About my bicycle(s)

There are more bikes like mine on the road nowadays, also more e-bikes on the road, I get more questions than I used to, which is nice actually, it is so heartening to see more people figuring out that they don’t need cars for every last trip.

But, the questions, the answers, I am bad at that, I excel at digressing and probably making people sorry they asked, so instead I thought I should write them all down, hopefully in a short and coherent form, then stick a QR code on the back “if you have questions about this bike….”

So, answers, to the questions:

This is a “long tail” cargo bike either designed by or based on a design by a company in California called XtraCycle.  I’ve been commuting on bikes like this a few times a week since 2006 (10 mile commute), every day since 2015 (6 mile commute), year round including winter and snow.  If the bike is green (Surly Big Dummy), the frame comes like this, but I customized the parts, if the bike is pink (XtraCycle EdgeRunner 11i), this is relatively close to as-sold.  You can buy a bike pretty much like this, if you want.  You can buy a bike like this with an e-assist, if you want.  They’re not cheap compared to “normal” bike, but they are cheap compared to a car, and in 2022 I drove and biked equal distances, and that includes a car trip from Florida to Massachusetts.

I buy most of the groceries riding this bike.  I have carried children and adults on the back; the official load limit is 200lbs, I have carried 250 and it was okay, though a lot of work.

This bike does not have an e-assist.  A day may come when I need e-assist, but it is not this day.  I can ride up most hills with most loads if I have to, but if there’s a way to avoid the hill, I just might take it.

The bike handles, very, very well.  I ride it no-hands often, including carrying loads of at least 100lbs.  I’ve also borrowed a friend’s very expensive road bike (Tom Kellogg Ti Spectrum) and according to my butt, the unloaded no-hands feel is exactly the same.

For the winter, I put a studded snow tire (Schwalbe Marathon Winter) on the front, and use a “snow tread” tire (Continental Top Contact Winter II Premium) on the rear year round (it has super traction in the summer and no particular increase in rolling friction or lack of durability, and I am lazy about swapping tires).  I wear regular shoes or boots, making about the same choices I would if walking, add bar mitts to protect my hands, and otherwise tend to underdress for the cold, but with a wind blocking jacket.  I wear a thin stretch polar fleece cap under my helmet.  Biking makes heat; I am big, the bike is big, I make a lot of heat.  Adjust your clothing to match your heat output, don’t be surprised if you warm up after the first mile (after years of experience, I plan for a “brisk” first mile, otherwise I have to take the clothes off anyway and I will have to take off more around mile four.  Dinking around my neighborhood, I dress plenty-warm because I won’t ride enough to warm up).

The worst weather is cold rain, the next worst weather is high heat + humidity.  If you’re biking to work, on those days a change of clothes is a good thing (I have a drawer by my desk, it has spare clothes in it, I very rarely use them).  But bad weather is rarer than people think (literally, I ride to work every day.  I should know.)

I am neither young nor slender; my main advantage is that I biked a lot when I was much younger and got pretty good at it, and in my 40s, when my annual physical started to be less fun, I realized that I needed more exercise, and that “old” people could ride bikes.  It didn’t hurt that we were busy fighting an immoral war over oil and had reelected the guy who started it; this seemed like a minor protest to me, I could send slightly less money to the oil companies.  The first month commuting was work, then I started to get stronger, as one does.  The first winter commuting I was somewhat randomly prepared and spent too much money on stuff I didn’t need.  At this point I have a tremendous advantage over someone starting “fresh”, because 16+ years and 40,000+ miles of biking in traffic in this area means that I’ve learned a little bit and acquired a bit of physical conditioning.  So, if you’re thinking about it, don’t wait, it won’t get any easier.

This bike does not have drop handlebars; it does not have mountain bike flat handlebars.  Those choices are intentional and for daily commuting and erranding use, you want these handlebars (52cm Nitto Bosco).  Yes they are skinny, yes they increase my air resistance, but I sit taller, can see, can be seen, am much more comfortable.  Flat bars and/or the leaned over posture can give you numb hands and fingers, for various reasons, it happens to lots of people, including me.

Yes the saddle is hard as a rock, that’s what works for me.  Well-padded saddles don’t work for me, I’ve tried them.  Your butt is not my butt, you might have a different preference.  I think the Brooks B17/Flyer is actually a good first bet for most men, on account of their history, popularity, and habitual use by men (but the Brooks Cambium is a very hard saddle, be careful of that.  Also, I tried one, and broke it).  “Terry” is another good choice, especially (as I understand it) for women.

I tend to wear a helmet riding in traffic, or in terrible conditions.  Off-road paths or in a low-traffic neighborhood, I don’t think it’s necessary.  I do however use lights that are powered by my front wheel and they have no off switch; if the bike is rolling, then they are on.  There’s research that shows that this prevents with-car crashes about as well as helmets protect your head in the event of a crash, and makes the need to dress “for visibility” somewhat irrelevant; the bike takes care of visibility for me.

Everyone vaguely able to should bike more; there are cargo bikes, e-bikes, e-cargo-bikes, trikes, e-cargo-trikes, you name it, you can get a bike that will do the job for a lot of the trips that you might drive today.  The exercise is really good for you if you can make it part of your routine, and at least in the Cambridge/Somerville area, it will cost you not much time, because driving here isn’t that fast.  Cars are bad for their drivers (lack of exercise), bad for other people (noise, pollution, crashes), bad for the country (murderous assholes get their money from selling oil, it’s a world market), and bad for the planet (climate change, it is a thing).  And if you think cars are actually a good thing, when was the last time you heard someone saying “what our neighborhood needs, is more cars.  Can we run a highway through here?”

