Replacing car trips with e-bikes

 "Replacing car trips with ebikes." That headline greeted me as I skimmed through the ol' inbox a few days ago.

First of all, it's a great idea. It would reduce the volume of large, boxy vehicles in traffic, although it would probably increase the overall number of vehicles. Second, it would reduce fossil fuel consumption. By extension, that would reduce tailpipe emissions. It would drastically alter the parking situation. But it would also drastically complicate the riders' lives in ways that they haven't imagined.

Motor vehicles have been the norm in this country for so long that massive support systems exist to keep them rolling. How many parts store chains can you name? NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, AutoZone, WalMart... you can get auto parts everywhere. You can go in with pretty fragmentary information about your car and the people behind the counter can usually find what you need in their voluminous cross-reference books. No such network exists for bicycles, e- or otherwise.

Most people drive vehicles that they don't even begin to understand. Car broken! Go to mechanic! Mechanic fix! It costs a lot of money, and we often feel that the mechanic might be shady or not that competent. But at least we have options, and the mechanics -- professional or home DIY -- can get parts, tools, and manuals, as well as the ubiquitous YouTube videos.

Electric bikes have almost none of this. Not only are they a much younger technology, they come in from a scorned and neglected sector by identifying as bicycles. In addition, many companies have abysmal tech support.

Because smokeless mopeds are so popular, independent support will evolve quickly, but it's happening very unevenly. In Wolfe City and the surrounding area, smokeless mopeds have been playthings of the rich for more than a decade. For some of them it's been since the 1990s. As the category has taken off in the past few years, the opposite end of the income scale has taken to it heavily. The wealthy have had resources that the worker bees will never enjoy, including calling up the CEO of an e-bike company and getting parts sent directly as a favor, executive to executive. That ain't the real world.

A local working class e-bike user who grew up working on his own internal combustion vehicles has delved into the inner workings enough that he is considering starting an e-bike service business. We are encouraging him, because smokeless mopeds are not bicycles. They share traits in common, but the motors and electronic aspects demand knowledge that the average bike shop shouldn't be burdened to acquire.

You might say that the competitive economy presents challenges and opportunities, and that anyone unwilling to embrace this new aspect of "bicycle" evolution is a slacker and defeatist, but you would be a dick. Simple economic reality stands in the way of this idealistic vision.

Someone starting a business from scratch can decide how to expend capital to equip that business. Let's assume adequate funding to establish the business. For smokeless mopeds you will want a powered lift, or at least one with some mechanical advantage built in. Depending on your expected volume of business, you might want two or more. I have only the vaguest idea what you would need for tools to service the electrical aspects, but they aren't free.

You will need space for this operation. If you also service regular bicycles, that will probably call for a parallel service area with the usual few thousand dollars in tools and workstands, plus staffing. Smokeless mopeds being a separate genre, you can probably focus solely on them.

My car mechanic has a three-bay setup in a side-street industrial park, for just himself and an occasional assistant. Smokeless mopeds don't take up nearly as much space as cars and SUVs, but they're generally bigger than regular bikes. Just as car repair places tend to accumulate derelict hulks parked here and there around the place, so do bike shops, including smokeless mopeds. Owners abandon them over the bill, or you scavenge them for parts, or you just get tired and go home at the end of day after day and never quite get around to processing the carcasses.

Once a business is mature, and has been operating in a dying industry that went into decline right after a phase of merciless competition between retailers, it has been getting by on slim margins and a shrinking customer base for years. We have no bag of cash to finance an effective expansion into a rapidly changing market sector only vaguely related to our original core strength. It's hard enough to keep up with the ridiculous bullshit produced for pedal-only bikes.

For now, the network of commercial and private e-bike mechanics barely exists. New owners are coming in much faster than support is forming around them. The vehicles are fairly reliable, but when they fail it could leave you stranded. The rider who is considering starting a service business almost lost his storage shed and more when the battery caught fire during charging. Fortunately, someone else spotted the fire in time to knock it down before it really took off. Battery fires are the most spectacular hazard of e-bike ownership, but hardly the most common.

Electric bikes either work or they don't. An internal combustion vehicle will enjoy its youth all shiny and tight, devolving gradually through the various stages of beater car (or truck), probably passing from owner to owner in the process. But electric motors don't generally just run rough and metaphorically burn oil. They either work or they don't. If something is loose, you don't want to let it rattle for too long. If power is intermittent, you need to find out why, or risk having to pedal your 60-pound behemoth with nothing but your li'l legs. Because that's another thing that evolved to support cars and has no comparable service for bikes: towing.

E-bikes are mostly massively heavy. Batteries and motors are heavy. You can buy light e-bikes and you can buy powerful e-bikes, but you can't buy light, powerful e-bikes. This may change, but for now the lightweight materials that might help with that equation are things like titanium and carbon fiber, which have mostly appeared on high-priced bikes. Carbon fiber in particular can suffer from the abuse and neglect that most of us inflict on our daily drivers. Light, thin metal and plastic might serve to lighten cheaper bikes, but with a resulting loss of ruggedness. Things will bend and break more.

You can't blame the industry and its cheerleaders for encouraging as many consumers as possible to become test pilots for generation after generation of failed experiments. The bike industry did it with mountain bikes through the 1990s without a twinge of shame. They also destroyed their market in the process, but they raked in some good bucks for a while before the dropoff. And the evolved product really excites the few people who can afford to buy one and ride in the style that the bikes have been shaped for.

E-bikes probably won't shrink to a niche product the way mountain bikes did, but their wide variety creates a parallel universe to the categories of bicycling. The categories don't line up exactly, because the e-bike spectrum extends from very bike-like all the way to virtual motorcycles. An e-bike is a motor vehicle. Expect costs to reflect that, even if they're lower than for a car. They'll never be as low as for a nice, basic transportation bicycle.

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

 The problem with bike commuting into my golden years is that I can't be sure from day to day whether I feel slow and weak because I just needed more sleep or if I just broke through one more rotted floorboard on the way to the grave. I can check my stats, which I have logged faithfully since 1988. They already show an unsurprising decline from when I was 32 to my present advanced state of decrepitude. But within that steady descending staircase are shorter and longer plateaus. The drops are not uniform. Sometimes I experience a bit of rejuvenation.

Twinges in my chest could be from my remaining feeble attempts at upper body conditioning, or from stacking three cords of hardwood in 90-degree temperatures. Or it could be gas. Cramming down breakfast before hurrying out the door leads to re-swallowing the last mouthful for the next 14 miles.

This time of year, riders around here get to sample the traffic of more populated places, as the summer influx makes this area one of them. It demands more combat readiness to be able to claim space and manage motorists where things get thick and fast.

The worst hill on my route home is the traffic circle at Route 171. On the way to work in the morning, I get a little boost from gravity to speed me around and out the bottom. On the way home I pay for that. The grade is mild. As just a hill it would present no more than an annoyance. But with motorists squeezing past me it demands an explosive effort to stomp through it.

The entry/exit chutes to the circle on Route 28 are curb-lined, narrow lanes. By law, I should be free to ride through them in my rightful place in line. By normal motorist custom, I get passed wherever I am. If I want my place I have to race for it. I try to get as many of them ahead of me as I can before we're committed to the tight space, but they can really jam me up when we get to the circle itself and have to either defer or play chicken with other vehicles coming through from 171 or 28 southbound. It's worse if I have to slow to a crawl or do a track stand while drivers either bull through or screw up the traffic flow by trying to be nice to me. Sprinting from a near stop will give me sore legs the next morning. Pushing a big gear brings those hints of a chest pain and the feeling of trying to accelerate an old car with bad compression. You can almost see the cloud of oil smoke behind me as the engine grumbles impotently.

Breath control is critical to quell those alarming coronary symptoms. Breathe freely. Gear down enough to keep from grunting. Old people die on the toilet because they hold their breath and strain. The same hazard stalks the aging rider who tries to push the anaerobic threshold. I suppose my daily overdoses of caffeine don't help. The circle requires a near-anaerobic sprint to make sure that I clear it without some pushy bastard who zoomed up behind me crashing on through because I don't belong on his road. It's only a dozen pedal strokes, maybe 20, to get to the exit chute and a widening shoulder. Breathe. Breathe. Keep just the right amount of load on, so the heart doesn't backfire like a clapped-out sports car that's seen its best day. Ease back up to speed because the next stretch is unaccountably fast. Enjoy all this while it lasts.

