Is bike commuting "ableist?"

 46 years ago, when I started my life as a full time member of the workforce, rather than a student, I did it as a bike commuter. I have used the bike for transportation to work at least some of every year since then.

At the start, the motives were economic and physical. I knew I couldn't count on a high income, or necessarily a steady one. I also knew that I like to eat tasty food, and that my family had a tendency to run to fat. Throughout my childhood I listened to my parents complain about their need to diet. Exercise wasn't part of any adult's normal life in the white-collar middle class. Every one of them faced a physical decline considered inevitable. Might as well joke about it, and keep buying bigger pants.

As the 1960s rolled on into the 1970s, exercise for adults became a mainstream thing. Jogging and running emerged as respectable, even cool, pastimes. By the 1980s, fitness centers had become an industry. Rolling parallel to that rode the ten-speed boom, which merged into the mountain bike boom.

During the ten-speed boom, bike touring and transportation cycling offered ways to beat the shocking rise of gasoline prices as they rocketed toward a whole dollar a gallon. We'd flip a U-turn in the middle of a busy six-lane arterial roadway now to get into a gas station selling for a dollar a gallon, but after decades of regular gas at 30 cents a gallon or less, a dollar a gallon seemed like onrushing doom. Even so, biking to work was always a fringe activity.

I'm sure that the petroleum industry has not noticed my absence, despite a lifetime commitment to limit my consumption. I can attest that it has saved me thousands of dollars, but admit that it has limited my returns from the economy that every other human voted to pursue instead.

The stubbornness of motor vehicle culture used to arouse my annoyance and contempt. These are not helpful emotions for advocacy. They're a response to the annoyance and contempt directed at me as a cyclist. They're mostly dulled now, worn out from overstimulation, but also tempered by a broader understanding of the complexity of people's transportation needs. Yes, a vast number of people could use something other than a full-size motor vehicle to move themselves and their stuff around, but that leaves many more whose lives would be much more complicated if they tried to rely entirely on walking, biking, and public transportation.

I love the simplicity of using my car when I need the load capacity, speed, and effortless range that it provides. I just dump my crap in the back and head out, in normal clothes, to zip around 80 or a hundred miles of accumulated errands in a few hours. The same circuit on a bike would take a couple of days. And there is no public transportation where I live.

I still roll my eyes at the pickup truck craze. "Gas is sooo expensive! I need a bigger truck!" I don't want to hear the bitching. Plus I have to fit in the lane with these behemoths. But they do pull a nice draft when they go by.

I don't even know what the proper term is for the disabled now. In my lifetime I have seen their emergence from shut-in and shunned to just another category in the workforce. Lots still to be done, but the debate has now taken the dark turn of almost officially discussing euthanasia. Just kill the wounded and put them out of their misery. Pretty dark. Leaning instead toward accommodation, what's the balance between meatheads like me who are willing to live at least part of the year like it's an extended bike tour or stage race, and people who physically can't?

We debate how to spend public money in a rich country that pretends to be a poor one. 

You can't plan for every detail. Some things just have to evolve and adapt as experience accumulates. For the most part, around here, drivers seem to be willing to make the minimal effort to go around rather than over me. Other riders tell me about being hit by a car. I have no answer for that. Riders can make mistakes that put themselves more at risk, but drivers can also either space it or make a malicious choice. As riders, we count on drivers making the choice to steer around us as they overtake. Coming from any other direction than behind us, drivers will be in our field of view. We have tactical options.

Fear of collision has driven many riders to quit using the public roads. There are roads I avoid because of traffic speed and density. Any built up area will have greater traffic density and potentially dangerous speeds. In those circumstances, drivers have less attention and patience for pedalers. Pedalers have less acceleration and speed to work within the traffic flow. Maybe they have route alternatives. Maybe not.

Mountain bikers have to worry about losing access to trails because land owners don't want them around anymore. Road riders don't have to worry about losing access to the public right of way. We just have to worry about encountering the wrong nut job who doesn't want us around anymore.

Road riding has weathered legal challenges, like a Maryland legislative push in the early 1980s that would have cut us off from anything with a speed limit above 30 miles per hour, as I recall. Something crazy like that. These are bound to crop up again. But for the most part the laws seem pretty permissive. They leave it to natural predation to keep our numbers in check. "You don't pay road taxes! I'm going to kill you!"

Transportation cycling can be a beneficial element in the traffic mix. I'm a lot easier to pass when I'm riding my bike than when I'm in my car, stuck in the lane in front of you. Drivers have contempt for cyclists, but real hatred for each other. So, because I am able to ride a bike, I actually help lower the emotional temperature out there. This does change with the number of cyclists and their behavior. Lots of riders give us a bad name with antics that either just look bad to motorists or are outright dangerous. 

The "looks bad but is actually good" category presents a challenge, because it includes running stop signs. This doesn't apply to all stop signs all the time. But it's generally better for a rider to be passed on a flowing stretch of road than to have a motorist decide on their own that they can and should squeeze past at an intersection.

Red lights are a different story. Rarely will I run one because I can't be sure that I won't overlook a hazard in my push to flow through. Also, it sets you up to be passed by the same motorists over and over. They get more and more steamed at having not only to stop and go and stop and go, but to accommodate the rider block after block. Cycling fundamentalists will say fuck 'em for being motorists, but fundamentalists at anything only make life worse. You need empathy and flexibility, even if you don't feel like you're getting it in return most of the time. I'll actually fall back a bit at a red light, to get more vehicles past me when they're stopped or moving slowly. At the very least I hold my place so that the ones who have "beaten" me get to keep their medals.

