Motorist outreach

We live in unsettling times. In the United States, the illusion of social evolution and increasing enlightenment was stripped away in 2016. As necessary as that was, to reveal the barely buried reality, it also constantly eats away at any kind of peace of mind or confidence.

Is there something you don't like? Attack it openly. It's okay now. Yell racial slurs. Refuse service to gay people. Practice random acts of meanness.

Under the heading of random acts of meanness, a motorist coming the other way on Elm Street gave a friendly, tootly, attention-seeking horn honk. When I lifted my hand to wave and turned my head, thinking that it might be someone I know, an unfamiliar bearded face extruded itself out the driver's side window above an outthrust middle finger.

Suckered into looking right at Finger Boy's insulting gesture, I responded with the universal WTF shrug: an expansive, palm-up gesture indicating that I see the juvenile overture, and I dismiss it. Still, I kicked myself for looking at all. The best response would have been to let him wave his finger at the side of my head as I ignored him completely.

Over the years I have fallen firmly into the habit of never looking directly at or into a motor vehicle. Friends occasionally wonder why I did not respond to a wave, but most of them understand, once I explain. I use my eyes defensively, in combat mode, not socially.

There's little point in making eye contact with motorists, despite what you may have read or heard. I don't want to know what they're thinking. I monitor their vehicles as potentially dangerous lumps moving, about to move, or likely to stop, depending on what might be most inconvenient. I try as much as possible to be emotionless.

Peripheral vision is better at detecting motion than your direct focused gaze is. You can learn to turn most of your field of vision into peripheral vision by letting your focus shift out into the classic thousand yard stare. I look at the road in front of me, scanning for small hazards like glass, metal, broken pavement, or chunks of blown tire that drop little pieces of wire from their reinforcing belts. I take snapshots of vehicles, noting make, model, color, and license plate. I don't retain the memory unless something makes me focus on it. For instance, Finger Boy's car looked like a 1980s Renault Alliance, white or pale blue. It had New Hampshire tags.

Even if there's an incident, it's hard to remember all the details. And without facial ID of the driver it's all worthless anyway, because police won't prosecute. So really, driving as if you're among computer generated characters in a game works just as well. We're all just matter in motion, trying to avoid collision. Most of us are trying to avoid it, anyway.

The danger of low-traffic roads

Bicycle riders often choose paths and trails because they are afraid of traffic on roads. Road riders will share routes that they prefer, often based on lower traffic volume. I do it myself.

On busy roads, cyclists worry about close passing and drive-by maliciousness. But the volume on a high-traffic road forces motorists to keep up with each other. Each one only has a couple of seconds to spend on hassling a cyclist before inviting the impatience of drivers coming up from behind. Granted, in a hostile neighborhood a rider may encounter a conveyor belt of aggressive criticism, but in most places a driver will settle for an angry horn blast, or a fender-brush, in passing on their privileged way. More drivers do an okay job going around me than don't.

Quiet roads seem relaxing. Most drivers I encounter seem more interested in getting by with a minimum of fuss regardless of traffic volume. But a quiet road also affords the malicious driver more time to plan and execute cowardly acts of bullying, one on one. A case in point: Yesterday, I was on the home stretch of a 41-mile ride home from dropping off a vehicle in Gilford. With about a mile to go, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, I was coasting down a little grade when a navy blue Chevy HHR came up and slowed beside me.

The road is bumpy there, so I kept my eyes forward. No one rolled down a window to speak to me. The vehicle just squeezed over to the right, to herd me into the ditch.

Having none of that, I braked sharply and yanked the bike to the left to cross behind the Chevy to the clear left lane. The driver jammed on the brakes as soon as I was behind the vehicle, but not enough to get me. He (I assume, since the whole thing was a total dick move) accelerated slowly away, giving no response to my interrogatory "WTF" shrug.

Such incidents are blessedly rare. But that makes them stand out all the more, when you are reminded that some people enjoy making a special effort to try to mess up someone else's day, and perhaps even cause injury. Put it on YouTube and it will get 7 million hits and make them some beer money.

My rage rises slowly in cases like this. As the incident unfolds, I focus on calm and decisive maneuvers to avoid a crash. Because the cowards usually do their thing and roll on by, I can come to a boil behind them while they're still close enough to hit with a short-barreled weapon, if I were so inclined and equipped. The fact that I could be so inclined is a major reason why I am not so equipped. I would dearly love to vaporize their back window in a shower of glass shards. But I really wouldn't love to vaporize the back of someone's skull, which is a very real possibility when you start tossing lead around.