Cadence signals to the motorists whether you are a healthy beast they should respect and avoid or a wounded creature caught out in the open. I imagine Phil Liggett describing my condition: "He can't push a big gear anymore. Notice how his shoulders are rolling and he can't hold his line." Maybe he'd say something about a valiant effort by a rider who has had a long career. That would be nice.

A smart cyclist uses terrain at any age or stage of fitness. The older you get, the more it matters. I know my commuting route very well. Don't push the climbs too hard. Recover on the descents, or use them to accelerate into the traffic flow. Save energy for the places where you know you'll need it. That's the same at any age, just at a different average speed. My commute is a road race, not a criterium, but it has its urban element in Wolfe City. I need the ten or eleven miles of warmup to feel fully ready for whatever traffic is going to throw at me that day.

On the way out of town, I get one good bit of gravitational assistance from the parking lot down a hundred yards or so to the sharp bend in Mill Street. I need to control the lane on Mill Street, because it's too narrow for a car to pass me safely with oncoming traffic. Of course this never prevents any motorist from passing me anyway. So it's a sprint out of the gate to get to Bay Street, where I can fall back to a better pace to warm up properly. The route out to the highway starts with a series of climbs, often with motorists pushing past. They need a whack on the snout in a couple of places, but for the most part I can just let them run.

E-bike riders have been leaning forward in their chairs through this whole essay, raising their hands and going "Ooh! Ooh!" The thing is, once you accept the assistance you become dependent on it. I don't mean surrendering to the atrophy already consuming you. I mean the bike itself will be miserable to pedal without assistance. I have considered an e-bike since way before they were fashionable. I've watched the technology evolve. If I did get one, it would be a mid-drive cargo bike. Might as well make it worth its weight. But I can't afford one. It's old muscle or nothing. Just hoping to get away with it one more time.

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. 

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

In endless hope and constant fear

 A road rider lives in endless hope and constant fear. The hope propels us, keeps us going out there because the odds aren't really that bad. The problem is that things can go gruesomely wrong in an instant. Anyone out there who isn't thinking about that stands a greater chance of experiencing it. I can't be the only one listening to a motor vehicle coming up from behind, wondering casually if it will be the last thing I hear. Of course I'm not. The fear has made many riders give up the road.

There's more than hope and fear, of course. We also proceed in exasperation and complete bafflement at times. Those feelings are common to all road users. "Who is this idiot?! And why did they just do that?!?"

Fear keeps you sharp. It doesn't have to be debilitating terror. I'm sure that enthusiastic mountain bikers, safe from motorists on their trail networks, experience fear. You have to look for trouble in a purely recreational context like that, but even at an intermediate level a hazard can ambush you if you forget to respect the possibility.

Hope motivates the transportation cyclist. It was strong in the 1970s, diminishing through the 1980s as the Boomers chased wealth in a wide variety of motor vehicles. It returned with the popularity of mountain bikes in all environments, even those with no mountains, and hardly any woods. But the off-road aspect pulled most riders away from contact with traffic except when driving to where they wanted to ride. The industry abandoned its cheerful suggestion that riders might like to use their bikes a lot more than their cars, and switched to baiting them with more and more expensive, elaborate technology.

My paid writing from the mid 1980s onward tried to use recreation as a gateway to environmental stewardship. Motorized recreation had seemed masochistic to me since the first gas crisis in the early 1970s. At that time, I did not think about transportation cycling as a central part of my life. I liked to ride my English 3-speed, but had no desire to open the rear hub and anger the gods by probing the mysteries of its miraculous functions. But I did see the price of gasoline more than double and continue to rise. It wasn't until I got to university and overcame my derailleur phobia that I also discovered anything like mechanical aptitude in myself. I also discovered the economics of poverty.

It was a safe experiment. I had family. I wasn't going to sink without a trace, the way real poor people do. But I was working within a set budget. I sold my car before the end of senior year because I was happy and confident on my bike, determined to live within my means. A car brought with it fixed expenses in registration and insurance, the need for parking, fuel, and upkeep. I could shelter and maintain a bike in a single room or a small apartment. All I had to do was find jobs I could ride to. Lots of college students in Gainesville managed school and employment without cars. Most cities and towns seemed to have a resident population of bike riders.

Most cities and towns today have resident populations of riders. Cycling survives because bikes are basically good things. This is more true of the ones that are well made, generally older, but the concept is sound no matter what. The riders starting out may have mostly hope and little or no fear. As fear grows, maybe interest dies completely. No one rides for long without finding reasons to give it up. Whether a particular person does depends on their personal equation.

The steady creep of crap...

Like rising sea levels, a steady tide of brake fluid, shock oil, and tire sealant laps higher and higher. On it float the carbon fiber fuselages of high-priced industrial flotsam, while the currents of the murky depths carry along the aluminum offerings. Dragged along the bottom is a spreading tangle of cheap steel frames and flimsy mid- and low-end parts. Brand name and no name products jostle in this festering stew.

There never was a dike against it, but if there had been there would be a lone, drowned mechanic with his finger stuck in it. The surge came right over the top. But there was no dike, so there's just me and my finger, which I have been giving to the industry since the early 1990s. I'm still treading water in this great oceanic garbage patch, trying to rescue the few who are not swimming avidly away.

Hey, if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well have some fun with it. I used to find energy in the belief that I could have some wider influence. Fantasy has played an essential role in human survival. It just functions differently under the influence of different eras. We can tap into each other's imaginations like never before in this period of individual social media participation overlapping with professional productions in a range of legacy media and their evolved, evolving forms. As many as a few dozen people might read this essay. That's a bigger crowd than I could draw if I was raving in a public park anywhere within a short bike ride of where I live or work. Good return on my time, says the lazy man.

Bike season is winding down around here. Enthusiasts are still riding, but the frenzy of summer has gone to sleep until next year. By then we will know if we're going to be living in a smog-shrouded theocracy or be zigzagging toward the flickering image of a world where people are trying to get along with each other rather than get on top of one another. Service work still drops in a job or two at a time. The shop converts to ski season as autumn progresses. It's still only cross-country skiing, so we never get mobbed. As long as people can use motors to get them up a hill, that will be their preference. It's true with increasing numbers of two-wheeled "pedalers," too.

A guy in the shop last week said that he was getting an e-bike that would go 50 miles per hour. I figured he was full of sht, so I looked around online. I found quite a few ads for e-bikes that will do 50 mph. It's absolutely not legal, but the police have much more pressing matters to worry about. There are thousands of bikes on the road, and no effective means to keep track of them. This is a good thing in many ways. I don't like the idea of omnipresent surveillance, even if it does permit jackasses on rule-beating motorbikes to pretend they're on a machine that they would ever power by pedaling alone. I figure that they will sort themselves out on their 50 mile per hour mopeds.

Riders with power assistance do present a hazard to path riders, both recreational and transportational. Few act with malice, but insensitivity hits just as hard. Any vehicle operator becomes velocitized. You get used to your flow through the scenery based on the feedback you get through the contact points with the machine. We drive our cars at what seems like a sedate speed, while a pedestrian walking on the side of that road perceives our vehicle as hurtling past them. Riding an analog bike, 15 mph feels pretty zippy. Twenty feels downright godlike. Throw a little power assist in there and you can legally push close to 30 mph. Juice up the moped and you get into survival mode.

Survival mode is sneaky. You are in it before you realize it. You may be within your own reaction time to negotiate the road in front of you as you see it, but have no margin for the unexpected. It happens on an analog bike as well, but almost always on a downhill. The other place you can get into trouble is when larger vehicles are slowed by their own traffic congestion, and a bicyclist is tempted to fly past them or even cut between them at full speed. Filtering is fine, but trying to show off with a power play will get you smacked sooner or later.

As daylight shortens, my bike commuting season comes to an end. I will become flabbier and grouchier (if you can imagine that) as the months progress until next spring releases me to see how much strength my aging body still retains. The problem isn't the darkness, it's the lights. The floodlit behemoths I share the road with blind each other with their headlights and make me disappear. The imperative that motorists have, to pass any cyclist without pausing, means that they will shove through in that tunnel of glare and blackness wherever we encounter it.

