal in links and cogs. And I defy an economist to tell me that a $45 dollar chain today is equivalent to a $9 Sedisport chain from 1982. As of 2018, the inflated price of a $10 chain would be just over $26.  I added a buck because the price of the Sedisport did creep upward gradually during its long and glorious reign as the best deal in the chain industry.

You can say that the Sedisport only worked on the drive trains of the time, but the same width chain works from six cogs on up through eight. I could piece together a Sedisport from old links in my chain stash and run it on any of my bikes today. Along with price inflation comes the reduction in versatility, and the decreased service life of the crowded drive trains of today.

Years ago, on a group road ride, we were discussing Shimano's new STI road shifting. Several of the riders had leaped to adopt that innovation. "If you truly love cycling, you'll pay whatever it costs to participate," one rider asserted.

"If you truly love cycling, you won't need gimmicky modern bullshit to enjoy it," I replied.

Racing is another matter. Racing is an arms race. You need equipment equivalent to the weaponry your competitors will be using. Racing equipment has one job: increase your efficiency in tight competition with other riders whose only goal is to keep you from winning. Maybe they're working to help a teammate. Maybe they are the aspiring champion who wants to cross the line first, with arms upraised. It's a series of short term goals embedded in the long term goal of a successful racing season.

We who pedal fall into the trap of comparing our activities to worse activities: "It's better than tearing around on ATVs. It's not as bad as street racing little sports cars and hot rods." And so on. Cycling used to be able to say that it was not only not as bad, it was definitely an improvement on wasteful and polluting forms of transportation and recreation. Human powered recreation in general is much better for our species and our world. But resistance is strong. Persuasion is difficult. There's a long list of things you can't say, or ways you can't say the things you might dare to express. This is why real social progress is so agonizingly gradual. We meander and sidle and murmur and nudge, getting basically nowhere until grievances erupt into an outright war. The smoke and flame and blood spatter from that ends up obscuring a lot of what we were fighting about in the first place. The mere end of hostilities is such a relief that we call it good. Perhaps slightly improved after the experience, we go back to our previous piecemeal advancement of the things that really weren't solved at all by the orgy of violence.

The mountain bike boom was started by idealistic bike nerds who had stayed on after the road bike boom faded out. We all kept hoping that the hints of social acceptance in things like the movies Breaking Away, American Flyers, and Quicksilver indicated a growing public understanding of our worthy goals. Bikes even got a nod from Doonesbury:

Of course mellowness fell out of favor during the early 1980s, and militarism regained popularity. It was easy to back a strong military when no one was required to join it. The volunteer force was already evolving into a separate warrior caste, while the general public could enjoy the Hollywood portrayal of our brave fighters in comfort and safety.

As mountain biking evolved through the 1990s, police departments adopted bike patrols, usually on modified versions of the simple and versatile mountain bike platform. Some jurisdictions have actually continued the practice. There was even a television show about bike cops. It was done on the Baywatch format, right down to the California setting. It did little to advance transportation cycling or bolster the longevity of the bike patrol concept. The average citizen's sense of safety and desire to try riding on the public streets has steadily eroded even as the average price of a bike has steadily risen.

Bike advocacy does advance. We make incremental improvements even as the need to make massive adjustments grows more urgent. It's better than nothing, in the same way that a single cotton ball stuffed into an arterial wound is something. We could save the situation if we had enough balls.

It's the traffic, stupid

To be more accurate, it's motor vehicles and the people who drive them. The category is, "Things that make people quit cycling on the road."

There is no last word on this topic. It shows no sign of ever going away. Those who choose to pedal must now and forever deal with the challenges of sharing space with large, fast vehicles, mostly piloted by people with minimal training. And professionalism is no help: truck and bus drivers are notoriously hostile to pedalers. Professionalism may make matters worse, because those drivers are on a schedule and are earning their living by driving. The direct monetary connection reinforces their territoriality against not just cyclists but against all amateur road users.

The solution comes not with a single stroke but with a multifaceted response that has to include a lot of infrastructure changes along with behavior modification. Unfortunately, the system we have evolved developed very naturally along the path of least resistance. People were happy to let their communities be designed around motor vehicle flow. Almost no one questioned it. Forget whatever sinister conspiracies underlay specific things like the destruction of streetcars in favor of buses, and other sabotage of public transit. The proliferation of cheap automobiles relative to rising incomes in the mid and late 20th Century guaranteed that they would dominate our lives. The illusion of freedom was easier to sustain when the consequences, both economic and environmental, could be more easily masked.

