Can We Be Enraged When Cyclists Are Killed...All The Time? and other post-NYC questions

Picture I took biking just after the Five Boro Bike Tour, 2014.

A pretty nerdy thing I am proud of is some work I did on the Connecticut Bike & Pedestrian Advisory Board a few years ago. I worked with a small number of people in the state DOT to reword a few things in the driver's ed manual - a document that probably hadn't been updated since before I got my license in the Nutmeg State a long time ago.

Going through the manual with a red pen was kinda gratifying in that I could make edits that would be seen by thousands of Connecticut teens who would, the hope went, learn about driving in more of a share-the-road style. One thing I distinctly remember was a passage in a section about aggressive driving behavior. It started like this: "When a driver, bicyclist or other road user does something to anger you, do not retaliate..." 

My suggestion was to replace the word "to" with "that." My reasoning was that actions that annoy or anger road aren't always done to get that result. For example, the guy who passed me too closely on Market St. in San Jose (he broke the three-foot law as he sped by...only for me to easily pass him at the next traffic light) didn't say when he left work that day: "You know what? I'm gonna piss off a cyclist on the way home."

I thought changing the word "to" to "that" might be a good step in creating a road culture that recognizes that things that anger you are things that are often done unintentionally, and should just be let go. I have no idea if this change works or not, but it is still in the Connecticut Driver's Manual to this day (you can find it on page 25).

Another part of my reasoning was that not matter what I am riding, any kind of a fight between me and a motor vehicle that outweighs me by twenty or thirty times I am going to lose. 

So when I hear people talk about how awful it is that cyclists were mowed down by a truck on a bike path in New York - one that I rode on frequently when I lived out there - I have to ask a few questions.

Have you been standing with us as we've been trying to build safer streets? If not, can you stand with us now?

I've been to many a town hall meeting where motorists gripe when cycling infrastructure of any kind is on the table. The disproportional anger I see is bang-your-head-against-the-wall irritating. In fact, the Mercury News' Mr. Roadshow column just ran a letter from a motorist (one who, no doubt, complains incessantly about car traffic without realizing he is part of the problem by driving) whining about a new $35 million bike and pedestrian bridge being built. Yet this area seems to routinely spend $1 billion or more on one highway interchange and nobody bats an eyelash.

                    View of the Freedom Tower from the bike path in 2013

And that's not even the worst part - the worst part is these massive car-oriented projects do not work. In 2014, NBC ran a story showing that after spending a billion dollars, commute times went up one minute after widening a ten-mile stretch of the 405. Of course, once the public and elected officials realized this, they decided not to build any more highways.

I am, of course, kidding. Just last month I saw the headline: i-405 Improvement Project Aims to Shorten Commute Times. The project, funded by Measure M, is expected to cost about $1 billion. 

The only way to improve highways is to have fewer people driving on them. That happens when big, effective bike/ped/train infrastructure is built and people leave the car and take the bicycle. Even if it doesn't happen overnight, cities and states can change their metrics over to Vehicle Miles Traveled from the outdated, car-friendly Level of Service and build roads as Complete Streets. 

Would your response to the NYC attack be the exact same if the angry person behind the wheel was white and wasn't motivated by ISIS?

Like I wrote in the Connecticut Driver's Manual, people on the road don't always do something intentionally to anger someone. But let's talk about those who do. Not just the terrorist in New York, but the one in the pickup truck in Marin, who, the very same month of the NYC attack,  intentionally rammed cyclists on a charity ride before taking off. He was eventually found and a lot of cycling advocates were at the arraignment. 

There has been very little coverage of this since then. 

If the driver in Marin wasn't white screamed something in a foreign language while attempting murder, what would the coverage be then? 

You know the answer to that already. 

You also know how angry I can get when journalists do the color-by-numbers coverage of a crash that involves a bike or pedestrian. It's not a sexy, click-baity topic like terrorism. 

The reporters often use words that assign blame (such as asking "was he in the crosswalk?" in an accusatory tone) and almost never follow up with the people affected by tragedy. It's long past time to talk about the design of roads and the use of motor vehicles to begin with. 

Cause, you know, we take off our shoes at the airport because of some dolt fifteen years ago and you don't see news stories of someone going on a rampage and running people down on a cargo bike, do you? 

                    View of the Freedom Tower from the bike path, 2013

Are you ready to speak up and ban cars from cities altogether for national security reasons?

This kind of question and conversation that will follow is going to make a lot of people really uncomfortable and possibly angry.