I do most of my own maintenance and repairs.  Bike repair is not as user-friendly a business as car repair, I learned how over the years, so it is more convenient to do my own.  It is not hard, and takes only a few specialized tools (mostly, metric wrenches) that you could mostly stuff in a pair of jean pockets if you needed to (the pockets would however be heavy and lumpy).

Regarding specific equipment choices, in general I optimize for convenience, comfort, and safety:

• I just use flat pedals, not cleats.  I have used cleats in the past, they caused me to ride less because of inconvenience of different shoes.  I don’t use toe clips either, they mess up your shoes, and delay transitions on/off the bike.  I don’t really need the additional power.  This also makes winter footwear easier to deal with.  Yes, I also own the incredibly expensive Lake Winter Mountain Bilking shoes, it’s nice, but not as sturdy as plain boots.
• The tires are fat, not skinny, because (good) wide tires have lower rolling resistance which is what matters at most commuting speeds.  Fat tires require less frequent reinflation, are easier to remove/install if you get a flat, protect the rim from potholes, protect ME from potholes, and give a more comfortable ride.
• I use internally geared hubs on cargo bikes because those allow me to change gears when I am stopped, make it easier to use a chain guard to keep my pants clean, and let me build a stronger rear wheel (freewheels require a “dished” wheel that is not as strong).
• I have a shock seat post because the roads around here are terrible.  I run it pretty “stiff” because constant bouncing up and down seems to make my knees too tight; what I want is protection from the worst bumps, that might really hurt me (that is, old backs don’t like surprises).
• I don’t bother to clean my chain, ever.  I do add lubrication, sometimes.  I replace chains about once a year, I am large, the bike is large, I destroy chains.  This sometimes requires replacing other parts of the drive train that get worn by a stretched chain.

If you have other questions, bother me in the comments, I’ll try to answer them.

Proposed letter in favor of Concord Avenue bike lane

Hello all, you are probably unsurprised to hear this from me, but I like the new bike lanes on Concord Avenue. I ride on them at least 6 times a week (5 days to/from work, plus farm share from Farmer Tim on Sunday), and they reduce stress even for someone as accustomed to traffic as I am.

I was also pleasantly surprised at the quality of the pavement; there are a few imperfect spots, but it is not as bad as I had thought it might be, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to other people.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that people now parking closer to traffic feel that is not comfortable to get in and out of their cars, and why yes, I have biked in that same space many, many, many times, I can see how they might feel that way.  That is sort of the whole point of a protected bike lane, reduce exposure to traffic.  Drivers newly exposed to traffic may feel this rather keenly, but it is a constant risk to someone riding on a street on a bicycle.

One reason to have such a bike lane is that it reduces the overall person-minutes of traffic exposure; it is a net win for that problem. Here are some measurements and estimates that I hope demonstrate this.  I timed myself this evening traveling from Baker to Orchard, and it took 2 minutes. I also experimentally got in and out of a car parked in our driveway and walked around it, and I was easily away from the side of the car in 15 seconds either entering or exiting. That is, each person on a bike traveling that stretch of road is exposed to about 4 times as much passing traffic as someone entering or exiting a car (2 minutes versus 15 seconds to enter plus 15 seconds to exit). If I had to guess conservatively, I’d say that (in one direction) there’s at least 15 bikes per hour between 8am and 10am and again between 5pm and 7pm (60 bikes), plus (really guessing) at least 5 bikes per hour between 10am and 5pm (35 bikes), for a total of 95 bikes, for one direction. I base my rush hour estimate on seeing at least one bike moving in each direction almost every time I commute on Concord Avenue, and they are as much as 2 minutes away from me, and I don’t count because I am the observer, so bikes are 4 minutes apart at rush hour, or 15/hour. 95 bikes times 4 is 380 — if fewer than 380 cars park on one side (or the other) in a given day, then the protected bike lanes result in less traffic exposure. I counted parking spots from Baker to Orchard on the north side (which has more spots) and got 57.  380/57 is 6-and-2/3 — unless the average weekday parking traffic per spot is over 6-and-2/3, we’re better off (fewer people-minutes of traffic exposure) with protected bike lanes. I don’t think there’s that much traffic in those spots. I suspect that the average weekday cars per space is closer to 2, so I could be off quite a bit in my estimates and the protected lane would still be a net win.

This is also just raw traffic exposure, ignoring dooring risk, and assumes that someone parking their car gets in or out of their car without waiting for traffic to clear; time is time, they’re exposed for 15 seconds. Actual cautious-driver behavior reduces this risk whenever there’s any gaps in traffic (it’s easier to find a 15 second gap, than a 2-minute gap).  There are caveats and quid-pro-quos, but none of them results in winning arguments against a protected bike lane; for example, in the old configuration, if no cars are parked, then I would often ride through parking spaces (where the protected lane is now) to increase my distance from traffic — but if no cars are parked, people aren’t exposed to traffic parking their cars.  Or, if there is very high turnover per space, yes drivers are more exposed, but then the risk of dooring becomes high enough that it cannot be ignored.

I do sympathize with people who think parking is unpleasant, and that’s one of the reasons I ride a bike instead — I hate parking, too.  I’m not young, I’m not thin, it’s not a short commute, I do this year round, I keep waiting for more other people to realize that they could do the same.  A protected bike lane removes one of the frequent and otherwise intractable objections that many people have to riding a bike around here.

Bike-related articles

An internet bikey friend is a new-ish assistant professor of transportation, has a pile-o-books to read. I figured, why not skim off the best/most-interesting of everything I collected in Evernote over the last few years, and make a dump of it, perhaps some will be useful, perhaps it won’t.