There's also a slight uptick in malicious behavior under cover of darkness, but the major issue is insensitivity and impatience.

If I had a good place to park for park-and-ride commuting, I could continue for months, gaining at least some of the advantages of fully car-free transportation. Unfortunately, the local cyclist ghetto, the Cotton Valley Trail, runs off at an angle, so I end up driving almost the whole way to town, or equivalent distance, to intersect it at various points from which to continue by bike. And it's the Cotton Valley Trail: an active rail line masquerading as a multi-use rec path. The rail car hobbyists have the right of way, and some of them can be real pricks about it. Others are kindly ambassadors, but you don't know which is which when you both enter a railed section. On the other end of the speed range, not one single pedestrian is ever glad to see someone on a bike. Add a dog on a leash and your stock drops even further. I'd rather be out on the road with the armored personnel carriers whipping past me. It's much less personal.

Too late this morning as I sit under a cat, but maybe I'll try a few rides from the shopping center three miles out from my house. That cuts off the worst stretch for night riding. But the challenge points up a major issue for anyone with a motor vehicle: where can you leave it? They do lock. They're hard to remove casually. But anyone annoyed at your presence can do a whole lot of inconvenient things short of completely removing your expensive appliance. Pick the right wrong place and you could even lose the catalytic converter. That's become a new hazard at some hiking trailheads in the area.

For now, it's time to displace the cat and finish getting ready to load the car. Driving is so brain-dead easy compared to riding a bike. It's a habit-forming sedative in that way, but side effects include joint pain, stiffness, irritability, inattentiveness, weight gain,... see package insert for full list.

Who is this dirtbag?

 We see them all the time, even in our affluent resort town. A sketchy character brings in a bike that no collecting hobbyist or trendy technolemming would ever want, and bargains for the least amount of work we can do to get the machine operational again. It doesn't even have to be safe. Just get it so that the pedals pull the chain around and the bike moves forward. Some of them don't even have brakes. A scuffed work boot or blown out sneaker will suffice.

Then there are the eccentrics with limited finances and one oar in the water. They come in all ages, genders, races. Some are born with challenges that hinder their pursuit of income and housing. Others suffer head injuries, or battle addictions. Some are just on their own track, seeing the world in their own way. Somehow, they have all come to the bicycle, and the bicycle has welcomed them.

Life already wasn't fair when I was a kid, and it has only gotten less fair since then. There are more and more people, many in unstable family settings, or no family setting at all. It's comforting to embrace the lie that they would all be fine if their families were miraculously transformed into the mythical models of the 1950s and '60s, but the cracks were just plastered over back then. The simple fact that we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet while wondering why ecosystems are failing and the climate itself has been buggered never seems to influence the idea that social failure is solely the result of flawed character in at least two generations of strivers.

We deal with riders in each of those categories just in our dinky town. In my previous bike shop job, in 1980-'81 in Alexandria, Virginia, customers ranged from a family who could afford custom built little Eisentrauts for the kids, down to Moped David, who loved his yellow Motobecane "Yellow Bird." Location matters, so we had more from the affluent end of the scale back then, but in Annapolis I saw the bike hierarchy laid out as well. I only worked in a backpacking and mountaineering store there, but we had one customer who had lost his marriage and home and pickup truck to alcoholism, and now went everywhere on his bike. Two of the town's bike shops were on West Street, an artery that stretched from the heart of downtown at Church Circle all the way out to the edge of town at Parole, where it split into several two-lane highways (at that time) headed generally westward. There were many riders and few cyclists among the commuters along that corridor.

Annapolis was mutilated  through the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century by car-centric transportation decisions that made cycling much more dangerous and unpleasant, and didn't really do all that much for motorists either. The areas that grew large buildings and sprawling parking lots drove the development. Road builders just did what they could to throw down pavement in straight lines to connect everything. Some of it reamed out existing roads, adding lanes and traffic lights. Some of it added roads to slam traffic into the existing corridors whether they were ready for it or not. Don't even ask whether they ever really could have been ready for it. All this makes life less pleasant for the recreational rider, and exponentially more dangerous for the cyclist of necessity.

One customer in Wolfeboro now, whose backstory and physical appearance indicate that he may have native Alaskan ancestry, bought a used bike from us to commute to his kitchen job at a local restaurant. A little while later he said that he had gotten a construction job for more money. But then he showed up again at the restaurant job, because the contractor he worked for required him to have a motor vehicle, but his income -- increased though it was -- wouldn't support the purchase and routine expenses of car ownership. Economically, the restaurant job was a better deal, because he could continue to use the affordable bicycle. It's not a great deal, but it's more survivable.

I ran the same calculation numerous times in my own life. I might have made a fraction more money in various editing jobs during the decline and fall of print media, but it would have required owning and using a car every working day, driving as much as a hundred commuting miles each day. The little bit more money would be absorbed and then some by the expenses required to go fetch it. Or I could sell out where I was living and go rent in the more expensive area where the jobs were, probably never able to scrape together the funds to buy back into the real estate market. The real estate market itself is a problem: I don't think I'm unique because I bought a house as a place to live, not as an investment. I didn't -- and don't -- care whether it appreciates in value. I just want it to shelter me. The built-in inflation of a capitalist mindset screws the lower end of the income scale even as it devours their lives for necessities they provide. The same is true of any growth mindset rather than a maintenance mindset.

Transportation riders who have to wait weeks to have worn out tires replaced don't get any help except from a charitable friend if they happen to have one. No one gets "bike stamps" to help them keep rolling. The people who get any subsidy have been in jobs where the company health plan pays them to buy fitness equipment so that their prosperity doesn't make them sick with the expensive ailments brought on by forced sitting and boredom snacking. The HMO reasons that subsidizing equipment now will mean that they don't have to fork out for costly medical care later. It's not benevolence, it's cost accounting.

The rise of e-bikes has led many cyclists of necessity to choose the motor vehicle over one powered by meat alone. It makes sense: they didn't want to be pedalers in the first place. We fix what we can for those riders as well, just as the shop in Virginia fixed The Yellow Bird. 1980 was the waning days of the 1970s moped boom that accompanied the bike boom. That shop had a dedicated moped department with its own mechanics, who enjoyed the motorized aspects. Now, as the smokeless moped has slipped in through the side door solely by forgoing internal combustion, bike shops are expected to embrace and understand them. And the worker bees who choose them don't even give them that much thought. It's just a bicycle, right? But with a motor! How cool is that? It's - like - perfect!

People are accustomed to the failure of their devices. The steady reduction of quality in every appliance has led to a culture that replaces rather than repairs. The "right to repair" movement runs hard into the fact that most things haven't been made to be fixed. Assemblies snap together in ways that break when you try to open them. The people who do fix things have to charge an amount of money that will support them, making the services too expensive for many of the people who need them the most: consumers of used equipment, nursing it through its declining years -- or months -- because it was all they could afford.

The bike industry embraced the disposable model within the first decade of this century.  Parts are gradually being withdrawn for what had been ubiquitous standards throughout the 1980s and '90s. Up until the past couple of years I could confidently tell a rider that an older bike could be maintained and modified relatively easily to suit individual tastes and needs. It's still true, but the options are narrowing. As a low-budget rider my whole life, I appreciated the fact that I could put together a high-quality, nice handling bike from scrounged parts. They might be scrounged new, but they were not bound to any other parts so closely that I had to buy an entire drivetrain to match. Working in a bike shop has given me the advantage of buying things at cost, but the disadvantage of a meager income. But even when I worked outside the bike industry I could shop sales, buy used items, and make targeted purchases of new stuff. The incremental upgrades to my primary bike led to the parts stash that would adorn the next bike. Tools and knowledge put me in a position to help other riders to put together and maintain their bikes for as long as they were interested. That wasn't usually very long.

The bike industry of the 1970s and most of the 1980s built bikes for the long term. Twenty years was a goal. It was a selling point. Same was true in backpacking and hiking gear. Buy good boots, take good care of them, and you could resole them for decades. It offset the discomforts some people experienced when breaking in a sturdy pair of leather boots. But industry observers figured out that most people don't stick with anything for that long. Products can be flashy and flimsier, sell better in the short term and head straight to the landfill. It clears the way for more products to roll out to enthusiasts who decide to reenlist, and newbies looking for the state of the art. Old gear doesn't mark you as a veteran, it stains you as a cheap old geezer too dumb to evolve with the times.

