A study in motorist psychology

If you want to understand a culture, live in it for a while.

I had not lived as a motorist since high school. I began my transition to predominantly cycling as I started college. Its advantages compounded over the years so that I came out of college car-free. Although motor vehicles made their way back into my life, I have considered myself a bicyclist who drives sometimes rather than the opposite.

This long, cold, snowy winter combined with other circumstances to make me a driver. I'm not proud of the tendencies that too easily turn me into a dickhead behind the wheel, but I'll use my own descent into hell to illuminate the psychology of the habitual driver.

Let's start by saying bluntly that there's no excuse for rude and dangerous piloting no matter what you're steering. I know myself well enough to head off the behavior even if I lack the spiritual advancement to avoid the desire to act impatiently or aggressively in the first place. But immersion in circumstances that inspire the feelings gives the analytical mind plenty to consider.

The average driver steeps  in a broth of impatience.  The situation that made me a driver this winter also made me concerned with scheduling.  Transit time suddenly mattered more than it had for years. On the bike my travel time is very consistent. But in the car it can vary ten to 25 percent due to circumstances beyond my control. That's a significant range. So leave earlier. That's the simple answer.  But what if the normal chaos of life delayed departure? We can still save this if everything goes right! Let's go!

Peel out of the driveway and the blockers move in. They take many forms. School busses are obvious.  Stoners, texters and the inexplicable weavers, wobblers and wanderers mysteriously sprout from the very heaved and potholed pavement itself. Maybe an opportunity to pass comes up. Probably it does not. All the while I wish I was on my bike.

I don't live in a six lane highway kind of place. It's two lane blacktop, baby. Not that it makes a huge difference.  We all know that more lanes just breed more traffic. The impatience that afflicts drivers acclimated to Gridlock Land probably springs more from the hideous realization that they're pissing away years of their lives sitting in traffic. That's right,  buddy.  You're growing old and dying in the driver's seat, delicately holding ridiculous horsepower to a crawl.

Cars represent independence to people. How ironic is that?

So the big revelation is that motorized transportation is a perfect  breeding ground for judgmental resentment.  Drivers judge each other.  They act aggressively. And there we are, one more thing. And we're small, slow and without armor. Time to vent!

This is obvious. Obvious, obvious, obvious. But put yourself in that frame of mind. Really absorb the character of the undiluted habitual driver. After only about three months I could feel the beginning of a sense of entitlement trying to take hold. Think how pernicious the infection must be in people who act on impulse without questioning their motivation.

Generations have grown up with the automobile as an undebated necessity of life. Look both ways before crossing the street,  kids. You don't want to get in the way of a driver! Let's get going!  We want to get a good parking place. Road trip! Hippies started bike touring. Questionable people.

Argue all you want about the true demographics of cycling. Drivers don't see statistics through their windshield.  They see things that might slow them down. You don't have to be the worst offender to draw their ire. You're an easy target. That's all that matters.

Someone's always got a more rad ride

A recent article from the New York Times website highlighted long-distance bike commuter Christian Edstrom and his 40-mile journey from Chappaqua, N.Y., to the offices of JP Morgan in Manhattan.

Edstrom said he commutes by bike in part to put his cycling into a block of time when he would be away from his family anyway. He gets to ride a couple of relatively high-mileage days without having to carve out the time from work or domestic life. The article stated he rides the commute at least two days a week. We can only speculate how often he exceeds that and by how much.

I know from my own modest efforts that a commute verging on long distance demands commitment. A life cooperating with others, whether just a spouse or domestic partner or with offspring as well, calls for adaptability. It's better to ride some of the time than none of the time. Zealots and the very fortunate need to remember that a purely bike-only lifestyle doesn't work for most people.

Long-distance commuters make good entertainment. People who wouldn't ride can use us as another excuse not to. "Well, I'm not up to riding 60 or 80 miles a day, so forget it." We also gather experience and provide feedback so that other riders, prospective riders and planners can improve techniques and infrastructure to make bike transportation easier and safer.

I envy the riders with lots of route options including traffic-free alternatives. My projected traffic-free alternative for the coming commuting season will add at least three miles as I work my way over to the trail on the inbound route. In some places those rail trail corridors actually provide cyclists with a more direct route than cars and trucks use. Some municipalities are studying the processes needed to co-locate bike trails with active rail lines so that the improvement of one mode need not require the decay of the other.

If a train swerves to hit you everyone has bigger problems than one hot-headed driver. And what a draft you might get.