An amazing summary of stuff
Cycling, Health and Safety (OECD)

Health
If you’re over 50, owning a car adds 20 pounds (randomized natural experiment)
English bike commuter health/mortality study (striking results, I think there is some selection effect)
Danish mortality study
5 studies summarized (OECD publication, above, table 1.2 on pdf page 44, Danish study above is in the list)
New Zealand Study (smallest effect, cycling RR is “only” 0.87)
Cycling for Freezing Gait in Parkinson’s Disease (video)
Physical activity, self-report vs reality (picture of poster)

Road capacity
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF ROAD CONGESTION: EVIDENCE FROM US CITIES (NBER)

125 bikes in 45 seconds (video, Boston, kids screwing around — seconds 2-47)
84 bikes in 30 seconds (video)
45 bikes in 23 seconds (video)
27 bikes in 18 seconds (video)
25 bikes in 25 seconds (video)
24 bikes in 16 seconds (video)
22 (?) bikes in 9 seconds (video)
14 bikes and scooters in 14 seconds (video, San Francisco)
12 bikes, bonus scooter, 6 seconds (video, San Francisco)
10 bikes in 15 seconds (video, San Francisco)

Inman Square, full light cycle, 21+ bikes westbound, 16 cars westbound (cars require full 55 second cycle, 20 bikes pass in first 20 seconds)
I’ve been in one of these bike-per-second blobs at Inman when a pedestrian jaywalked, and we all parted around them like a school of fish. Cars can’t manage that at half that rate.
Bikes also manage when the box is blocked by stopped cross traffic.

Videos illustrating road capacity different ways (article and videos)
Estimating Capacity of Bicycle Path on Urban Roads in Hangzhou, China (2512 bicycles/h per meter)
Operational Analysis of Uninterrupted Bicycle Facilities (Level of Service for bike paths?)

Safety
Bicycling injury hospitalisation rates in Canadian jurisdictions (Teschke et al, helmet laws)
Vancouver drivers at fault in 93% of collisions with bicycles: city report (news article)
Bicycle Use and Cyclist Safety Following Boston’s Bicycle Infrastructure Expansion, 2009–2012
Cyclist’s video of annoying crash, shows how a driver can “not see” what is right in front of them. (video)
Cycling safer than driving for young people, new study suggests
Study blames drivers for bike crashes (study not perfect…)
30x higher hospitalization rate for helmeted Dutch cyclists (blog, great illustration of selection effect)
Risk compensation and bicycle helmets

Florida bike crashes: 7 things that may shock you (news study)
Wearing a Bicycle Helmet Can Increase Risk Taking and Sensation Seeking in Adults
The influence of a bicycle commuter’s appearance on drivers’ overtaking proximities

Drivers overtaking bicyclists: Objective data on the effects of riding position, helmet use, vehicle type and apparent gender.
Florida bike distance passing study, somewhat replicates Ian Walker’s study
Cambridge, MA bike crash data

Comparison of bike+earbud and car+windows/stereo hearing

Rail
How many people use commuter rail? (in Boston — blog, generally interesting)

Social/general
Crash injury/mortality rates by mode of travel (US).
Crash injury/mortality rates by mode of travel (England).
Crash injury/mortality rates by mode of travel (Canada).
The cost-effectiveness of bike lanes in New York City.
How driving a car into Manhattan costs $160
CYCLISTS FURIOUS AS COUNCIL PAINT EVERYTHING ELSE LUMINOUS GREEN (joke)
94% of bike riders wait at red lights
Why people jaywalk (looooong video)
People assume biker breaks law despite contrary video evidence
Comparison of cyclist and driving ability to hear
Understanding congested travel in urban areas
Transport transitions in Copenhagen: Comparing the cost of cars and bicycles (paywalled)
What is the optimal speed limit on freeways? (paywalled)

Auto air pollution
MIT air pollution deaths study (estimated 53k early death/year from cars+trucks)
Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Chicago Microdata
The list of diseases linked to air pollution is growing

Auto safety
International road safety comparisons (USA is not great at safety per mile, but then we drive a whole lot)
Pounds that kill (Anderson & Auffhammer SUV unsafety article)
Car helmets
Car headband
SUVs’ risk to others admitted by industry
CDC: TBI Death causes (totaled & percentages— over 1/4 of all TBI deaths come from car crashes)
CDC: TBI Hospitalization causes  (totaled & percentages— 17% of all TBI hospitalizations come from car crashes)
Literature Review on Vehicle Travel Speeds and Pedestrian Injuries
Effects of Speed on Pedestrian Fatalities
The fatal injuries of car drivers (head injuries sole cause 23%, co-cause 18%)
A long twitter thread on road crash victims in UK (scroll up, goes on, and on, and on)

Stuff I wrote
These tend to include links to spreadsheets and source documents, should anyone care to check my work.
Hypothesized mechanisms for US safety-in-numbers.
Bike share does not need helmets. Per-trip, it’s a lot safer than driving. There are caveats and quid-pro-quos — but the Cs and QPQs have larger effect than helmets.
We subsidize driving, yes we do.
Videos of not-quite right hooks, in case anyone wants to know what they look like.
A graph, by zipcodes, of the cumulative US population density.

Distributions for trip distances, for commutes and trips and general, and also a cumulative graph of the distance traveled. TLDR=”Lots of trips are short, but long trips matter because they are long. Commutes are 26% of trips but 35% of miles.”
Various ways of looking at road damage. It’s not presented as well as I would like unless you’re comfortable with log scales.
E bikes in China (back in 2011 the boom was well under way)

Videos I made
Tortoise and hare. Biking is that much faster, zooming ahead is useless and unsafe (video)
Why run reds (video)
Ticketing bikes and reducing safety (video) (catch the ped pass at 1:27, oh well)
A 10 minute chunk of my morning commute, with various events and commentary
Most of my 6.1-mile commute, 28 minutes
A playlist of biking in the snow and cold yes it is entirely possible, do be careful on the glass-smooth ice (there is another video where I fall on that ice; well-used road commuting snow tires are not good enough for ice).