Sometimes, change really does represent improvement. This is certainly true in both cycling and outdoor gear. But in both cases the majority of change seems to be driven by the marketing and accounting departments more than by long-term users who want to spend more time out doing the thing rather than shopping to replace whatever just wore out or broke after a few months or a year. It puts us all on the conveyor belt of expensive replacement, not just the poor idiots who can't afford good boots. The upper echelons of consumers can still support the expense of replacement better than anyone struggling to stay equipped at all.

Without a car, I depended on my bike to get to whatever job I had. Even now, with a car, I depend on the significant amount of money I save by not using it. I have the car when I absolutely need it. And my life has been propped up by several lucky breaks. See earlier reference to how life isn't fair. The person who presents as a dirtbag or a weirdo and doesn't have the backstop of a few strokes of luck is not a lesser person solely based on that.

Assholes inhabit every level of socioeconomic status. This is why I don't embrace any automatic standards of brotherhood on that basis. And, oftentimes, the downtrodden are scarier people because of the ways in which they might act out their frustrations. The psychopathy of the rich tends to be more impersonal, perhaps even unconscious, in perpetuating the systems that create and maintain an underclass that might drag a beat up bike into a shop in search of aid. That "underclass" rider might not expect brotherhood from a place that serves an activity forced more and more into recreational areas, using ridiculously expensive machines to go stupidly slowly compared to motorcycles and ATVs.

We've had a few young guys put full suspension mountain bikes on layaway after they worked with a cheerful trail builder who tried and failed around here before packing up and moving on. He presented a welcoming and hopeful scenario to the kids who helped him lay out the first professionally designed and meticulously built trails in the area. But his business acumen didn't match his cheerful personality and artistic standards. The young guys failed to complete their layaways, and have not returned to try again. Perhaps they have been lured to other attractions. Perhaps they would come back if they could scrape up what it costs for a trailworthy bike.

Back in those 1950s and '60s of golden memory, even through the '70s, kids rode bikes until they could qualify for motor vehicles. The surge of adult cycling in the 1970s recast bike riding as potentially a lifetime activity for more people than the enthusiast base that existed before then. Changes in development through the 1980s progressively reduced the habitat of youth cyclists whose parents were being fed increasingly scary possibilities by media coverage of crimes both real and imagined.

I rode my bike on the streets wherever we lived, from about the age of six or seven. I was never hit by a car or even seriously honked at, from central Maryland to Rhode Island to mid-coast Maine and back to Maryland. The Miami area was a little hairier, but still overrun with riders. It wasn't until the later '70s that motorist hostility went from startling to expected. Others had worse luck. One of my cousins reported getting drilled in the back with a full beer can while riding in the Philadelphia area in the late '60s or early '70s. There were more than 100,000,000 fewer people in the country when I was a kid, and kids riding their bike to get around were a common feature.

We were supposed to outgrow it. That was the accepted model. Then grownups started filling the streets that were increasingly filling with the mere mass of assembled humanity. We were bound to piss each other off.This is the environment that riders of necessity are thrust into and that idiots like me choose to stay in. We may not share a common love of the machine and its simulation of flight, but we do share a common hope to survive each trip.

Challenges to transportation cycling

 Yesterday I had an appointment to drop my car off for service. The mechanic I'd been going to for more than 30 years has been facing the same challenges in his line of work that I face in mine: keeping up with the expense of buying tools makes his life harder and more expensive, even as he watches the overall quality of vehicles get worse and worse. Disposable transportation afflicts almost every mode. When he told me that he couldn't fix an air conditioning problem because of the newest refrigerant, he also scouted around his area to find someone whose ethics he respected, who could do it.

For a person of limited means, every choice is critical. I don't have money to waste on either a sleaze or a well-meaning fumbler. So Rich's endorsement carried a lot of weight. In about 34 years, he's never diagnosed my vehicle's problems incorrectly or wasted my money on a repair that didn't work. Hence my willingness to drag my aging body across 40 miles of New Hampshire hills to leave the car with him when it needs service.

On the plus side, the mechanic who could do the AC was in Alton, less than half the distance to Gilford. However, Alton's terrain is a challenge to a bicyclist, even fit and young. I am fairly fit, but only for someone who is no longer young. Route 28 goes over a series of large rolling hills south of where I usually leave it. Those features stood between me and my objective going either direction.

If I was going to Gilford, I would ride on Route 28A and Chestnut Cove Road to avoid as much of Route 28 as possible. But Google Maps showed the bike route from the mechanic in Alton should follow Old Wolfeboro Road to avoid Route 28 on the other side, away from the lake shore. Sometimes the old roads avoid terrain that the new route tackles. Sometimes they're worse.

Heading from Alton to Wolfeboro in the morning, after I had left the car, I faced more than a mile and a half of steady climbing, some of it rather steep for an old fart on a heavy bike, laden with lunch and water and the other items I carry on a routine ride to work. Almost no cars passed me, which was nice, but I climbed higher than I would have on the highway. I appreciated the quiet, and the fact that I held the elevation rather than plunging down and climbing again, the way Route 28 does. However, the quiet road dumped me back onto 28 about a mile sooner than Chestnut Cove Road does. The highway isn't bad from there, but it's more tedious on a wide road with flying motor vehicles to remind me of my plodding speed.

During the day at work I tweaked something in my right pectoral muscle that I had previously injured the week before. That escalated gradually through the day until I could not draw a deep breath without pain. This would be a problem when I had to ride back out of Wolfeboro to the south, up a notorious wall.

I kept looking at Google Maps recommendations for the route back to Alton. They mostly favored a very direct route, using even more highway than their recommended route in the morning. But I also saw, grayed out to the side, Chestnut Cove Road and Route 28A. The route was less than a mile longer and completely avoided the unnecessary climb and descent of those nasty rollers. It was by far the better route for a rider. The only possible problem was a sign I'd seen in the morning as I passed the intersection of 28 and 28A, that said "Road Closed September 20." I looked up the actual work on the Alton Public Works Facebook page and saw that it was just one culvert repair, way down near the end, about two miles from my destination. I wasn't leaving until 5 p.m. They would probably have knocked off by then. Even if motor traffic was barricaded, I could probably slip through with the bike.

The ride out of Wolfeboro was absolutely as painful as I expected, with rush hour drivers at my elbow, because South Main Street so completely sucks for road cyclists. Most of them were as kind as they know how to be, so of course there were a lot of close passes, but nothing malicious. Once I hit the wall climbing out of South Wolfeboro, a pickup truck that had been stuck behind me as I wailed through the corners and descent leading into it made a big time about revving noisily on the way past me, but the driver left plenty of room. I was too busy trying to get enough oxygen past the stabbing pain in my chest to worry about macho posturing.

Once at the top of the wall, I knew I faced no more serious climbs. That was nice, although the pain continued not only from breathing but from how I held myself. There seems to be nerve involvement. Something pops occasionally, and the pain fluctuates, sometimes going away completely for a few minutes before I piss it off again somehow. It gave me something to think about as the sun fed the metaphor by sinking toward the mountains to the west. 

Chestnut Cove Road had been chip sealed, but it had settled nicely. It starts with a ripping little descent, which is nice. Then it climbs and drops a little, basically descending all the way to 28A.

The intersection with 28A had no signs forbidding passage. I turned right and continued to descend. Again there are climbs, but the trend is generally downward toward lake level. Eventually I came to the sign saying "Road Closed. Local Traffic Only." Cool, cool. I'm local. Don't mind me.

Next came a sign that just said "Closed." It adorned a more comprehensive barricade. Yeah, fine, but I'm on a bike here. I only need a few inches of space according to most highway planners. But then...

The crew was still at work after 6 p.m. A friendly workman said, "Not quite yet."

"I thought you guys might've knocked off at 5," I said.

"We would, but we're really trying to get this finished," he said. It was a cheerful exchange. I knew that they'd been working on this road since flash flooding ripped it to pieces in July. I said I totally understood, and settled in to wait. I could spend the time working on my breathing and trying to figure out what exactly was tangled up in the muscles and cartilage of my ribs there. The sun continued to sink. The excavators continued to dig and swing. The skill of the operators was impressive. Our machines become extensions of our bodies.