We all understand the problem, but it seems as difficult to solve as gun violence. Both motorist dominance and gun violence breed fear, which can then be used to control people. In the case of cycling, fear serves to keep riders off the road.

People who used to ride tell me that they can't anymore. Maybe they quit completely. Maybe they switched to separated venues ranging from mountain bike trails to sedate paths. Most of them express their decision as a matter of maturity and wisdom rather than defeat and surrender.

People who haven't ridden on roads much or at all, who take up cycling or continue it in separated venues also assume the mantle of mature wisdom rather than regretful fear.

We all want to feel good about ourselves. Most of us, anyway. The problem is that the ones who have surrendered have surrendered completely. They've put it behind them and will not advocate for road cycling. I have not met a single quitter who said that they would take it up again if they noticed that conditions had improved. It falls to a shrinking group of experienced riders, augmented by younger people who are still in their riding phase, to keep a scrap of territory available to riders willing to face the existing reality and continue to promote proposals for its improvement.

The inexperience of those younger riders hampers their ability to understand the experience of cycling as the body ages. What was good enough for me in my twenties is out of reach to me in my sixties. It takes a bigger and bigger truck, going slower and slower, to get me to sprint it down. The degeneration has been gradual, but, because I have never stopped riding, I have been able to observe and document it. I guess I do all right for my age, but without the explosive power and grinding endurance I enjoyed from age 20 to about 50. And it shouldn't always be about exploring one's physical limits. Transportation and exploratory cycling should seldom be about exploring one's physical limits, or the limits of one's courage. It's okay for daily life to have a certain serenity.

To make this post self-contained, I have to acknowledge that motor vehicles have their uses. Time, distance, payload, and weather can all make a closed, motorized vehicle a better choice than something powered by human muscle. That has to factor into the system. When you need them, you need them. And what Edward Abbey called "motorized wheelchairs" can accommodate anyone who has decided that it's time to settle into their embrace.

Immune to Utopia

In 1979, I emerged from the 16 years of schooling considered normal for middle class young people, and started trying to make my way as an adult in what we referred to as The Real World.

For practical reasons, I chose to use a bicycle for transportation, and to shape my life around that, rather than automatically assume that I needed a motor vehicle, and all the expenses that go with it. At the time, you could actually come through a basic college education without debt, but I knew I could not guarantee my income in an uncertain job market. Why load myself down with living expenses?

The 1970s bike boom was nearing its end, but I didn't know it. In Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, bikes had been a dominant mode of transportation when I arrived at school in the mid '70s, and were still going strong when I left there in the early spring of '79 to journey north.

I hit the streets of Annapolis, Maryland, and firmly believed that I was better off on the bike than in a car. My friends and I took a lot of risks, but we got away with it long enough to refine our skills and develop better judgment.

The motoring public could be quite hostile. Occasionally the encounters would escalate from verbal (or salivary) to actual physical combat. Being young and idealistic, I could not understand why the vast majority of people was so blind to the Utopia in which we could all be living if more people took up bike pedals instead of the gas pedal.

The bike represented strength and freedom, but it also represented mutual trust. Strength meant personal physical energy, built and maintained by an activity I found entirely fun and beneficial. Freedom meant freedom from the massive expense and logistical hassle of owning a motor vehicle. Trust was a key element because the bicyclist is balanced on those two wheels, vulnerable to the accidental or purposeful incursions of nearly everyone else. A motor vehicle of any size can crush you, but even another cyclist can take you out. For that matter, a pedestrian could do it, too. A well-timed shove, a quick thrust with an umbrella or a stick, and the bicyclist goes sprawling, to the amusement of onlookers.

At the very end of the 1970s, widespread mutual trust still looked like a societal goal, nationally and globally. Sure, there were international tensions and we could be taken out by a nuclear holocaust at any moment, but most people seemed inclined to avoid it, not solicit it. We were getting better. Weren't we? Meanwhile, I was going to keep showing how it could be done, making the bike transportation thing work, and living a comfortable life on modest means. When I look at my tax returns from the period, I'm pretty horrified at my casual acceptance of a cockroach existence, but such is the nature of idealism. I was not wrong, but I was in the minority.