Updated numbers for car/truck road subsidies

The last time I did this, I had figures through 2011.
Now I have 2012, 2014 and 2105 (2013 seems to be missing).
Now in a Google spreadsheet, so you can look at the numbers directly and poke at the links if you want to see where the numbers came from.

In words — since 2009, each gallon of gasoline or diesel is taxed between 40 and 50 cents too low even if the only purpose of that tax is to pay for road construction and maintenance. Any other taxes (carbon, pollution, noise, congestion, health care) would be on top of that. This also does not include the maintenance or construction that we ought to be doing; this is just what is spent.

Totaled over all the fuel sold, each year since 2009 the annual shortfall totals somewhere between 75 and 100 billion dollars.

Doing bikes wrong the US way

Been meaning to write something, always too distracted to “do a good job”, as if getting nothing written was a good job. So….

Just now read a Copenhagenize article on bikes and trains saying something I had believed, but had no data to support. They have data. They also point out by example yet another way we do bikes wrong here in the US.

Hypothesized mechanisms for US safety in numbers

Hypothesized mechanisms for “safety in numbers”

Safety in numbers is a cycling safety rule that says that the more people ride bikes, the safer each rider will be. Hypothesized mechanisms include (1) driver familiarity – because drivers more often see bikes on the road, they become better-trained to see them on the road and (2) driver empathy – because so many drivers also ride bikes, they are more aware-of/concerned-about bicycle safety issues. (Here’s a nice pile of pointers to papers, tracked down by a real live researcher.)

I think both of these mechanisms are entirely possible, but riding an actual bike in actual traffic in actual crowds of cyclists, I’ve noticed what looks like other ways that greater numbers provide safety. In at least one case I’ve captured it on video. The difference between these mechanisms and the others that are hypothesized is that they are extremely short term – “safety in numbers” can appear whenever there is a biking crowd and disappear as soon as it disperses. These are also somewhat more likely in crowded urban areas and depend somewhat on the existence of traffic jams.

The first mechanism I might call “schooling” (after Bike Snob’s “shoaling” and “salmoning”). Bikes riding in a line are schooling, and for several common cycling hazards, most of the risk is borne by the lead fish, and the rest get a free ride. If someone in a parked car is not looking for bikes and is about to open their door, but then a bike zips by, it’s not unreasonable that they would be startled, and maybe then look to see if it was clear – and if the bikes are schooling, all the followers get the benefit of that. The dooring risk is almost entirely on the lead cyclist. Similarly, cars pulling into or across traffic represent a threat only to the lead cyclist, and very little to the ones in the rear. A line of bikes is also somewhat protective against right hooks, since those usually occur when a driver thinks they can overtake a bike and turn right, or forgets the presence of a single bike. With a line of bikes, once the first is across the side street, it is obvious to the driver that a right turn is not possible.

A second method is less obvious, but safety decreases markedly in the range of speeds between the slowest and fastest typical commuters. A low-speed (below 10mph) crash is stupidly survivable; you can almost step off your bike as it falls down. A high-speed crash (above 20mph) is far more likely to send you to the hospital or worse. Bike lanes at rush hour tend to run single file for some distance, usually because the bikes are hemmed in between parked cars on the right and “parked” cars on the left. Inevitably, some riders will be slower than others, and the inability to pass then compels the would-be-faster riders behind to slow down until they can pass. This makes them safer, whether they like it or not. This, I’ve seen on video, where I play the role of impatient rider. The probability of this delay and the difficulty of passing both rise pretty quickly once there’s more than a couple of riders delayed behind a slow leader.

After dark, a school-of-fish also multiplies the effectiveness of any lights that cyclists might be using. Just considering use of lights and not, if an unlit cyclist pairs up with one using lights, they can obtain most of the safety benefit of the lights. When two cyclists both have lights, the variations in their movement or in the flashing style of their different lights will create additional visibility over a single cyclist; for example, one cyclist’s flashing light might draw attention, but the other’s steady light might allow a driver to accurately locate the pair. Not nearly as many cyclists ride at night, but bicycle lighting use in the US is not nearly as good as it should be, so there’s plenty of room for this to help.

I don’t know if I’m typical, but if I’m riding at night and overtake another cyclist without lights who’s not too much slower than me, I’ll slow down to give them the benefit of my lights. I’ve even done this with a (impressively fast and competent) rollerblader caught by the late-fall early sunset on the local multi-use path.

The interesting (to me) thing about these is that they can work in the US, they take no time to work, and they take no change in driver empathy or enlightenment. And if a crowd of bikes disassembles, then the safety effects do as well. The effects should appear most often at rush hours, when the largest number of bikes are on the road and when they are most hemmed in by traffic.

A historical/hysterical note is where the idea for safety-in-numbers comes from, and why we assume its existence even when we’re not entirely sure how it works. Once upon a time, when Effective Cyclists were peddling their prescriptions for safer cycling (ride in the road, in traffic, just like the “vehicle” that bicycles legally are, and that legal status is a good thing for which the EC movement certainly deserves some credit) the counterexamples of “the Dutch” and “the Danes” came up, where many people often ride bikes on lanes entirely separate from auto traffic, with crash fatality rates 5 times lower than ours. The EC people were very good at finding and/or interpreting studies that “proved” that if only the Dutch would get rid of their separate facilities, they would be even safer than they are now, that in fact their extraordinary safety must have some other cause. (This might even be true, but nobody’s ever managed to get more than about 1% of the population to bike in an “Effective” style.)