The light lost its last gold and turned silver. I dug out and put on my reflector ankle bands, preparing for the dusk. Finally, the work crew waved me through. I had just two miles left to cover. I put on the lights and pedaled away. It was still more light than dark out. I was still glad that I had chosen this route rather than the nasty climbs with the shorter mileage. Once I had committed to the route, I wasn't going to make the long detour to ride harder terrain in the dark anyway. You make your choice and you make it work.

Unapologetically Utopian

 If you look up terms like "effective altruism" and study the many characteristics derided as "woke," you will find, in addition to ominous interpretations that project a future in no way pleasant to the majority of people who would find themselves living in it -- however briefly and uncomfortably -- common threads of utopian fantasy. These go back well into the 20th Century. The principles in some of them stretch back as far as recorded language, but by the 20th Century a lot of technological developments were well established and evolving to support many of the practical underpinnings of a society based on the greatest good for the greatest number.

Because greatest good and greatest number are elastic terms with no universally agreed definitions, the uses of these technologies diverge into the various earthly paradises and hellscapes explored in futurist academic and fictional narratives and analysis. They also underlie the current privileged areas and existing hellscapes that we have already established.

I have said for years and will repeat with tiresome persistence that human-powered transportation, most notably using bicycles, has always been a game that any number could play. The more people using bikes and their own muscles to get around, the better the world becomes. It is unapologetically utopian.

More than 40 years ago I set out to demonstrate how much easier it was to negotiate the crowded streets of Annapolis on a bicycle than in a car. What the other road users saw instead was just some idiot exposed to weather and traffic hazards, not a thought leader and influencer. They put up with the few transportation cyclists in town with varying levels of tolerance depending somewhat on the neighborhood. The further you got from older residential neighborhoods and the center of town, the more likely you were to have friction with an irate motorist. But no place was safe. A skirmish could break out anywhere. Still, the struggle seemed winnable.

By the time I left Annapolis, the local cycling group could put 15 or 20 riders onto the road in a group ride on a summer afternoon, but their consensus was that the traffic was so hostile that they would meet at the mall parking lot on the west edge of town rather than start somewhere downtown, as we had done when it was four or five plucky road racers from 1979 to 1982. Of those four or five racers, three of us also rode our bikes for transportation, because none of us owned a car. We would have to borrow one to drive to a race. By 1987, I was the last one who was living without a car.

Racing was always secondary to transportation for me. Transportation cycling provided a baseline of mileage and saddle time on which to build whatever recreational riding I had time for. Meanwhile, one of the other car-free riders invested his spare cash in carpentry tools to prepare for when he eventually started his own highly regarded contracting business, and the other one saved up enough money to make a down payment on his first home in Annapolis. He didn't buy in the most expensive neighborhood, but in Annapolis there were no cheap ones. Transportation cycling improved their lives to the point where they could give it up and never look back. The fact that they gave it up is unfortunate, but it does underscore how not everyone can use a bike to get around. Although one of them started out as a naval architect, they both ended up working as carpenters, and that requires a truck and tools.

We need people who build things. What they build depends on their vision of the present and future that they want to create, or the lack of any sorting criteria. The trap is that someone might stake their savings on tools and training to build things, and have to take jobs building things that are ultimately harmful, just to get the money to live. Principles are a luxury. To make that happy future, the human species needs more than infrastructure and tools. We need to agree on where we're headed, informed by all kinds of investigative thinkers who study the interactions of all life and environment. We need someone to design and build the transportation network that can accommodate all vehicles, including thousands of bike riders who will eventually be taking advantage of the vast benefits of simple, human-powered transportation.

I guarantee that if the human species had chosen back in the 1970s to focus its efforts on making a long term plan instead of knowingly forcing crisis after crisis in order to generate profits and duel for global dominance we would have fewer young people scornfully dismissing Boomers. Not trusting my own generation's better judgment as I saw how they were progressing I didn't add my own cannon fodder to the future that looks increasingly likely. Meanwhile, my 30-mile commuting days on rural roads and highways here in New Hampshire look less like proof of concept and more like proof of insanity. My system is stretched to its limit to try to maintain all of the things I've come to like a lot -- not to say love -- in my life. But this rickety economy depends on the considerable savings of even a half year of bike commuting compared to uninterrupted motor vehicle use. So it does demonstrate that one can still stretch a dollar a long way using pedal power where possible. It's worth expending my waning strength on it.

Bike Zoos

 Once again, the chat filtering in from the sales floor is about abandoning the road and only riding in car-free spaces.

How does one get to these car-free spaces? Mostly by driving, but partly by scurrying anxiously along the shortest possible route on public streets before diving into the perceived safety of the bike preserve. These habitat parks will be the last home of the vanishing cyclist.

It tolls ominously for me, one of the last remaining free-range riders looking forward -- somewhat -- to the return of transportation cycling season. I say somewhat, because I acknowledge, as I always have, that interacting with motorists exposes a rider to a certain amount of danger. Today's visitors, chatting with upper management while I did my best to be unnoticed, recounted how their son had gotten peened twice in Boston. 

Statistics may favor the survival of the vast majority of riders on the road, but that does not make any specific individual invulnerable. Someone is getting hit out there to keep our average from being 100 percent good. It could be any of us on any ride. Good habits, training, and experience improve your odds, but someone else is driving the bigger, more dangerous vehicles. 

I still wonder how much these refugees from road riding think about how bloody it would be if all of the other drivers out there jousting with them on the two-lane, and flying in formation with them on multi-lane roads were really as bad as they describe. There are places I wouldn't like to ride, and places I would consciously avoid, but the choice is guided by a lot of factors, not simply the number of drivers or an untested hypothesis about their collective lack of skill. Neither overestimate nor underestimate your counterparts on the road. I have been extremely impressed by the reflexes and alertness of many drivers over the years. Generally, if someone encroached on me it was because I had neglected to control the space properly. My major reason to suspend the commute when I can't do it in daylight is because I can't control the space when drivers have trouble discerning me in the glary environment created by multiple floodlit vehicles converging in an area we're all trying to fit through.

Because humans have not abandoned the concept of ubiquitous personal motor vehicle ownership, we can look forward to a future of continued sprawl, traffic, and parking problems, even when the vehicles are powered by electric motors instead of dead dinosaurs prehistoric oceanic plant life. If you look at the evolution of the bicycle itself, the most popular form is the one that has mutated into a motor vehicle: the smokeless moped. Simplicity and durability are so last century.

You make your own choices. Having done so, you then try to figure out if you can even operate in proximity to the choices that others have made. If not, you have to devise a path through the landscape and the shifting contours of popular culture to go where you want to go and avoid encountering the incompatible rhythms and speeds of other users. I refer not so much to the age-old problem of mixing human powered vehicles with motorized ones on public rights-of-way, but to navigating among the other purely muscle powered and hybrid cyborgs in the car-free spaces as well as in the general public traffic mix.

The weather was all somewhere else

With summer-like weather predicted, this was a good week to live without the car while it got some long-overdue service. As of last Tuesday, the days looked increasingly warm, and free of rain, through Saturday.

Naturally this didn't hold up.

I never know for sure how long it will take my mechanic to finish servicing the car. Sometimes he turns it right around within a day or two. Other times I have to get along for close to a week, depending on how busy he is with other jobs, and what complications he finds with mine. I am unusually well situated to live without a motor vehicle in the milder seasons with longer daylight, because I have been stubbornly focused on it at the expense of some other things. Most people order their lives differently.

On Tuesday I made the long ride home from Gilford after dropping the car at his shop. The least worst bike route goes through Wolfeboro, so I often split the trip around a work day on one end or the other. This works best for the pickup after it's fixed, although it means the longer segment with almost 1,000 feet of climbing after a full day at work. There are also unavoidable narrow sections of road. These include the two worst climbs. The 1,000 feet is distributed over quite a few hills, but the one out of South Wolfeboro is the longest and steepest, with basically no shoulder. On the other side of the lake, in the section I call "White-knuckle Shores," Route 11 runs right along the edge of the lake. After Ames Farm, the road climbs one last grunter.

Wednesday was warm and dry. I felt pretty good after the 43 miles on Tuesday. I carried everything I might need in case I got the call to head over to Gilford after work, but the call never came. Same for Thursday, only even warmer and nicer. By Friday, the commutes were starting to wear me down a bit on their own, without the extra distance and hills. Later on Friday evening he called. So Saturday was the day.