I have yet to devise the ideal emotionally-satisfying response or a good defense mechanism. Any use of force invites escalation. The best strategy seems to be the existing strategy: ride smart, refuse to quit, and remember that there are many ways to stand up for what you believe is right. The need for principled resolve never ends. It could be scary and it could be painful, but you will experience fear and pain no matter how you live. You might as well spend them on something worthwhile.

Fear itself is just an emotion. Sustained negative emotions can have damaging physical effects, but you can learn to diminish a lot of your fear, and use the remaining bit to heighten your awareness. Mere emotional disruption is far more common than actual physical injury out there on the road.

Anger is a byproduct of fear. My anger centers on two aspects of the violation: I could be hurt, which would disrupt my economy, to say the least; and someone else could be hurt or intimidated. So far, I have been able to take care of myself out there. Ride smart. Learn to get comfortable with other vehicles fairly close to you. You're safer on most streets than you would be in a Cat 4-5 criterium. Most riders do not try racing. They don't learn how to ride mere inches (if that) from someone else.

You can't let yourself dwell on what could go wrong. If you're going to do that, don't just stop at cycling. Think about how insane most of our transportation habits are: We fly at each other on two-lane roads at a combined closure speed of 80 to 130 miles per hour. Motorcyclists join this flow, many of them with no protective clothing whatsoever. I'll bet that they all feel like they've made a better choice than riding a bicycle.

If I let fear get the better of me and quit riding on the roads, I see no point in keeping my job. I'll be walking most places, and driving very little. I've already made plenty of concessions to the motoring public, short of quitting entirely. I ride to the right, I don't bother to herd. I was riding to the right on an empty road on Monday. It's just not enough for some people. Anyone as petty as that deserves no more from me. They represent everything that is wrong with humanity.

September is Aggressive Driving Month

September Driver Aggression was a little late this year, probably because the protracted summer-like weather made it easy to forget that the month had arrived. It really hit this week, though.

One hallmark of autumnal aggression is impatience after sunset. I always get honked at more when I'm operating with the lights on, and the honks tend to be a little sharp. With the generator head and tail lights, and two additional blinkies to the rear, plus reflector leg bands, I'm not hard to see. But drivers seem pushier when they pass. This continues after September. On my route, it's worse on the secondary road between Route 16 and my home in the woods than it is on the highways or coming out of Wolfeboro.

I have not commuted anywhere but here since the late 1980s, so I don't know what other riders may experience. When I commuted year-round by bike in the Annapolis, Maryland area, between 1979 and 1987, the percentage of jerks seemed pretty stable, day or night, in any season. During my bike commuting period there, it was getting steadily more urbanized and sprawled out. Of course this new growth was designed around motor vehicles exclusively. There might be token signage and a bit of width designated for cyclists in a few places, but the motorists knew that they were the top predators in that food chain. I don't think any of my old racing buddies still ride around there anymore. When I would visit from up here, even though the motoring public actually seemed less aggressive than during the early 1980s, the traffic volume made riding stressful. To be dangerous, drivers don't have to be maliciously aggressive, just self-centered and unaware.

Drivers may think that a cyclist can't see them as well in the dark. The opposite is true: a motor vehicle has powerful floodlights on the front of it, and it still makes as much noise as ever. I hear them and I see them, or at least I see the light thrown by them.

The closer passing and increased tendency to honk make me think that drivers believe that the darkness cloaks their identity. I suppose that is somewhat true, since most people's license plate lights don't work. But I have a terrible time seeing into cars and trucks in daylight, let alone at night, because of the reflections on the glass. In a lot of developed countries, hitting a cyclist day or night is basically a freebie. They don't need to be cloaked. Reasonable doubt shines down on the whole encounter.

Since I've had close encounters in the dark even when the motorist and I were the only vehicles on a stretch of rural road with decent sight lines, I think that the darkness and seclusion might also stimulate predatory instincts in some borderline folks. And I'll bet that a lot of us are closer to that borderline than we will admit even to ourselves. A twitch of the steering wheel is all it takes to assuage a little impulsive blood lust. So a super low traffic volume is not necessarily a selling point.