And what was the obvious difference that might be the cause of that anomalous safety? “Numbers”. It must be “Safety in Numbers”, assumed to exist to fill a (huge) gap between theory and reality. This was convenient for the Effective Cyclists because they got to continue to feel correct about their prescriptions (“just you wait, once everyone here rides bikes, we’ll be the safest cyclists on the planet!”) but now this same hypothesized mechanism is used to justify creation of cycling-specific infrastructure that Effective Cyclists hate (“we’re tired of waiting, EC is phenomenally unpopular and we’ll never get the numbers that give us the safety we want if we do it your way. And by-the-way, global warming, particulate pollution, pedestrian deaths, urban congestion delays, traffic noise, and public health, we need this now. Infrastructure will get butts in saddles and safety-in-numbers ‘proves’ that they’ll be safe.”)

Biking in Mountain View has tremendous upside potential

I was just in Mountain View for most of a week on business, biking to and from work and to work dinners in the evening. The roads are much smoother than here near Boston, the weather was warmer, it did rain once, but wimpily, and it’s flat as a board in Silicon Valley. Biking there ought to be great.

Links go to short YouTube videos illustrating claims/points

However, they blow it. If you need to cover any particular distance, it’s easy to find yourself with no choice but a four-lane road with a door zone bike lane that waxes and wanes with the whim of whoever laid out the road, and parking is prioritized enough that you often find yourself squeezed towards traffic.

One shared use path is designed with the apparent assumption that bicycles are OMFG deadly dangerous to pedestrians, so it’s considered appropriate to encourage lower speeds by installing barriers that make high speeds deadly, and that also makes larger bikes (bakfiets, trailers) difficult to pass through, and that guarantee conflicts whenever people are traveling in opposite directions or if there’s a pedestrian and a bike traveling in the same direction. Imagine, for cars, that a crosswalk was made safe not just by installing a narrowing bumpout in each lane, but by narrowing the road to a single lane for both directions.

Note that this is on a straight path where everything is completely visible, so all that’s really needed in most cases is a “slow for pedestrians” sign. Not all people will go as slow as they should, but not all people will negotiate those gates without injury or conflict, either. Later on, a blind intersection with plenty of cross traffic on the Google Campus goes completely unremarked, and several curves past that are gratuitously blind, either because of untrimmed vegetation, or because bicycles were routed between two chain link fences, and for no particular reason one side (the one that matters) is intentionally made opaque by slatting installed in the fence so that it’s impossible to see oncoming bicycle or pedestrian traffic on the fence-narrowed path.

Incomprehensibly, an underpass with over 7 feet of clearance (I reached a hand up to measure as I passed under, so that’s an estimate – apparently they couldn’t be tasked with actual measurement, but I ride quite tall and cleared easily) was declared to be dangerously low, and thus we’re told to walk our bikes there, as if.

Actual road crossings are designed with zero thought to the convenience of cyclists. At one there’s a gate to force a U-turn to enter it, then a beg button that imposes an interminable wait despite large gaps in motor traffic (I didn’t wait). A cyclist obeying traffic laws to the letter could not ride back that same way – the returning lane slips onto San Antonio, and returning on the sidewalk instead one is greeted with a WRONG WAY sign specific to bicycles (and the sidewalk is clearly intended for bicycles, else the sign would read “no bike riding”). It’s not much wonder that I just wing it.

At another crossing on the Permanente Creek trail, cyclists are vaguely directed to enter traffic and then make a u-turn at the light, as if that is preferable to looking for a gap (which we’d need to look for anyway, to enter traffic to make that u-turn) and just crossing on foot. There’s a sidewalk, but it’s twisty and too narrow for two-way traffic. Crossing on foot is necessary because there’s a big-ass curb in the middle of the road. The same can be seen on parts of Middlefield, where children crossing to/from school have worn goat paths in the median strip, far from any crosswalk. (Video is not great; there were kids, they were waiting to cross, and the median is cut by little footpaths.)

At a larger level, multilane Alma/Central and the RR tracks make a nasty barrier to traveling (peninsula-compass) east-west in Mountain View. Crossings are not well signed, Google Maps doesn’t seem to know about them, the entry is tight, the mirrors at the bottom make it clear the bicycles are known/expected to be there, but the ramps are quite narrow, guaranteeing conflict if there’s 2-way traffic or pedestrians.

This is all doubly annoying because it could be so nice. Remember, flat topography and a mild climate. If there were good, comfortable, safe routes that led anywhere interesting, lots of people could and almost certainly would use them. But right now, Mountain View is failing both in the small (annoying and insulting inattention to details of intersections and safety) and in the large (arteries are for cars – wide, fast, and with varying-width door-zone bike lanes, sometimes very fast).

And yeah, I know, “reasons”. Y’all ought to look at yourselves, a 10-lane highway jammed up every morning, even with thousands of employees delivered by buses instead of single-occupancy vehicles. I rode a bike to dinner after work and beat the people driving. Here’s two free clues as to why Mountain View ought to install a ton of really nice bicycle infrastructure. #1, no matter what you do about traffic, more cars will always arrive to fill the voids that you create, and with high tech salaries I’m not sure even congestion charges would do the job. #2, if you install really nice bicycle infrastructure, if you need to get around your own town, you won’t care about that traffic, and because the land is so flat and the climate so mild, that’ll be true all year. You might want to knock out a few parking spaces and replace them with bike corrals to make this really be true, but I managed to find bicycle parking a lot closer to the restaurant than anyone driving there.

Cars as Sensory Deprivation Chambers

I both drive cars and ride bikes, and for years I didn’t think much about how much driving a car impairs all your senses, as well as your ability to communicate. To hear how other people talk about traffic and safety, I think I’m not the only person to miss this.