Saturday shop hours start an hour earlier, but end a half-hour earlier right now. So add short sleep to the challenges facing an aging idiot flogging himself across miles of New Hampshire hills. And the forecast had gotten interesting: 20-30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Thunderstorms could produce gusty winds and small hail. The high temperature had been at or near 90 F by mid afternoon, and hadn't dropped much by the time I set out with complex cloud formations arranging themselves around the sky.

The route out of town starts with a long grind up South Main Street, on a narrow, busy road. Traffic speeds aren't too bad, since the road goes right past the police station, but drivers are getting impatient because they've already had to endure the congestion of the town center, no matter where they entered it. By the time they're heading out South Main Street they've had all they can take.

From the crest of South Main Street by the high school, you lose almost all of what you laboriously gained, on a slightly shorter, slightly steeper descent to the corner of Middleton Road, and the fun 90-degree bend into more descending to the bottom of the wall I call Alpe de Suez, for the restaurant East of Suez near the top of it.

The route goes southeast, then southwest, then south, before heading generally northwest along the lake for about 15 miles. As my direction changed, the aspect of the sky also changed. Hills and tree cover also limit the sky view. One window might show a dark mass of slaty gray, followed minutes later by a light overcast. Once over the Alpe de Suez, the road widens to a 55-mph highway with full-width shoulders. While the elbow room is nice, it can be more of a grind to do your best next to motor vehicles effortlessly ripping by at 60. It's a relief to exit onto Chestnut Cove Road for a few minutes respite from the stress of passing motorists.

The weather radar had showed blobs of convective action blossoming all around the area, rather than a well-defined front. I hadn't had time to study it for long enough to discern an overall direction to the storm cells. I had no choice in any case. I'd brought an extra vest in case the rain found me. I hoped not to need it.

Once the route turns the bottom of Alton Bay and heads up along the southern shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, long views are more frequent. And at that point the wind was mostly in my favor. But would it push the storms out of my way? At each overlook I could see the deep blue-gray clouds trailing curtains of rain, occasionally lit by pink-white flashes of lightning. Beneath them, the mountains showed as dark silhouettes, Thunder followed across miles of open space. Was it from the distant storms, or from one closer, and threatening, obscured by the overhanging trees and rising hills on my left? The air was still comfortably warm, and the sky above me only cloudy. All the drama and discomfort was far away, happening to someone else, like a war in another country, or oppression of a minority that you're not part of. Those storms seem to be someone else's problem, too, until you realize that the winds can change and put you in the path of trouble.

My mileage for the week is laughable: 174 miles over five days. The longest was 43 miles, followed by three days of 30-mile commuting days, ending with 41 miles to fetch the car. Setting aside that I'm 65 years old, with multiple stressors in my life, I wonder if the rides would take less out of me if the routes themselves were more serene. They're not as bad as in really built-up urban and suburban hells, but traffic is traffic. It always carries emotional weight. However, bike-only routes are almost never designed to support the full speed potential of habitual cyclists trying to cover distance on a schedule. If the choice is a 12 mph plod on a path versus a higher average on a shared route with motor vehicles, I still tend to take the road that allows me to push it where I can. Coming down the Alpe de Suez northbound into Wolfeboro, I routinely hit 40-45 mph on the descent. I exceed 35 mph on the descents on every commute.

Full-size streets let me come off of a motor vehicle draft at 25 mph and lay into a corner to carry momentum into a side street that climbs slightly. Toddling into an intersection like that at 12 mph would give me nothing going into the grade. But would I miss it if I wasn't also having to manage motorists? Every ride is a race in places where a rider needs a bit of snap to hold a place where oblivious or malevolent drivers might clot things up by pushing past when they should wait.

I have no idea why I can still chase cars as strongly as I do. It's certainly not as strongly as I used to. But in my weakened state it's even more important to be able to take advantage of every benefit that gravity and wind will bestow. These are benefits that every rider should have access to. A path built for the maximum possible number of riders will be the size of a real road, to accommodate the potential numbers of riders and their full range of potential speeds. Or we figure out how to accommodate pedalers on the transportation routes we already have in place, while minimizing the conflicts with motorized users to increase cyclist safety.

Almost no one passed me in a very unsafe or threatening manner on my ride. Incidents have become quite rare in what most people think of as bike season. The problem for sensitive riders is that a bad crash can come at any moment when motor vehicles are around. Decades of trouble-free riding count for nothing at the moment of impact. This knowledge rides along with everyone who still pedals on the road we all own. It adds at least an extra gear's worth of fatigue in upper body tension, and heightened vigilance.

Quitters

 "I don't feel safe out there."

"The roads are so narrow."

"People are all on their phones."

"Someone I know was killed."

These are just a few of the lines I hear from the quitters: the people who are getting rid of their road bikes because they don't enjoy being out there on the travel ways that we all pay for with our taxes and have every right to use. If they're in the shop, these quitters aren't quitting cycling outright. They're just being intimidated into leaving the public right of way to go play on various closed courses, or highly limited corridors like what passes for a rail trail around here.

Most of the time, I overhear the conversation between the quitter and a salesperson on the retail floor while I toil away in the repair shop. It makes a weary day wearier.

To be fair, if I lived in Wolfeboro I would probably come to dislike road riding, too. Every time I think about moving closer to work I think about the severe limitations on riding, imposed by the hills and water bodies that have shaped the road system since colonial times. The typical New England road has a white line and a ditch. Combining that with resort-area traffic in the summer makes road riding increasingly stressful as what used to be a rural area gets overrun by creeping suburbia. We're not seeing too many cookie-cutter housing tracts yet, but the attitude of drivers, and their numbers, make the roads busier in all seasons, compared to how they were in the end of the 20th Century.

Creeping suburbia extends to my area as well, but the terrain of the glacial plains allows for longer sight lines and some degree of wider roads, and the lack of particular geographical attractions, like top-tier lakes or brag-worthy mountains means that most people on the roads are just passing through. But we do have our dinky rush hours. And GPS has turned the road in front of my house into some kind of "secret" escape route for southbound motorists when Route 16 is choked with traffic.

One quitter this week said that a friend of hers "passed away while riding on the road." Passing away is something you do in your sleep. Even if you die from natural causes rather than the smashing trauma of a motor vehicle impact, if you're mounted on a bike when you have your stroke or heart attack you're going to hit the ground hard. People are funny about death. If your friend's terminal experience was horrendous enough to get you to give up a form of cycling that you say you loved, say "killed." Give it the full horror and outrage that it deserves. Highlight this side effect of humanity's bad decision to prioritize the passage of motor vehicles over the health and safety of nearly everyone and everything else.

Other riders quit the road because of physical limitations that accumulate with age and injury. Some retreat gradually through upright bikes that replace their drop-bar models. Some go straight to the e-bike. Some try mountain biking. Some head straight for the path.

There are very few transportation cyclists around here. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the most persistent, and I ain't shit compared to real dedicated car-free people in areas and occupations more conducive to it. My occupation has been quite supportive of my cycling fixation. It just pays so horribly that I can't recommend it to anyone as a long-term program. But other people, better people, in generally more populated places, manage the synergy of a decent-paying career and a bike for transportation, to demonstrate how the world could be a better place for productive citizens, not just dilettante fuckoffs with silly dreams.

Transportation cyclists seem less inclined to quit than recreational riders. When you just do something for fun, you stop as soon as it is no longer fun. There are days when transporting myself across the necessary miles isn't a lot of fun. A couple of days ago as I rode down Route 28 I tried to estimate how many miles I've logged on just this route. I'm sure it's more than 40,000, possibly as high as 60,000. That may seem like a lot, but it's over 32 years. My average annual mileage wouldn't even make the charts among real year-round transporters, long-distance tourists, or anyone training to race. It's just the result of stubborn, stupid persistence. My total mileage in that time is far higher. I used to ride more for fun. And I didn't include the training miles I log to get ready for the commute or to stay in some kind of shape transitioning into winter. The 40-60 figure was just on the principal commuting route. 