I don't care. It still needs to happen.

We're wading toward it now - and someone more famous and more articulate than me (that is a really big pool) needs to take this up. One kid gets killed by an alligator in Florida and nets go up all around the ponds. A tiny number of lithium batteries burn and talks of banning them from flights engulf us all. Four planes are used as weapons and cockpit doors of thousands and thousands are fortified. 

Can we harness that kind of reaction when cyclists and pedestrians are killed instead of shrugging? And can we do something other than making it illegal to look at a phone in a crosswalk? 

    Avert your eyes, Honolulu (also your ordinance won't make pedestrians safer) 
Cyclists and pedestrians have to share space everyday with machines that weigh thousands of pounds and can do an incredible amount of damage in the wrong hands. This is already in addition to the fact that cars cost a lot, pollute, are bad for our waistlines and take up space in cities that can be better used to build affordable housing. 

The time is now for city engineers to take several steps to not just do more to separate cars from bikes and pedestrians, but separate cars from cities altogether. 

I know these questions may not go anywhere and in a week ADHDmerica may have moved on to something else. I can tell you one thing though. Bicycles were in cities before cars and before terrorists. And we will be in cities after both of those are gone. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Cranksgiving San Jose update -  It is happening on Nov. 18th. Like Cranksgiving San Jose on Facebook and learn how you can help feed hungry Bay Area families this season!

Danika

    Danika Tyler Garcia (photo credit: Danika's mom)

I see ghost bikes wherever I ride all across the country - and the world, for that matter. Part of why they are made is to memorialize a person who was killed while riding their bike.

One of those killed - here in San Jose - was a teenager named Danika. While I was volunteering for Good Karma Bikes (which I sadly haven’t been able to do for a few months since keeping my freelance writing hamster wheel spinning has become a full-time job in and of itself) I helped her mom locate an old bicycle that could be turned into a ghost bike. 

She contacted me again last week: twists and turns in life meant the ghost bike couldn’t be put up right away. She decided to put it up this past Friday, which was Danika’s 17th birthday. That means she was born on September 9th, 1999 - 9/9/99. 

As some of you know already, I am miffed at the collective way cyclist deaths are covered in the press. Not just because one can play a macabre Cyclist Death Bingo game and - in terms of the scant information conveyed - get five across every time, but because nobody follows up. 

Well, I did. 

In an email, I asked Danika’s mom how she was and asked her to tell me about her daughter. This is what she wrote me (and she gave me permission to reprint it here):

“Danika was a nerd. A big, gentle nerd.”

“She hated bullies, and stuck up for the outcasts. Her friends were the choir/drama kid, LGBTQ kids, anime kids, the kids that are considered "different". The day after the crash, the students at Del Mar had a memorial for her. It lasted until the next morning. Supervised by Danika's best friends Mom.”

“One boy came up to me, wearing a three piece suit that was 3 inches too small for him. He said, "Danika was the only one to talk to me on my first day at school”.” 

“She was kind. Babies loved her. We have a huge Nicaraguan family and lots of little ones. They all flocked to her. Like the Pied Piper of toddlers.”

“I remember how, when I was a teenager, I would tell my mom (I) hated her. All the time. The thing that comforts me now, is she never, not once, told me she hated me. I'll hold that in my heart until I see her again.”

                                 Danika's Ghost Bike (photo credit: Danika's mom)

I mentioned the last time I wrote about ghost bikes that when I pick one out I just look for the biggest one I can find so it can be seen easily. But all of Danika’s mom’s words? All her grief, all Danika’s friends, family and teachers’ grief? There isn’t enough space on the bike frame to write it. 

When someone takes a ride somewhere, they should get to where they are going without incident. Yes, cyclists need to take ownership over their safety and absolutely, drivers need to slow down (and, as Cyclelicious just showed in his coverage of yet another unnecessary road death, never pass cyclists unless you have plenty of room to do so). But street design is also a ‘person of interest’ when a cyclist or pedestrian is hurt or killed on the road. 

So that’s my plea to the media: not only do I want you to follow up on the grieving done by survivors but also follow up with the ‘person of interest’ in every one of these cases: the road itself. In the time that has passed since the death, has the road been redesigned to encourage slower speeds? Has a road diet been done or complete streets initiatives implemented? Are there adequate warning signs of dangers? When you observe people at the site, do you see them engaging in the same behavior that led to the death? What do elected officials have to say? 