I've mentioned before that I feel helplessly conspicuous, riding on a trail in the dark, with my bright lights making deep shadows outside their glare. When I don't need to be seen by others, night vision goggles would be the better choice. And here we go with another gear purchase. More likely I rely on statistical probability and just keep on with the visible illumination.

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.

When you can't please everyone...

This stunning human being in Columbus, Ohio, summed up what I would guess is the majority attitude among motorists, with his entry in a whimsical parade there to celebrate Independence Day. The sign on his door says, "I'll share the road when you follow the rules."

I considered a post titled "Don't ride like an asshole," but I realized after a nanosecond's thought that riders who draw attention by flamboyantly anarchistic behavior are only the excuse that motocentric road users throw up to justify their hostility. Many bad habits that ignorant or stubborn riders use, like riding against traffic, are embraced by the motocentric, because they reinforce the stereotype of the wheeled pedestrian. Bike riders belong somewhere, anywhere, other than in the lane, taking up valuable space and demanding a traffic flow that respects their humanity. Humanity ends at the door handle, pal. Once the motorist is sealed in the capsule, the only things that count are horsepower and cunning.

People who are generically hostile to bike riders will take exception to nearly anything a rider does. Add this to the hostility between biking subcultures themselves and nothing ever gets fixed. And I don't imagine it ever will. No single solution or workable set of solutions will please everyone. The yammering will continue, with occasional blood drawn, mostly from riders who get caught in the crossfire.

The cellist and I were ordered off the road this morning, by a motocentrist in a shit brown and pond scum green step-side pickup truck coming the opposite way. He was defending the rights of the poor motorists I had trapped behind me while I waited for the oncoming truck to clear the lane. To their credit, the motorists behind me took it all calmly, and passed safely and methodically once the oncoming driver had made his statement and gone on. It reminded me that angry people with simplistic points of view can throw a little or a lot of tension into what should be simply a normal piece of traffic flow. The offended truck driver would say the cellist and I were taking excessive liberties because we did not wobble along the right rim of the pavement, allowing any driver to pass at any time. Good luck explaining anything to someone like that.

I do believe there is a right way to ride on the public streets. I just know better than to put it forward as the one true path. It IS the one true path, but my advocacy will not hasten its discovery. Its own truth will guide riders to it, if they ride for enough years. It's a wide path, with probably half a dozen One True Alternate Routes and a couple of dozen special exceptions, but it's true. Perhaps the growing population of people with riding experience will infiltrate the motoring population to the point where cooperative behavior becomes a reflex.

Many motorists already do remarkably well. But then, the fact that many places don't get shot up by a miserable attention whore with an assault rifle is little comfort when you are in the place where it happens. Same deal when you're riding along and you meet the wrong sorehead driver. There's no defense, really. You just have to keep living in a way that sets a good example, and hope it becomes the universal choice.

There is no battle. There is no war. There is only patient teaching, endurance, and luck.

The work of hateful cowards

This item came up in my Facebook feed. Spring seems to have brought out the haters on both sides of the Atlantic:

http://road.cc/content/news/182405-barbed-wire-booby-trap-found-kent-cycle-trail

Tacks on a trail could be considered mischief. Most likely, they will only cause a rider inconvenience rather than bodily harm. But barbed wire strung across a trail is a premeditated assault on the rider, not just sabotage of the machine.

Traps are the work of cowards. Trappers may set them out of contempt, but they are also avoiding any confrontation or accounting for the harm they might cause.

Our species produces a certain percentage of damaged people who like to inflict pain. An even larger pool justifies acts of aggression -- even passive aggression -- because the targets of the aggression have aggrieved them in some way. In most cases, you can't settle things with a fight, because you can't kill a mindset. At best you can hope to educate someone out of one. Even then, sickos remain sickos.

As population density increases, we all get on each other's nerves. Whether we're really headed down the drain of the behavioral sink is still debated in the scientific community. The higher intellect of humans at least slows the process of total degeneration by keeping notions of conscience alive in a large percentage of us. That still does not protect us from the less-evolved types who think hunting each other is a fun and effective way to solve their problems.

The joker with the barbed wire should be tangled in a length of it and rolled down a bumpy slope, just for educational purposes. Or we just wait to see what karma comes up with on its own. It's always tempting to intervene and try to speed up the process.

The first priority is always to avoid the traps and cheat the cowards of their fun. If you can get it to blow back on them, that's a bonus. If you put too much thought and energy into it, you become part of the problem yourself.

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.