I don't push myself as hard as I used to. When I pushed myself harder, it didn't feel as hard. I was younger. The key to longevity as a road cyclist -- aside from not getting crushed by a motor vehicle -- is avoiding debilitating injury. Especially with a somewhat long route, a dedicated bike commuter is an athlete with more than just the riding career depending on completing the course, day after day. So I go ahead and take the car on the grossest days. Recovery is key, and an aging body doesn't recover as well over a single night, especially if the aging rider has gotten too frisky the day before. Commuting turns into a time trial. Oops! How did it get to be so late?! Oh well. I'll sprint this one as hard as I can and promise to do better tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, stomps in this hectic pace to the last syllable of yet another work week.

The rides are frantic, sandwiched around days so incredibly tedious for the most part. But you go from moment to moment of reward, finding something of value in the neck-deep mud of your own created predicament. And be glad because the mud so far remains below your face. If I could have imagined anything else in sufficient detail, while there was still time to implement it, I would have done it. So without real complaint -- just a continuous profane grumbling and self reproach -- I get on the bike for another day.

Bikes are like cars now

 Our energetic trail builder has been forging alliances all around the region for the ambitious vision of turning Wolfeboro into a unique destination for mountain biking. He recently met the owner of a prominent shop in neighboring Maine, who told him that the pandemic had provided a great opportunity to start nudging service prices up to "where they should be."

This shop owner starts from the laudable goal of paying his staff a good, livable wage. To earn this, the technicians are certified to do suspension work, provide full service to electric bicycles, and any other credentials that will look good in a simple black frame on the waiting room wall. He described it as similar to taking your car to an auto service center, where the people all wear neat jump suits and have documented training. "And you pay for that," my friend said.

And you pay for that. Thing is, the best car service I have ever gotten has been from a hard-drinking, independent genius whose shop uniform may start the day clean, but ends up fully grimed by the time he knocks off somewhere between 8 p.m. and 1:00 the next morning. You'll never find him there before noon. He's semi-nocturnal, because it suits his biorhythms and he finally gets some uninterrupted hours when the phone doesn't ring and people don't drop in on him. He has some certificates hanging crooked on the grubby walls of his waiting area, which is mostly a place for his dog to lounge. The fancy service place isn't just charging for competence and your best interests. They're charging for the jump suits and the spiffy building and the cheerful person who checks your vehicle in, and the ones who answer the phone.

I can see both sides. I hate having to interrupt a tricky bit of mechanical work to answer an insistently ringing phone or launch a party of bike renters or just answer casual questions from someone who hopes to impersonate a customer long enough to be able to ask to use our restroom. I would love to make more money and achieve respect for my knowledge and ability. But I also remember when bikes were a vehicle of true independence. If you want to invest in more and more expensive tools, and learn how to service the more and more temperamental and complicated mechanisms of the modern super bike, you may still achieve a measure of independence. But because of the complexity, and the perfect precision with which all the pieces have to work together, your freedom only lasts as long as someone can make you the parts that fit your particular marvel of modern engineering. It misses the point of the bicycle entirely.

We've gotten used to the idea that a car is old when it's been on the road for three years. People do hold onto them for longer than that, or buy them used from the first owner who loses patience, interest, or trust after three years. The used car owner then holds onto it for another three years before handing it on to the next level of owner, who can't afford to buy anything fresher, and puts up with the increasing eccentricities of an aging vehicle. Eventually the car is too degenerated to function anymore, and gets scrapped. But the system has evolved around motor vehicles to provide the parts it needs at all of these stages. My used car is a 2003. When I got it I felt warm and happy because it wasn't too old and hadn't been driven hard. But the years sneak by, and suddenly it's 17 or 18 years old, and it's been driven by me. But I can still get it fixed. Something will finally break that dooms it. Maybe by then I'll be working for The Dream Shop in Wolfeboro, earning a livable wage, so I can buy a newer old piece of junk to pilot through my declining years.

This is the vision of the crowd that wants riders to pay like drivers. There's already a bit of a used bike progression, but because parts support isn't there for obsolete high-tech bikes, the used buyer of a formerly cutting-edge bike depends a lot more on luck to get any use out of the investment before something breaks that dooms it.

Your odds are better buying a 30-year-old bike than a 10-year-old bike, or even a five-year-old bike. They're even better buying a 40-year-old bike. For instance, I just changed the gearing on this 40-year-old Motobecane road bike, to give the rider the lower gearing of a compact crank and a wider range freewheel.

I'd done the rear derailleur and freewheel earlier in the year. The other parts weren't available yet. The crank is a 74-110 arm set offered by Quality Bike Products under their Dimension house label. The rings -- bought separately -- happen to be ramped and pinned for easier shifting, but the rider is used to flat rings, and shifts in friction, so there are no clicks to coordinate. The inner ring says "for ten speed only," meaning the current version, with a skinny chain and ten cogs in the back. I had to use spacers on the chainwheel bolts to set the ring over properly for the 6-speed chain. If or when he replaces the ring later, maybe we can get a thicker one and ditch the spacers. The whole job took a fraction of the time needed to rebuild the brake lever and caliper on a mountain bike, or replace suspension pivots, or chase down electrical gremlins.

The down side to simple bikes is that the work still takes skill and art, but the machines are so starkly simple that customers don't respect the people who work on them for a living. They don't want to do the work themselves, but they assume any idiot can do it. Therefore, you must be an idiot. Many days, I agree with them. I didn't get into bikes because I wanted to work on bikes. I got into bikes because anyone could learn, and bikes offered a great alternative for a world already getting smothered in asphalt and choking on fumes 50 years ago. Emission standards improved the fume situation somewhat, but the proliferation of pavement and the culture of haste have only gotten worse. And the emissions ignored by the standards are destroying the climate itself. Widespread adoption of the bicycle by those who could, aided by a societal resolve to support that alternative, would have bought us more time to work on the traffic systems and polluting output of the motor vehicles we still legitimately needed. I would much rather sell tools and parts, and share knowledge, than clean up someone's crappy, abused piece of junk or touch my cap and bob my head respectfully to the squire when he brings his immaculate machine for me to fine tune and polish.

People can break their bikes in more profound ways than the local auto service center will see in the cars that people bring to them. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, it's all vulnerable. I don't see how a flat rate book can account for stuff like the twisted wad of this derailleur:

This rider didn't just shove it in or pedal hard enough to yank it up in the back. He rode it all the way around the dropout, making a full wrap with the chain and cable.

With the trail system and the Dream Shop fantasy, its supporters believe that if you build it, riders will come, and bring business with them. But that also assumes that the consumerist, privileged lifestyle of expensive toys ridden by highly paid people with both the leisure time and the temperament to play that way will survive much longer in the economic and social adjustments being forced on us by our decades of unwillingness to enact incremental changes to head off the problems that are now boiling over. In my research on some other service topic I found a guy's blog post from the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, about trying to make an "apocalypse-proof bike." If it has suspension and a complicated shifting system, it ain't apocalypse-proof. You want a real apocalypse-resistant bike, build yourself a fixed-gear. Find a frame with long horizontal dropouts so you can stack cogs that will allow you to get off and shift manually among a small selection of maybe four gears, tops. You'll need a two-sided hub.

The trail builder wants to build a little Bentonville North, with trails for all abilities, including completely non-technical path riders. It still ignores the real-world transportation cyclist. We have to dream our own dreams and live in the real world, negotiating our way among the indifferent majority. I guess their nod to the transportation cyclist on the open streets is the e-bike section of the service department, because the only way bikes are going to become popular is if they are actually motor vehicles. And you'll pay for that.

With power comes confidence

 As I rolled into town one day this week, I saw three riders coming toward me on Center Street.

Center Street is also Route 28 coming north out of Wolfeboro. Thus, it channels not only local traffic, but through traffic as well. Because Wolfeboro is off the direct line to much of anywhere, the volume of things like truck traffic and through travelers is fairly small, compared to a hell run like Route 25 on the other side of the lake. But Center Street is one of Wolfeboro's arteries. I do not ride it northbound to get out of the downtown area, because the slope, the lane width, and the temperament of the drivers make it one of the more stressful and unpleasant stretches, and it can be avoided. The Cotton Valley Trail lies to the right of the corridor, easily entered and exited when headed out of town. For anyone who doesn't want to ride the trail and can handle a bit more of a diversion, a road route goes out Route 109A to Beech Pond Road to Trotting Track Road, which intersects Center Street/Route 28 North just beyond the narrow bendy bit.