Where this usually comes up is in discussions of rolling stops, and stop-then-go at red lights. The claim from cyclists (and this claim is absolutely true, which is why I’m writing this) is that they generally can see and hear better than people in cars, and thus are in a better position to judge if it is safe to go or not. This is one of the several justifications for the Idaho Stop Law.

So, vision. Someone riding a bike is as tall as they are standing up, if not taller. To stop, most people must hop off the saddle because they sit too high to reach the ground with their feet. Modern sedans tend to be about 4-and-a-half-feet tall (I just measured a Civic and a Camry), so whoever is sitting in them is shorter than that. On a bicycle, seated, your head is about 3 feet back from the front edge of the bicycle, but it’s easy to lean forward to within about a foot of the front. In a car, leaning forward gets you to the windshield, which is five feet back from the front of the car. Add to that whatever fog or dirt happens to be on the windshield and the windows, plus the various pillars and mirrors and fuzzy dice, and I hope it’s clear that the cyclist has a far better view of what’s around.

Next, hearing. Luxury cars are actually marketed for their ability to make you deaf to the world. That ought to be enough right there, but I’ve actually mentioned this to a degreed+prestigious colleague whose snap reaction was “no, I can hear okay in a car”. No, really, you can’t. Even without luxury soundproofing, cars have noisy engines, ventilation fans, tire noise, often a stereo, and quite often their windows are up. All these things act to block exterior sound. On a bicycle, the default is that you hear everything. There’s wind noise when you’re moving, but stopped at an intersection there’s nothing between you and the world and the bike is silent.

And you might like to think that maybe hearing doesn’t matter–after all, we let people who are deaf drive and ride bikes–but it certainly does. When I approach intersections, I can hear cross traffic coming before I can see it; that’s redundant safety information, which is a good thing. I can hear cars approaching from behind, and tell if they’re slowing or swinging out into traffic to pass, and I can judge the size of the car or truck as well (big trucks without sideguards are very dangerous). For pedestrian safety being able to hear matters, because I can carry on a conversation with the people around me. “I see you”, “go ahead, it’s a crosswalk, I’m stopping”, and of course “oops, sorry”. I can communicate with other cyclists, “there’s a blind woman walking ahead of you” (in the dark). All the sound signals that we’re supposed to legally make when approaching pedestrians are useless when approaching cars because drivers are effectively deaf. All the communication that’s easy with people around us is impossible with people in cars.

People on bikes also see more because of their ability to always position themselves near an intersection before stopping. That means we always get to see the light cycles and light timings, and even if we haven’t learned them all yet ourselves, we can see how other cyclists react to them. We don’t need to catch sight of landmarks as we drive through the intersection, because we always have plenty of time to look around at the front. Once you know the usual timing for a light (easily derived from countdown pedestrian timers on the street and cross street – which you can see because you are stopped at the intersection) you can also judge from quite a distance the appropriate speed to make the next light, which allows you to moderate your speed to only what is adequate to catch the green. Lower speeds make for easier pedalling, and are also safer.

I had meant to make a much longer rant about “windshield vision”, but I think this is good enough for a start. You might ask yourself, if you could drive and fool yourself into thinking that you weren’t half-blind and mostly-deaf, and not realize what you were missing stuck back in a line of traffic, if you might not be self-fooled about some other things. If your reaction to the facts stated here is that they’re the crazy opinions of one of “those cyclists” – don’t forget, I am a licensed driver, I drive often enough, I own a car, and this is true of most adults riding bicycles (knowing this stuff makes driving a lot less fun. Don’t expect any auto advertising to mention this ever).

Bonus sensory deprivation video, in case you still don’t believe me: watch the second driver in this video roll right over a bicycle and a bicyclist’s foot, and not be able to believe she did it. Said bicyclist has right of way, in clear daylight, riding straight on a straight road, wearing a dayglo-yellow jacket, with a front flashing light. The second driver did not see, did not hear the crash, did not hear the crunch of the bike as she drove over it, did not hear the guy she was running over yelling at her.

It occurred to me a few days after posting this that “people on bikes behave unpredictably” is consistent with “people on bikes make decisions based on information I don’t have”. Probably not the only explanation, but worth thinking about before jumping to pejorative conclusions.

Banning Cars as a Thought Experiment

Most times you see discussions on the internet of global warming, traffic congestion, and road safety, the advocates of the status quo are quick to claim that “we cannot ban cars, because [reasons]”. I’ve got no respect for this style of arguing the point because #1, even pseudo-serious calls to actually “ban all cars” are quite rare ( this recent article is the strongest statement I’ve seen, and that’s just one writer at Gizmodo ), #2 the reasons all assume that we’d do nothing to adapt and when possible remedies are proposed, new reasons are concocted (we can play this game all day), and #3, there’s real live reasons to reduce car use by quite a lot, and those cheerfully get ignored.

Just to motivate this, here are some very good reasons to drive a whole lot less. It’s also helpful to keep this in mind when considering alternatives; if they’ve got the same problems, then maybe they’re not good alternatives.

• Cars kill thousands of people in crashes, including over 4000 pedestrians per year.
• Cars kill their drivers through lack of exercise, enough to raise their annual mortality risk by about 25-30% 

  (summed over the population of car commuters, this is probably more early death than results from cigarette smoking ).  As long as exercise is its own separate activity, you’re unlikely to get enough of it.