In the minority I may have been, but I was not alone. Baltimore and Washington had a lot of bike commuters, messengers, and recreational riders. Advocacy groups managed to keep us on the road against various legislative challenges. Of course we still fight the same battle over and over, because the motorist mentality has such a firm grip on all aspects of life and infrastructure, but progress inches forward. It would do more than inch, if people felt more welcome on bikes in the transportation system, but that goes back to the curious resistance to Utopia. Concerning bicycling and nearly everything else, people seem suspicious of happiness and of each other.

I'm the last person to want to be all huggy touchy feely, swaying in unison and singing some stirring anthem of universal siblinghood. You be you, I'll be me, hopefully we'll each find some people to hang with. But I sense and absorb the increasing general paranoia that has grown out of decades of alienation, as we drive like hell on our vital errands of personal advancement.

Many institutions seek to divide us. Certain devotees of certain religions eagerly try to connect the dots of prophecy to bring about the final bloody battle between their version of good and their version of evil. To the dividers and the faithfully divided, there are no innocent bystanders. If you are not with them, you are against them, or at least disposable. If you have not chosen the right path, you shall be cast down, and rightly so. It isn't rational, but rationality itself is prideful and a sin. Add in greed and a whole smorgasbord of bigotry and phobias, and you have a species running in all directions to find some sense of security.

By the late 1960s, it was commonly accepted that we were moving toward a more inclusive and tolerant humanity. Obviously that was a misconception, and the resistance to that point of view has been virulent. As with other virulent things, it may only resolve through a high fever and convulsions which could prove fatal. There's a chance that other treatments will reduce the inflammation, but it's really in the hands of evolution now. It would be funny if our evolution was violently ended by people who don't believe in evolution, but who would be left to laugh about it?

Riding a bike really does symbolize the benefits to be gained from finding your own balance and not interfering with the balance of others. It is among the best of human inventions.

The War Effort

The commute gets harder every year. I'll be 60 in July. That's not old by modern standards, but it's not young, either. I'm as tired on the third day as I used to be on the fifth day.

In 1979, emerging from college to make my mark on the world, I assessed the situation and decided to live in a way that any number of people could imitate without fear of making things worse. Imagine a world in which people at all social levels in industrialized nations felt well rewarded by modest dwellings and non-motorized mobility. It's hard to picture, because it's not enough, after centuries of conditioning to revere wealth and opulence, and the power these convey to our fellow apes.

In the 1970s, military service did not look like a good idea, when the United States government had just finished demonstrating how many lives it was willing to waste in pursuit of a mistake. We were told to expect a nuclear war, which would render conventional forces irrelevant. How many service members does it take to keep fingers on the button in an undisclosed number of missile silos, and keep our submarines patrolling? By the time I got out of college, bombs delivered by airplanes were a quaint anachronism. Conventional forces appeared to have some parade value, if news photos from the Soviet Union were any guide, but in the big exchange of fireballs they were just one more thing to melt. Sure, this is a simplistic view, but the media and the educational system already excelled in presenting simplistic points of view.

My peers and I were taught to get good jobs and make as much money as we could. Some of us learned that much better than others. I flunked it completely. But I stayed in the system long enough to absorb the intent. I have a dutiful sense of failure because I did not prosper. The fact that I live well is due partly to my own frugality and largely to a couple of unanticipated lucky breaks. But I feel an even greater disappointment that I never figured out how to inspire widespread change.

The plan remains the same as it was before the little windfalls that made my hovel a bit larger. Behind the facade, I am just another idiot whose retirement options consist of either a refrigerator box in a warm climate or a shotgun in the mouth when I realize I am no longer able to support myself. I'm holding out for the refrigerator box, or perhaps a hike into beautiful wilderness, without food or water. But the gun thing sounds nicely dramatic.

It seemed to me -- and it still does -- that one can serve one's country and the greater good of humanity better by setting a good example of how to live than by how one kills and dies. I don't know what to do about the human compulsion to force other people to die for things, but I do know that accepting it as the unchangeable norm locks us onto a course toward global destruction.