The long-distance commuter community does seem to exhibit a bit of early-riser arrogance. One rider from Ridgewood, N.J., Rob Kotch, said that the early group of commuters leaves at 5:30 a.m., but would leave at 4:45 if a critical bridge on the route was open earlier. He said there's a shift leaving at 6:30 a.m. "for the lazy people."

I'm going to blow an air horn outside his bedroom at 9 p.m. Send him right to the ceiling.

I'm sure he was joking. But living in rural New England one gets sensitive to the competitive nature of early rising. The customary greeting for each other any time after 8:30 a.m. is "Good aftanooooon!"

I lost my membership in the early rising club when I took up with a musician. I was barely hanging in there anyway. Do good work while you're awake and get good rest when you're not. Ideally, anyway.

Plenty of rest these days. The subzero cold moves out, admitting a brief bit of snow which will then be sluiced away by heavy rain on Wednesday. All that seems to end up sticking to the ground in most places is ice. You can stud your tires and even your shoes, but it's never the same carefree romp as riding on firm, dry surfaces or skiing and snowshoeing (or even fat-bike riding) on packed or fluffy snow. Ice anywhere but on a rink or a natural water body (or an ice climb, for those inclined) is just a pain. Oh yeah, and in your drink.

I always think cabin fever season will be great for creative pursuits, but the lack of activity slows all my processes down. It's always a challenge to find the slot in the day where physical activity won't displace something else equally important, especially when the convenience of bike commuting isn't an option.

Until society adopts my idea for phys ed for everyone, we will each have to come up with whatever systems we can. Phys ed for everyone is my shorthand for the idea that every person should be given a couple of hours of prime daytime to do something for their personal fitness. Bike commuters who are satisfied with their exercise level could opt out and use the time for something else, but everyone would have the option to get out in daylight and the best weather if they wanted it, with no penalty and no stigma.

Some people go riding or running on their lunch hour. That only works if you get a lunch hour. And someone who is regularly active will need the lunch as well as the hour. I would rather work less and enjoy life more, even if I don't make as much money, than work to exhaustion and hope I live long enough to enjoy myself some day, while others are out of work completely.

Lunch Interrupted

In a small retail store lunch is taken when the opportunity presents itself.

The most interesting lunch interruption I ever experienced came after a long series of failed attempts to get some time alone with my sandwich when I worked in a small outdoor outfitter store in Annapolis, Maryland. One after another, annoying people came in with questions that did not lead to sales or to interesting conversations. At last, they seemed to have finished with me. I sat on a stool behind the front counter, my back to the front window and the door and raised the sandwich to my lips. Immediately I heard the clang of the door chime and turned to see a slightly unkempt individual who looked like he could be crazy. He pointed over my shoulder out the window.

"Look, it's the space shuttle," he said.

That's it. He was definitely crazy. Then I turned to look and there was the space shuttle, flying low and slow over the old Parole shopping plaza on the back of its 747 transport plane.

Today's interruption was not that interesting. You can't beat something as weird as the space shuttle, but I have also gotten harder to wow over the years.

We have a pact here at the shop that whoever is eating should have the best chance to finish doing so  before some annoying bumbledub gets to lurch in and demand attention. That being said, a lot of the time I'll be trying to python down my sandwich and everyone out on the sales floor will apparently be abducted by aliens or something. I'll hear the tentative, "hellooooo...!" from the workshop door while I'm sitting a the lunch desk we call the Bayview Cafe.

I'm really good at pretending I can't hear people. It's even better when they can't see me, but not necessary. So when someone came up the back stairs right after I sat down I didn't even twitch when he said loudly, "ANYBODY AROUND IN THE BIKE SHOP?" Let the guy who had just finished lunch take care of it.

He spotted the boss at the front register. The sound of his voice receded. Then the sound of both of them grew louder as they came back.

"...my son is building bamboo frames in the Philippines. I was wondering if your customers would be interested in anything like that," he was saying. He told a little more about the origins of the company and stated that he thought there were only a couple of other players in the business, "one in California that builds them in Africa and another one in the Philippines."

I could think of Calfee and Panda right off the top of my head. I was pretty sure Calfee was the one doing the bit in Africa. I didn't think either one was in the Philippines. A quick Google search on bamboo bicycles yields plenty of leads to follow to other companies well before getting to his son's. But I don't enjoy blowing people out of the water the way I used to. Besides, Bambike seems like a great little company with a nice philosophy.

The frame was surprisingly heavy. Calfee's site said they engineer the frame to rider weight, so perhaps this one was for someone fairly substantial. Bam is a different company, but the same design principle could apply. I don't know if we could move any here, but as interruptions to my lunch go it was a lot better than a stinky pair of hockey skates, even if it wasn't the space shuttle.