• Ignoring the less-death part of the equation, the regular exercise that you get from not-driving to work and results in just plain better health; you get more wind, more stamina, more flexible joints. It tends to help you keep weight off, tends to help blood pressure, tends to help blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, tends to ward off type 2 diabetes.  None of this is guaranteed for any one person, but it’s a really good bet.
• Cars are a source of both particulate and noise pollution, which both contribute to poor health. Noise pollution from cars makes public spaces more annoying and less useful; you can’t hear as well.
• Cars use roads very inefficiently. In urban areas the resulting congestion is so serious that one additional car added to Manhattan traffic is calculated to have an aggregate cost of $160 through delays to others on the roads.
• Cars are a major source of CO2 emissions which contribute to global warming and climate change.
• Paying for fuel for cars puts money into the pockets of nations and groups that do not share our values. Al Qaeda was mostly funded from oil money. Daesh is funded from oil money. Iraq would have been a non-issue without oil money (murderous dictators of poor nations don’t get much attention from us). Iran, officially an enemy of the US and ally of our enemy in Syria, runs on oil money.
• From an economic-theory point-of-view, cars are a poster child for market failure. Their use is not independent of other people’s choices; if I want to take the bus, traffic from cars makes my bus ride slower and more expensive. If I want to ride my bike, cars can make the ride so much more unpleasant that many people won’t ride a bike. Even if I want to compromise and just drive a smaller car, the mass of larger cars makes me less safe in any collision; even for cars, it is a safety arms race. These externalities (pollution, noise, risk) are not accounted for in gas taxes. Even the direct costs of driving itself–repair and expansion of the roads–is not fully paid by the gas tax. The one reason that economic theory says ought to motivate people not to drive–that driving is very bad for your health–falls victim to human over-optimism about their good intentions and future luck; we won’t invest rationally in our (near-) future health, because we think we’re “healthy” and don’t need to do more. All this means that you can’t use hand-waving appeals to popularity and market outcomes to prove that profligate driving is what happens in the best of all possible worlds.

Given this motivation, let’s suppose we did ban cars. The question I’d like to see thought about and answered is not “why is this impossible?” but rather “what changes do we need to get by in a hypothetical car-less future? What changes would a lack of cars allow us to make?” My hope is that we would make some of those changes now, so that more of us won’t feel like driving a car is our only option. If the assumption is “cars are banned”, that removes the option of not thinking about a problem by assuming “well of course, for that we would use a car”.

One problem with using the thought experiment for this purpose is that there’s a difference between cars-banned and cars-reduced. If we actually banned cars, we wouldn’t need “bike lanes” because we’ve already got bike lanes. They’re called “roads”, but right now they’re full of cars. But if there’s still many cars on the road, we don’t get those “bike lanes” for free.. So keep that caveat in mind; if we’re planning to use tools from the hypothetical world in the real world, because some might not survive translation.

Another problem is: “what about the car-like things?” This might mean delivery trucks, golf carts, buses, trikes. What about self-driving cars? What about really big “bicycles”? Are those cars? Do we ban them too? I think what makes sense is to look at the costs of each and how they interact with what’s around them. Anything heavy tends to impose unusual wear-and-tear on the roads; this includes city buses. Anything human-guided has the potential for inept or careless use, so there should be some combination of small size, low speed, and/or safeguards to mitigate that risk. Inefficient transportation will produce excess CO2 until our energy supply is properly carbon-free. Even if a motorized robot-guided chair is carbon-free, safe for others, and kind to roads, it is still a motorized chair and will have the same detrimental health effects for its passenger.

So, to consider some of the problems:

There are people who cannot walk long distances or ride a bike.

Anything that assumes bike riding or increased use of transit by default assumes some basic fitness, and some people lack that. How should they get around? In practice I think quite a few of them would use mobility scooters of some sort; modern electric wheelchairs travel as fast as 5mph (according to a wheelchair user I asked) but if they could be made stable we’d want more than that. I think they could be made stable. A larger, faster real-world example is a golf cart, though this is cheating slightly on the “ban cars” assumption. For people who lose their balance a tricycle sometimes works.

There are people with very long commutes.

Back before cars were so popular we tended to use a lot more rail; people would take the train in to urban areas to work. Would we restore our train networks? If the rail line doesn’t pass close by home and work, how are those endpoints connected? My default answer is “bicycles”. Another answer is to modify the zoning regulations that prevent people from living close to transit and work; artificially restricting that supply drives up prices and forces longer commutes. I expect this is one of the harder changes to make because it involves change near where people live; allowing greater density near transit would financially benefit anyone owning that property, and it would also provide an advantage to those somewhat near transit who wanted to use it (higher density allows transit to function efficiently allows better service). However, widespread density increases closer to urban centers might have the effect of reducing property values sufficiently far out as a simple consequence of increased near-urban supply reducing far-suburban demand.

For an all-bicycle commute, from personal experience I’d say 6-7 urban miles is fine, but 10 miles is pushing it, though that depends on conditions. The median commute is nearly 9 miles, which means that half might be done on bikes, but half also almost certainly will not. It’s possible to make biking somewhat faster — current bike routes often contain many gratuitous stops or are far from direct, and bikes with aerodynamic fairing or modest electric assist can cruise at 20mph (a human doing this without “cheating” is likely to get very sweaty) which reduces the time for a 10-mile ride to 30 minutes, which is about what my 6-mile commute-with-stops-and-old-legs takes.

There’s weather.

Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows, sometimes it’s hot. As a general rule the only truly difficult weather is hot weather; we can add rain coats, umbrellas, gloves, boots, and hats for the wet and cold. Some cities have building codes that allow for pedestrian awnings, and those help with sun, snow, and rain. We’d probably do more of that in a car-less world. One useful thing about banning cars is that you no longer need to deal with your car and the weather; no need for car washes, no need for digging cars out of the snow. A pedestrian or a bicycle can fit down a narrow lane, or if in a hurry, can simply push through/over a snow pile rather than shovel out a wide path.

There’s kids.