In the decades I've ridden, I have noticed a slight increase in understanding from motorists, but hostility remains a problem. Internet postings, bike path assaults, and road rage killings remind us that bicycle riders are outcasts, and fair game as far as many people are concerned. And a silent majority does nothing to harm, but nothing to help, hoping the problem will go away on its own. If that means road cyclist extinction, good enough. Go play on the bike path. Drive to a mountain biking venue.

The life I pledged has lasted nearly 60 years. The fortune I pledged by declining to amass it. I don't look forward to being a casualty in the lifestyle revolution, but I like even less the idea of prospering at the expense of others. Who is enslaved on your behalf? What makes you better than they are, other than the accident of your birthplace? You may be completely comfortable with a harshly hierarchical view of humanity, but at least think about it. Be certain in your conviction that a large number of people deserve to live downstream from your toilet and downwind from your smokestack.

I'm no better than anyone because of the choices I have made. I'm an idiot. But I'm not wrong.

The energy I've put into trying to live a simple and relatively self-propelled life, other people have put into things they think are worthwhile. Evolution will log the results. In all likelihood, no one will be around to sift through the archeological record to find out who predicted the end correctly.

This is The Renaissance of Hate

A friend in Des Moines, Iowa, just reported that persons unknown had dumped thumbtacks all over a section of bike trail, causing the sort of damage and inconvenience you would expect.

This trail is a segregated venue. These riders are not interfering with the holy motor vehicle traffic so beloved by Americans. Spiking their trail is an act of pure malice, singling out bike riders purely for being bike riders.

We live in a time when we are actively encouraged to give way to our prejudices and express them without reservation. Close borders. Harass, intimidate, beat up, and even kill "undesirables."

Talk radio hosts have been exposed numerous times suggesting that bike riders make perfectly legitimate targets for violent slapstick comedy. They never suggest that riders should get some hazard pay and a share of the residual income from any video coverage of these actions. It goes along with every other form of entertaining contempt peddled fiercely and continuously by people who have soapboxes large and small. The comment thread on any article about bicycling in the mainstream media devolves almost immediately into a collection of traded insults. It's just one aspect of a culture of intolerance that has been growing steadily since the backlash against "hippies" in the late 1970s and early '80s. It is blossoming now with creative expression of destructive tendencies.

We're in the Renaissance of Hate, when divisions mean more to people than coexistence. A large segment of humanity inclines toward duking things out and settling them now, rather than trying to bump along, accommodating each other as best we can. Another segment does try to keep building toward a universally tolerant society, but there are many details to iron out. The human propensity for simple mindedness and quick fixes throws land mines in front of any peace march to try to shut the gentle people up and let the men of action have their way.

I use the term men of action purposely. The culture of hate is sexist. It attracts many followers who are women, but they either think they can fight it out or they buy into the classic gender roles in which men make the big moves and women support them. In general, movements of intolerance try to keep people in their rigidly defined places. Amazing how totalitarian ideas can march in under a banner of freedom. They have specific, worthy recipients in mind when they talk about freedom.

Some things are deplorable and need to be opposed. Sometimes, forcefully delivered rhetoric is not wrong. That complicates analysis for the concerned citizen. But if someone is suggesting that it's okay to target anyone for unkind treatment, that's bad advice. "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a shorthand way to remind yourself that a broad brush and a machine gun are ham fisted solutions.

At the start of every riding season, and at intervals during it, I wonder whether hatred or negligence will strike me or someone I hold dear. It's one more thing in the back of the mind when gearing up to take a simple bike ride.

We were the Culture of Speed once

An item I read about a bicyclist in Kentucky being arrested for vehicular cycling reminded me of the ChipSeal case from several years ago. I'd lost track of ChipSeal in the intervening years, so I went to see what he's up to. His blog reported police encounters from August 2013.

ChipSeal illustrates the difference between an advocate and an activist. He rides within the law, but he takes up every square inch the law allows. Because most people, including many of those paid to uphold it, do not know the law, the vehicular cyclist claiming a permitted share of the road looks conspicuously obstructive to motorists who firmly believe the cyclist has a legal duty to defer to them in all cases. And that, my friends, is the majority of motorists. So ChipSeal and others who assert their rights -- and ours -- in the face of civilian and police harassment keep motorists thinking about bicyclists, but not necessarily fondly.