                                 Danika's Ghost Bike (photo credit: Danika's mom)

I know journalists are overworked and underpaid but follow up stories like this are more important than stories about Donald Trump’s hair or any ‘daily tracking poll.’ The kind of stories I’m talking about might encourage safer driving, safer cycling and smarter road design - all things that can save lives and up the chances someone like Danika will live to see another birthday (and, from what her mom described, touch more lives). 

Thank you, Danika’s mom, for talking with me. I am thinking of you and of the empty space at a table in a school cafeteria your daughter should be sitting and the empty spot on the street where she should be biking. 

Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

What a Kid Killed by an Alligator Can Teach the Media About Covering Bike/Ped Accidents

Unless you’ve been living under Boris Johnson’s Brexit campaign bus*, you probably know that a kid was killed by an alligator in Florida a couple of weeks ago. 

At first I dismissed the story - it just seemed to be a part of the media’s love affair with ‘disproportionality of fear’ stories; meaning, telling us with a straight face what we should be afraid of when what we should really fear just goes by unchecked. 

For instance, about 400,000 people have died in car collisions in the United States in the last 14 years. But we don’t hear about that kind of thing the way we should since the news is often a filler between car commercials. But the rare roller coaster accident? The rare child dragged around by a gorilla? The rare kid being snatched by an alligator? The network news has a graphic ready by the 5:00pm broadcast. 

The kid that was killed by an alligator in Florida teaches us both about the disproportionality of media attention and the disproportionality of fear (I talked about both in a piece I wrote recently for Blaze when I came across a rattlesnake while mountain biking…and found out how insanely rare fatal snake bites are). 

So even though the story seems to have been dragged from the media news cycle** we can actually talk about the coverage the poor child received and what the media can learn from its own coverage - and that is this: I want the media to cover bicycle/car collisions exactly like the way they covered the Alligator Kid. 

Stay with me: if you walk through the timeline of the Kid-Killed-By-Alligator news cycle, you’ll see several parallels to how we wish - no, how we need - news coverage of bike vs. car crashes to be. 

So here we go: reporters of all ages please take note.

1) Don’t Blame the Victim 

Kids move freely in an environment. So do cyclists. We think it inappropriate to blame the kid for what happened. Let’s think it inappropriate to blame the cyclist.

Classic example is when the media has more information about whether or not a pedestrian hit by a car was in a sidewalk than any other detail about the crash that killed or injured him or her. The sidewalk detail is important as a detail but as I’ve written before, we can’t ask about whether or not a pedestrian was in a sidewalk in a sneering, blame-the-victim fashion. 

So, instantly, do not blame the victim.

2) Ask ‘What Could Have Been Done to the Environment to Make This Safer?’

Intersection in Stamford where a pedestrian was killed in 2014. The media covered the immediate aftermath but moved the coverage elsewhere quickly afterward. (From: How Complete Streets Can Save Lives) 

With the attention off the blaming of the kid (and the alligator but I’ll talk about that in a minute) the next thing that news stories have to have is an examination of the environment. In the case of the Alligator Kid: there was a ‘No Swimming’ sign but the tone taken by the press was that wasn’t enough. 

I saw a horrendous lack of discussion about the environment in a recent Stamford Advocate story about a cyclist who was killed by a  car on Tresser Boulevard - the stretch of Route 1 in Stamford I know has just about no infrastructure for cyclists. “Without Helmet, Stamford Bicyclist Never Had A Chance” was the headline. Nothing about how God-Awful that road is for people who do not use a car to go from one place to another. 

3) Make it a Dangerous Time to Be An Alligator (Motorist) 

At least six alligators were killed in the hunt for the one that grabbed the kid. Obviously that’s just terrible and shouldn't have happened. I don’t condone the killing of animals that aren’t ordinarily found at a New England BBQ place, the killing of motorists, the murder of everyone in the phone book named Sarah Connor, and so on. 

But what if - in a The Far Side sort of way - alligators could read, watch TV, and owned smart phones? 

In the event of someone being snatched by an unknown reptile or killed from a hit-and-run, make sure every alligator/motorist knows that heaven and earth will be moved so the guilty party is found. If everyone knows the guilty will be hunted for, found and punished severely, it will hopefully sear into the minds of innocents not to do what the alligator (or dangerous motorist) did. 

4) Cover the Redesign of the Environment 

One aspect of a Road Diet involves reducing the width of a travel lane from 12' (or even more) to 11'. The cars tend to drive slower and the move makes room for a bike lane. 