It turns out bikes work pretty well for hauling tiny kids, and once they’re too large to haul, they can ride their own bikes.  With cars banned it’s vastly safer for little kids to ride bikes (turns out a ban isn’t even necessary if you design your infrastructure right).

Grocery shopping.

Not much need to adapt here. People who walk already use folding carts. My old retired now-deceased neighbor just carried his bags. People riding bicycles have many options, everything from backpacks to huge messenger bags to front racks to baskets and panniers mounted on racks. Even on a “normal” bike proper equipment allows six bags of groceries (2 front panniers, 2 rear panniers, 2 in basket). Actual intended-for-cargo bikes carry more.

There are heavy things that require heavy machinery to deliver.

True, but this is far from the common case. Delivery vans nowadays are large to amortize the cost of the driver who guides them, and then they drive as fast as allowed to also amortize the cost of that driver. The van is large, but the delivery generally is not. Consider the potential capabilities of self-driving delivery vehicles that don’t need to be large and fast. We can estimate this somewhat by looking at what humans on bicycles and tricycles are able to deliver. The point is not “this is what humans should be doing” or “look at those crazy people”, but rather, with a small vehicle (bicycle) and a small motor (human), it is possible to deliver this much stuff if you aren’t in a terrific hurry. Examples: Haley Trike and 400 lbs of sand (video); a chicken coop; a trailer full of Citibikes; a ludicrously large pile of stuff; a mattress, table, chair, and box. Robots could also deliver loads of this size, and if it becomes economical for self-driving cars to ferry people around, then it will also be economical for self-driving carts to ferry cargo around in smaller batches.

Emergency vehicles

Well of course, for that we would use a car.  With all the other cars and trucks banned, they should be able to move really quickly through the traffic that’s not there.  (Bikes don’t take up much space and you can haul them completely off the road if you need to clear a path for an ambulance.)

Steep Hills

There is already (one) cable-lift assist for bicycles.  E-assist also helps, if a hill must be crossed regularly.  For one-shot annoying hills, walking works.

Rural Areas

No good answers here yet.  Horses?  Even electric vehicles are dicey, for sufficiently cold and remote values of rural.

Greedy Reasons to Bike to Work

I’m a little reluctant to post this because it’s got a bit of a gloating feel to it (“look at my massive calves and thighs!”) but people should understand that if they don’t have the opportunity to bike to work, they’re missing out and they’re being cheated. That means they have to know the sort of thing that they’re missing.

This doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it’s clear that most people are suspicious of doing things because it’s supposed to be good for the planet. Instead, I’d like to suggest reasons for biking to work because it might be good for you. I’ll try to be concrete.

I am 55. I weigh between 220 and 225lbs, and I’m 6 feet tall. That makes me officially quite overweight. I hate dieting and so I don’t really do much more than try to keep sweets out of reach. Beer is a regular part of my diet, and food is free at my new job. I weighed more before I started biking to work 9 years ago, but in the last year I started biking even more.

My commute to work, since March, is 6.1 miles by the fast, direct, and less-fun route, and I reliably do that in 30 minutes on a bike without running red lights. At rush hour biking is faster than driving. If I am in a hurry I can do it in 26 minutes, though I may end up sweaty (all I need to go faster is to breathe more; the legs just go as fast as oxygen debt allows). Traffic jams are not a problem; I ride through the gaps and go almost as fast. Parking is not usually a problem (we do almost fill the bike cage at work, but less so now that the weather is cooler, and there is other parking). If I instead take the less-annoying route, biking takes about as long as driving, but not longer. Oh yeah, my bike weighs about 65lbs.

Since March, I have gained over a centimeter in circumference in my thighs, a centimeter in my calves, and I’m regularly pulling my belt a notch tighter. Even before the new commute when I was biking somewhat less per week, I still had enough wind and stamina to shovel snow like a machine; I expect it’s rather better now because the new commute includes more sprints that punch my heart rate up a bit.

So. Would you like a faster commute to work, no parking hassles (and it’s FREE), a little weight loss, a slightly smaller waist, more muscles, and enough wind to shovel snow without fear of heart attack? If your commute is like mine, perhaps you should ride a bike. If your commute is about as long as mine but too unpleasant for you to tolerate, have you considered pestering your local government for some combination of better enforcement of traffic rules (if it’s speeding cars that make it unpleasant) or a reasonably sized lane in which to ride your bike (or perish the thought, a segregated path or lane)? Failure to provide you an adequate place to commute by bicycle is depriving you of a faster commute and measurable improvements in your health and fitness.

And do understand, if you want this and your roads don’t allow it, you should be angry. If I had to give up biking to work I’d be very unhappy. Statistics say this would increase my annual risk of death by about 30%. Do you think it is reasonable to live with that kind of extra risk? Do you have any idea how much larger that risk is than all the risks that usually get people all wound up and excited? That’s not an acceptable status quo.

One warning; if you’re out of shape, your first commutes will not be as fast or as fun. It’ll take about a month and a half to get over that, and then there will be gradual improvement for a few years — not necessarily faster, but one day you may find yourself regarding hills as merely annoying, instead of as an obstacle to go around. Eventually you’ll learn to run up an oxygen debt charging up hills and then rest on the downhill, because that is fastest, and because one day, you can.

Anyone who takes this seriously, if you’re looking for a bike, you could do a lot worse than a 3-speed with fenders, chain guard, dynamo hub, and fat tires. The fatter the tires, the better; you’ll be more comfortable, at less risk from potholes and road cracks, and you’ll spend less time pumping up your tires because they’ll hold their air longer. If you’re gung-ho, get a cargo bike, either an EdgeRunner , Yuba, Big Dummy, or a Gr8, or maybe a Kr8 or one of the several other US–produced cargo bikes.