When I see riders coming out on Center Street, I always want to explain their other options to them, but I never can. We're both in the flow, paying attention to our survival. They're virtually always roadies or the odd occasional misdirected mountain biker. 

In the shop, I hear from many people that they avoid the road at all, let alone intimidating stretches like that part of Center Street, because they're afraid of motor vehicles. That's probably the biggest deterrent to riders. Imagine my surprise then when the riders I saw tooling merrily up the slight grade, taking the narrow lane in a chatting, amorphous formation were three women on upright comfort bikes. But they were on e-bikes. They were not blazing along at 30 miles per hour, but they had considerable assistance to maintain a speed that looked to be no higher than the low 20s. They felt like they were moving well, so they didn't worry about going at about half of the average motoring speed through there. Their demeanor might have changed if some irritable asshole had harassed them. But they looked completely at ease in that moment. Motorists were handling it well, for the brief time in which I could observe.

I will get glimpses of other smokeless moped riders on Main Street, which is also a state highway, and Wolfeboro's other artery. Most of them probably have summer homes outside of the downtown area. Some of them used to ride bikes powered by muscle alone, but age or convenience have persuaded them to accept assistance. The people best able to afford a car alternative around here also can afford -- and do own -- multiple cars. The e-bike is only a baby step toward a future that actually has fewer full-sized motor vehicles in it.

From a motorist standpoint, it matters little whether the pedaler in their lane has electric assistance or not. The riders are no more maneuverable than someone relying solely on their legs. A bike moving faster up a hill actually takes longer to pass, making it marginally more inconvenient for drivers to get around. Someone in the mood to go faster than 40 mph will find 25 just as aggravating as 20. They might even find 12 or 15 more acceptable, because they can get by more quickly.

With motor-assisted riders occupying a bicyclist-shaped space on the road, all riders gain as more motorists get used to dealing with more riders. It backfires if too many of the riders blaze around like no laws apply to them, but if the increase is mostly riders behaving more or less vehicularly it might serve to shift the balance of power as a beneficial but unintended consequence.

If the percentage of riders to motorists shifts in favor of riders, the pressure to have separated infrastructure drops, because pedaling on the existing system becomes more of a norm. If pedalers become the majority, all infrastructure becomes bike infrastructure. Then we will no doubt end up fighting among ourselves based on who goes faster with less effort. You could have some little old lady beating you with her umbrella as she paces you on her pedelec. It's a bright future indeed.

Trial by combat

 The weather is getting nicer and people are getting nastier. Drivers bring their prejudices with them when they crowd New Hampshire roads in the warm months. The combination of aggressive attitudes and sheer numbers raises the stress level no matter what mode of travel you choose. But on a bicycle you are more exposed and at times you are more vulnerable.

Drivers treat each other badly. Think about how many games of chicken you get sucked into in the course of normal operations. The majority of drivers may simply want to get from place to place fairly cooperatively and without drama, but embedded with them are the ones who are starring in their own private movie, and you're an extra in the chase scene. More numerous are the ones who don't mind racing in a tight field. Driver training may suggest that you leave enough following distance to avoid trouble that may pop up in front of you, but standard practice is more like drafting in NASCAR.

Driving becomes a test of skill and nerve. Drop a bicyclist into this and you generate automatic friction. The law says that drivers have to accommodate cyclists. The majority of drivers who do so varies from a slim margin of 50.000000001 percent to a sometimes hefty 98 percent. Around here, as the roads get more crowded the cooperation level drops noticeably. On open stretches of steady cruising you may only notice a few more close passes, random yells, a bit of extra diesel exhaust blurped in your direction, or a tendency for motorcyclists to downshift abruptly just behind your shoulder. But at any intersection or other flow regulation point, the cyclist enters the trial by combat.

I already mentioned the bad design of the new ramp from Route 16 southbound onto Route 28 southbound. Further down, the state put in a rotary/traffic circle/roundabout at Route 171 to reduce or eliminate the occasional bloody smashup that would occur at the old-style crossroads.

Not much of New Hampshire is flat, especially once you get away from the coastal plain. As these traffic circles become more numerous, you notice how many of them sit on a slope. It means little to a motor vehicle whether the in-run is uphill or down, unless it's very steep. You do need to regulate your speed, but you have throttle and brake that require little effort to change speed by several miles per hour on demand. Not so much on the bike. At the 171 circle, I can come into it with a gravity assist on my way south. I can snap accelerate to catch a gap and maintain a speed in the 20s easily. But in the evening, tired from a long day, I face a slight but noticeable climb into the circle itself, and have to fight gravity around that arc to continue plodding slightly uphill all the way out the exit chute to stay on 28 north. As a result, I don't usually do that.

Route 28 descends for more than a mile coming down to the flats approaching the Route 171 intersection from the south. Even a tired old fart on a heavy bike at the end of a long day on his feet can pull speeds close to 30 almost all the way to the in-run on the circle. But there the land rises, and drags the energy right out of those tired old legs. However, you learn to manage the forces of gravity and your own insufficiency. I will stay well to the right and sacrifice a little bit of speed, to encourage as many drivers as possible to go past me before we get into the confined chute. Sometimes, drivers who roared up at supersonic speeds along the straight road on the flats suddenly lose it all just when I wish they would keep rolling a little longer and get the hell past me. Now they're stuck until I finish my maneuver, but it was their choice. I always wonder if they really considered it. Worse are the ones who don't get on by, but don't back off, either.

Northbound through that circle, my standard move now is to hold off the armored cavalry as best I can in the chute, and snap a hard right to take the first exit from the circle, onto 171 east. I get an instant gravitational assist as the road drops sharply, throwing me up to about 25 mph. Even if one or more of my pursuers have come out the same way, I get a quick gap on them before the road rises just as steeply and knocks me back to the kind of speed most people consider normal for a cyclist. If it's early in the week and I'm feeling frisky I can stomp up the rise in good shape. More commonly I grovel to the top as the motorists pass with varying degrees of compassion or contempt. At least it's a straight piece of road and they're more eager to get on their way than waste time with me. I then snap a descending left turn onto Old Route 28 to merge back to the new highway in a mile or so. It's a pleasant diversion that adds very little distance and rewards a rider with a touch of tranquility.

I had a classic example of it on my ride home last night. I'm a little fried after four days of fairly hard riding for an old geezer on a utility bike. Coming into the circle I was passed by a pickup with a plow on the front, followed closely by another vehicle, with a third lining up as we got close to the entry to the circle itself. That third vehicle was determined to squeeze past me wherever we were, regardless. I slapped him back long enough to sprint a couple of yards and drop into the sharp right. He came out the same exit, but didn't catch up to pass until I slowed for the climb. Then he seemed to kick it down to a lower gear a bit more noisily than necessary. Gotta assert that dominance.

I could be a stickler for the law and cover the lane, riding into the circle and around, but I can guarantee that drivers would try to pass me at any point during that. There would be horns, shouts, anger, frustration. Vehicular purists and effective cycling instructors might say to hold the line and lead by example, because eventually the motoring public will get used to it. It will become normalized. But normalized is not normal. Normal people are self centered and self serving. Those impulses are probably responsible for 90 percent of traffic incidents. Bad behavior is constantly eroding good training, if good training was even provided in the first place.

Motorists who force bike riders to defend their place on the road do it from the safety of their armored vehicles. The drivers have nothing to lose. Even if they hit a cyclist, they usually face no penalty. They have their standard excuses, all based on the understood principle that cyclists on the road are crazy idiots who brought trouble on themselves. Our only asset is maneuverability.

Infrastructure like the Route 171 circle and the new 16-28 merge is anti-cyclist. Clearly the designers consider that bike riders are a small enough minority that we can be left to figure out our own survival strategies to get through them. We've had a lot of practice, so I guess it's true.

I do acknowledge that if the majority of motorists really wanted to kill us we would all be dead. It would be very easy, and most of it would probably be considered accidental. That's what it's called now, even if it started with a pushy driver bullying the rider, and it took a bad turn. Sorry. Breaks of the game. No driver will ever admit to the responsibility after the fact, nor will witnesses likely come forward to refute the story that will be told by the living, defaming the dead. You simply have to accept this part of the terms and conditions and put it out of your mind. Hassling a cyclist, even injuring or killing one, is like littering. It's just another technically illegal rude habit that will never lead to an arrest.