The journalists in Florida just wouldn’t shut up about the lack of infrastructure that, if it existed, would have decreased the odds of the incident happening. They had a story about it every day. They showed footage of the area in the days that followed the incident. They asked concerned people how they felt about the fact the environment hadn’t changed. And the media asked the people who controlled the environment why they weren’t making it safer immediately.  Over and over. The news media seemed to ask themselves what would make Disney take out a restraining order and took away a teaspoon of the effort needed to get to that stage.

That’s the way the media needs to work. Are you reading this, CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, The Hogwart's Gazette and the rest of you? Follow-up. Keep the pressure on. And annoy. You may not win any Pulitzers but you’ll save lives. 

So there we have it. For all the Jimmy Olsens and Tom Brokaws out there: it is never too late to apply some Alligator Coverage Logic to deaths and injuries on our roadways. I look forward to reading and viewing your coverage from now on. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

    A bit of context: This graphic was made when I was making a point about the whole issue of cyclists running red lights. That it is a problem but the stakes are a lot different when a cyclist does it rather than a motorist since the aftermath never, ever looks like this. 

* Watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver if you don't know what that is. If you do know what that is, watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver anyway. 

**too soon?

1,000 Words for Sunday (What's Wrong With This Picture?)

Alright I know I usually just post a random picture and leave it at that but today I just couldn't let something go.

Yes, I was biking on a road in San Jose and I whipped out my phone to take a picture because I thought it was cute.

Then I got home, looked at the photo, and got annoyed.

The sidewalk gets narrower for no reason and the car lanes are doubled up and 12' wide for no reason.

This is the kind of nonsense that needs to change. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

The Inaugural Address: Five Ways Malloy Talked About Bike Infrastructure Without Talking About Bike Infrastructure

Yesterday in Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy took the oath of office for a second time. Before the event, the media was already buzzing about what he was going to say about transportation. 

As many of you know I was disappointed with the governor’s answer about parking at train stations at a transportation forum a few months ago. But in yesterday's inaugural address (published here by NBC Connecticut) I counted five times when he spoke about the value of cycling:

1) "We all want our streets and neighborhoods to be safe places to work and to live…”

You can tell how unsafe your neighborhood is by conducting a simple test: watch somebody cross a street in the middle of the day. If they glance back and forth several times before running across the street like they’re avoiding sniper fire, it’s not a safe place to live. 

Days after a woman was killed at this intersection in Stamford in the summer of 2014, I went out there to watch how cars treated the corner between Summer and Hoyt Streets. 

Another test: the number of passionate cycling neighbors you have who won’t ride their bikes unless they’ve attached them to their Yakima racks and driven across several area codes to get away from car traffic. 

Neighborhoods aren’t made safer by adding cars or making it easier to chose a car to go somewhere. When state roads and town roads simply reduce the amount of space a car can drive on (say, reducing the width of a travel lane from twelve feet to 11 and adding a bike lane) it’s a low cost way to make a neighborhood safer.

2)"We all want cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy for our citizens and for our businesses."

Let me tell you something about my City Bike (the vintage Diamondback road bike I paid $5 for at a New Hampshire tag sale in July. Hundreds of miles logged with it (including in Cleveland!) and the ‘check engine’ light never came on. Not only that but I never had to spend $507 dollars for a mechanic to investigate a mysterious noise. 

A run to the Stamford Goodwill in 2014 with the trailer I made the year before. The bike is so much easier to maneuver in the tiny parking lot I try to avoid driving there at all times.

It doesn’t get cheaper, cleaner or more reliable than a bike. And if you do things that make bikes easier to use (add bike lanes, secure bike parking, and so on) it eases off the throttle of gasoline demand a bit - which will make motorists happy. 

3) "And we all want roads, highways, buses, trains, ports, and airports that work for every city and town, for every business, and for every person in our state."

If you’re driving by your favorite coffee shop and won’t make it to work on time if you stop (since you’d have to wait for a parking spot to open up) the coffee shop loses a sale. 

But if the roads leading up to the coffee shop were built for cyclists and the parking lot was designed for bicycles it might make it a lot easier for everyone to stop.

One thing that drives me nuts when people talk about transportation ‘systems’ is when they leave out just how mind-bogglingly flawed a car-only system is. Think about this: it only takes one or two cars blocking the box at an intersection to tie up traffic for dozens of motor vehicles. 

A way around this is to build boxes that open up briefly when all lights go red so as to remove the box blocking miscreants.

But it’s probably cheaper and more humane to build bike infrastructure. Probably. 