So: If you're able to use a bike some or most of the time, try it. If you're not sure, try it a few times in different contexts to see if you can start to fit it in. If you can't, you can't. 

We don't serve your kind here

Late this afternoon, a kid was thrown off of Amtrak's Downeaster and marooned in Boston for trying to travel with his bike.

Our young trainee David had told me that a riding buddy of his was going to ride the commuter rail from somewhere south of Boston to pick up the Downeaster and continue to Dover, NH, where David would pick him up and bring him the rest of the way to Wolfe City for a weekend of training rides. Then, sometime after 4 p.m., the friend called from North Station to say that he had been removed from the train in what sounded like a rather underhanded way.

The cyclist had been told by one train official that it was okay. He had boarded and was settling in, when another train official came and told him, "bring your bike and your bags and come with me." The lad complied, and was led off the train. The doors shut, and the train left. No warning, no explanation, no appeal. No one bothered to find out whether the kid was okay being dumped in Boston's North End on the verge of evening, when he was in the middle of a journey northward. They just knew that they had to get him and his bike off of that train.

David immediately set about figuring out how to rescue his friend. The obvious and unpalatable answer would be to drive more than two hours each way to retrieve him from North Station. Maybe the cyclist could cut a deal with the bus company to take him to Dover. Whatever they did, they were having to improvise it as nightfall marched steadily closer.

You could say, as Amtrak no doubt will, that the boy should have done his homework. I say it's long past time to give cyclists roll-on access to every train at every stop on every line, and make intermodal transportation a reality instead of a novelty. This incident is strikingly similar to the way I was treated almost 40 years ago when I traveled from the New Carrollton Amtrak station to New Brunswick, NJ, in the spring of 1980. In that journey, I was allowed to board in New Carrollton because a sympathetic conductor recognized me from the regular trips I'd been making along that route in pursuit of something that felt like love. But he could only get me as far as Philadelphia. There, he said, I could get on a train with a baggage car, scheduled to be leaving at a convenient time.

When I went to the train in Philly, the conductor told me that they don't open the baggage car there, and to get lost. Philly is such a minor city that they don't open the baggage car there? What if someone has baggage? Surely someone has the key.

I did not say any of this. Instead I negotiated a little, and he finally told me that I could ride between two cars, boarding just before the train pulled out. "I can get you to Trenton," he said. "Then you have to find a commuter train. They let bikes on."

"Get on here," he said, pointing to the door. I did as he said, and wedged myself into the wiggling space where the car platforms scissored back and forth with every undulation of the rails. About halfway to Trenton, I heard an altercation break out in the bar car, which was the leading car of my little duplex. The car door popped open, and the conductor, a burly man now red-faced with irritation, shoved a smaller man into the space. The smaller man, who appeared to be an Amtrak employee riding for free, made the mistake of taking a swing at the conductor. The conductor knocked him down. When the big man pulled his foot back to kick, I gave him the eyeball. He withdrew, grumbling.

Now sharing the tiny space with the smaller man, I had no ideas for conversation. He didn't seem to feel too chatty either. We leaned in our respective corners, lurching back and forth with the movement of the train. I was holding my bike on its rear wheel, pressed against the side of the compartment.

When the doors opened in Trenton, I squirted out and headed down the platform as police officers closed in.

I got aboard a commuter train. A guy in a uniform told me it was okay and pointed me toward a car. I leaned my bike up and sat down. A lady in a nearby seat started chatting me up. She was convinced that I must be some experienced world traveler. She refused to believe me when I told her that this was my first attempt at such a trip, and that I had started from home at 0500 when I rode to New Carrollton from Annapolis. Our conversation came to an abrupt end when the train official came back to throw me off before the train departed. I was now stranded in Trenton.

My grandfather had his optometric practice in Trenton. I rode over to his house. He was quite surprised to see me. I explained my predicament. We had a nice lunch together, and then he gave me a lift to the edge of town, so I didn't have to battle traffic making my way to the nice two-lane road through Princeton. I broke a spoke outside of Princeton, but found a bike shop (gotta love college towns) and replaced the spoke on the steps in front of it.

In the last few hundred yards of the ride, in New Brunswick, I flatted and dumped the bike in an intersection. Traffic was light. I dragged myself to the sidewalk and trudged the last bit to reach my love interest.

The return trip was less harrowing, but still relied on special circumstances, not on any kind of bike-friendly policies from Amtrak. We went down to the station, bought my ticket, walked out onto the platform, and lined up to board. There was my bike, shiny and obvious. The conductor came over shaking his head. My love interest burst into tears, explaining that I just had to make this train. She didn't even dress it up with any bullshit about my humanitarian mission or the transplant organs I was transporting. The basic version was good enough to get me onto one direct train all the way to New Carrollton.

You can't count on having an effective performer to deliver a literal sob story every time you need one. Amtrak has made a big deal about every grudging concession to cyclists, every individual station slowly added to a limited network of trains. Meanwhile, if I could roll on in Dover and roll off in New London or Old Saybrook, I might never use my car to visit my parents again. I could even go to Baltimore and get myself to and from the stations. I really like trains. It costs more money to take the train than to drive, but it's so great to be without a car.

That's so un-American. "Great to be without a car." What are you? Weird?

Demonstrably so.

Anyway, it's been 40 years since my hopscotch adventure, and about the same length of time since I got thrown off of the DC Metro for having a disassembled bike in two bags, and things don't seem to have improved a hell of a lot. I look forward to hearing how David and his riding buddy solved their transportation problem, but I hate that they had to.

All public transportation needs to embrace human powered transportation and make it easy to change modes. No requirement for folding bikes. No limitations. Roll on, roll off, every train, every line, every station stop.