Any set of principles can take on a religious level of dedication. If we as riders believe we have a right to the road, why do we not all claim this right, all the time? The activists seem to survive at least as well as the less assertive. They would say more so. By being in-your-face visible and present, they are told they make themselves a target, but they also force motorists to steer deliberately around them.

"It is common for motorists to be annoyed with my presence and express it with their automobile horns. Often, the more impatient motorists will pass me on the shoulder. Even when the road divides into two lanes again I will often get free unsolicited advice from motorists or their passengers as they accelerate past me." This is a quote from ChipSeal's blog entry for August 23. It indicates the psychological effect of assertive cycling on motorists and passengers in vehicles passing the assertive cyclist. They do not suddenly start thoughtfully considering the rights and the challenges of transportation cycling. They're just pissed off by one more idiot on a bike.

ChipSeal refers to the Culture of Speed and a windshield view of the world. We notice it now, after almost a century of motorist domination. But we were the Culture of Speed once. Not only did the introduction of human-powered two-wheelers lead to incidents of bad behavior, the bicycle as it evolved also greatly increased the speed and cruising range of a person who might previously have had to walk everywhere. Cycling groups led the movement to improve roads so they could go faster in greater safety. And from the bicycle, on the roads that cycling helped improve, transportation evolved to be even faster with the addition of external power sources that did not eat hay and crap on the road. So the bicycle was left behind by technological development. Whether it should have been is another matter. People wanted to go even farther, even faster, with even less personal effort, even though the automobile required massively greater utilization of resources and mobilization of workers, and thus a greater public cost than bicycling and a good rail system would have required. All that stuff created jobs and set money in motion, so it all seemed just wonderful.

The costs were spread over society in ways we have only begun to calculate. Individuals tend to look only at what they see coming directly out of their pockets. So they'll complain about the cost of a vehicle, registration, insurance, fuel, parking and maintenance and overlook public health and safety costs, congestion, sprawl, pollution, resource depletion and other ills until they get so bad they can't be ignored anymore.

Those of us who for various reasons took up bicycling have to varying degrees refused technology that the mainstream has accepted. Some purists refuse it entirely. Some recreationists don't really refuse it at all, even to the point of despising and persecuting bicyclists who ride on the road. Anyone can hop on a bicycle. Then, no matter what they really believe, anyone who sees them on it will lump them in with "bicyclists" as a category. The opinion of that category lies with the beholder.

Why do we ride? Usually people ride to go faster than a walk. I don't think too many people say, "I ride to go slowly." Even people who pride themselves on riding slowly will find that they have a lower limit. Otherwise, why pedal at all? So speed is relative, but it's always a factor. And relative speed is the root of all our problems with the motorized road user. It's also the root of our problems on paths where we are the fastest users. Then our speed is obvious even if we feel we are working hard to attain it.

Along with speed goes flow. Traffic systems function best when they help the elements using them to flow with the least awkwardness. Wheels create the illusion of flight, so where paths intersect these flights have to cross each other. Mostly we use a system that subordinates the flow on one path to the flow on another, or we use interchanges that keep elements in motion, using ramps and bridges to manage the connections. But motorists can change speed without major muscular exertion, whereas pedalers cannot. We are protective of our speed just as much as drivers are. Indeed, much of our desire to use travel lanes has to do with avoiding the margins of roadways, where debris and poor surface conditions would hold us to very low speeds and rough rides.

We have other reasons to ride in the lane, notably to control passing behavior. But anyone who rides mostly on narrow roads learns to give way in some places and hold the line in others. Full-on vehicular cycling might not get you hit by a car, but it could get you pummeled by someone who followed you until you stopped or tagged into the ditch by someone who had to wait behind you until you did swing right to open the gate.

All of our decisions are calculated to maintain our flow -- in other words, our best sustainable speed.

The motorized Culture of Speed certainly runs at a more frantic pace. Its unquestioning participants can't begin to understand why anyone would settle for less. Only kids and drunks ride bikes to get from place to place. Them and weirdo freaks who probably don't smell very good and must not have real jobs to get to, families to raise and busy schedules to keep. You get nowhere emphasizing the differences between us and them. You have to try to minimize them. Don't think you can do that just by wearing regular street clothes. The drunks wear those. So do the kids. You need to solve the flow problem. Do that and no one will care how we look.