Also remember this: a one-car accident on I-95 delays hundreds and hundreds of cars for hours. That’s the ‘transportation system’ I’m talking about: one car represents a point of failure in a complicated system. And bikes, trains and cars are all connected and can’t be thought about in silos, either. 

4)"..no one party or one policy maker holds a monopoly on good ideas. We might not always agree on the details, but we can agree that we want our children to inherit a better Connecticut than we were given."

Taking bike rides with the mayoral candidates in Stamford back in 2013 (two Democrats and Republican Michael Fedele) reminded me of what Malloy said yesterday. Nobody owns the voting cycling bloc but everybody needs to get from one place to another. I hope Republican cyclists heading to Cleveland in 2016 encourage their friends to go riding with them.

5)"We can build a transportation system that better connects us to one another and to the rest of the world."

Let’s start with the first part of that sentence where he says connects us to one another. How many times in a car have you driven by somebody you know and honked the horn and waved while still going by? 

Our fellow humans deserve more than that. 

While on a bike, I recognized and stopped to chat with Congressman Jim Himes on Bedford Street. My yoga instructor from Exhale in Cove. A fellow cycling fanatic walking on a sidewalk by the Stamford Town Center. Another friend I had meant to email but instead stopped to have a real conversation with. 

It’s easier to talk to a fellow traveler on the road (and easier to listen to a fellow traveler) when on a bike. As for the rest of the world comment…

My house is about a mile and 3/4 from the Stamford Metro North station. It’s also, of course, an Amtrak stop. I’ve biked to the station to get on a train to get on a plane to fly somewhere. In doing so, I gave a parking space at the transportation center to someone who really needed it, didn’t add traffic to I-95, and didn’t wear out my car. A bike can do more than take you as far as your legs will take you. When done right, a transportation network can allow you to use your bike to go anywhere in the world.

So please join me in congratulating Dan Malloy on his victory and make sure he works toward what he suggested in his inaugural address. In 2014 the Connecticut Department of Transportation adopted a Complete Streets policy, so 2015 is the year for implementation. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

7:00pm Tonight in Stamford: Support Complete Streets

If you live in Stamford and don’t read this post all the way through I’m okay with that - provided you attend tonight’s public meeting (7:00pm at 888 Washington Boulevard) of the Board of Reps or otherwise show support for Stamford’s Complete Streets Ordinance. Write a letter to the editor of the Stamford Advocate, shout from the rooftops, borrow Speakerbike - whatever you need to do to be heard.

As you probably guessed, I’ve been riding the Bikeducken lately - you know, that cargo bike I welded last year from the parts of eight discarded bicycles. Two photos taken with my phone really capture everything anyone needs to know about a city that’s been shaped by cars:

This is my bike pausing at the parking lot at Ridgeway last Friday. As you can see there are a lot of cars searching for an elusive parking spot. Some of the motorists - both in and out of this parking lot - were staring at me; presumably because the Bikeducken looks strange. But you know what? I was staring at them because what they chose to get to where they’re going was a lot more odd than what I chose.

As you can see, I had no trouble finding a parking space at Ridgeway. But going forward: I want trouble. 

I’ve long ago lost count of the number of passionate cyclists I know that won’t bike through the heart of Stamford because they are too afraid - hence the empty bike rack. Anything this city can do to reduce that fear - including bike lanes - needs to be the big priority in 2015. Hand in hand with that has to be actions - including blanketing the city with usable bike parking that encourages people to not drive their cars into or through the city. Bikes take up less space, and that means motorists have fewer cars to compete with when searching for parking on their own. 

Adopting and aggressively implementing a complete streets policy - which will save lives, by the way - is the only direction this city can travel in. 

You don’t even have to take my word for it: gas is cheaper now than it has been in years and AAA cited that as part of why we’ll see more traffic on the roads this holiday. The National Bureau of Economic Research also published a report five years ago that concluded that increasing the provision of roads would do nothing to relieve congestion. 

And what was just discovered in California isn’t just a final nail in the car culture coffin, but it is a financial disaster: $1 billion was spent to widen a mere ten miles of the 405 freeway and traffic commute times increased by one minute after it was completed. 

A shorter way to say we've spent a lot of money on a problem only to make it worse is known as ‘induced demand’: We’ve thrown gobs of money at cars and all it has done is encourage people to drive more. Now is the time to encourage people to drive less. 

Please attend tonight’s hearing, take action to support Stamford’s complete streets ordinance, or both. We’ve already killed four pedestrians on our roads this year. Let’s try for none next year. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.