The Part of 'Share The Road' You Don't Understand

As you know, I've been in a position to pick out ghost bikes. I've stood in silence as names of dead cyclists and pedestrians have been tonelessly read aloud. Every time I read the news of a cyclist being hit by a car, I quickly look for the name of the victim to see if it is someone I know. 

I got that on January 1, 2019, when San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo was hit by an SUV. From the description of the crash I can easily imagine what happened: a driver turned into his path at an intersection and collided with the mayor of the 10th largest U.S. city. It's part of why Beryl invented the Laserlight - to avoid the 'right hook' - but the mayor was hit in the daytime.

The mayor of San Jose - a place I've called home for almost four years - could have witnessed his last sunset on December 31. Instead on January 1 he got two broken vertebrae and sternum because the driver "just didn't see him" which is Car-patriarcy (or 'Cartriarcy' as it were) talk for "I was driving so fast I didn't bother to look and see if other humans were on the same road as me."

So this seems like a good a time as any to talk about sharing the road, which a lot of motorists - especially those in the comments section of the news stories of this and other crashes - don't seem to understand.

While fighting and beating Proposition 6 with other bike advocates, I've gotten used to the idea that there is an entire class of drivers out there who don't think cyclists matter. People like Carl DeMaio and his ilk made that very clear in his mean-spirited and stupid Yes on 6 campaign. But we exist. We choose to ride for one reason or another. We get fewer parking options than drivers, fewer places to travel than motorists (see 40,000+ miles of interstate highway cyclists are forbidden to ride on), fewer safe passages to ride in, and someone who gets to work on a $100 bicycle or even a $1,500 and up bicycle is just not taken as seriously as someone who drives a $100,000 Tesla to work and enjoyed a fat taxpayer subsidy* from day one of owning the car. 

So we ride on whatever scraps of pavement we can find and we put our lives at risk a hell of a lot more than motorists do making the same trip - our chalk outlines are on the streets at a much greater proportion than our numbers riding on them.

Cyclist on El Camino Real in Santa Clara, not far from The Off Ramp bike shop. Cars have three travel lanes and cyclists just get whatever's left over.

That's us sharing the road. Our lives are at risk more and as long as whoever hits and maims or kills us stays at the scene and cooperates with the police, that driver will get to drive off into the sunset the next day without any punishment whatsoever. 

You sharing the road - and I'm talking only to motorists right now - means you have 3,000 pound boxes of climate-controlled air surrounding you as you travel in cushy comfort. A low-speed impact for you sends you to Maaco. The same impact at the same speed will send me to the hospital or morgue.

I've had it with people saying "why wasn't the cyclist wearing brighter clothing?" or things of that nature. If you are driving at 40 miles an hour and see a cyclist from a distance of 70 feet, the cyclist is hit no matter what they are wearing.

You get to travel at higher speeds with less effort than me. You get mass and the benefit of appearing menacing. You get a loud horn. I get a bell. 

You get to deduct every mile you drive for work or for your business. A cyclist does not.

If there is a serious accident between us, you get to tell your side of the story to the police. I get to lie in a pool of my own blood clinging to consciousness. 

The aftermath of a crash for you is only as serious as your conscience. I, on the other hand, may spend years relearning how to tie my own shoes or staving off an addiction to painkillers.

Sharing the road means neither of us get what we want. So I need you, the motorist, to respect the power you have and ease off the gas pedal. Look around. Drive slower. Stay off your phone and refrain from smoking marijuana in your car (an infraction I've seen twice in the past year).

Sharing the road also means some changes need to be made to the roads themselves so people aren't punished for not driving a car. Some of this involves building more housing near transit. Some of this means protected bikeways, and the city of San Jose has installed several miles of it recently - Mayor Sam Liccardo has been a champion of these.

Unfortunately, changes made to streets so cyclists will be less certain to face death aren't always taken well. A bewildering article about this was on KPIX 5 San Francisco: San Jose's 10 miles of protected lanes involved moving the on-street parking spaces several feet from the curb and the protected bike lane would go in. 

Protected bike lane in downtown San Jose

This arrangement allows cyclists to travel on blocks with less fear of being hit and killed and doesn't cost drivers any parking spots since they are just moved a few feet further from the curb. But a few of the motorists interviewed for the KPIX 5 piece said they do not like having to open their car doors with traffic being there. 

If these drivers would pause for just a moment and think about what they are saying: I don't want to be at risk being hit by a motor vehicle. Even though it is the last twenty feet of their 3 mile car trip or a stop at Starbucks to buy a Frappuccino with whipped cream. But reporters are notorious for creating a false equivalency about things - and one of these things is the concept of sharing the road. 10 miles of protected bike lane is all about the safe motorists inconvenienced - not people feeling more comfortable to ride a bike to work. Protected bikeways and bike lanes are necessary infrastructure and should be covered in the news fairly.

But as I've said before, infrastructure is only half of what a city needs. The other half is acceptance. This was part of why I was hard on Mayor Liccardo a few weeks ago (and also mocked him in the parody I wrote where the city banned cars instead of scooters) when complaining about the speed governor on shared scooters. In an empty warehouse or parking lot, a slower speed will make the scooter safer - what vehicle couldn't that be said about? -  but the mayor and the city council didn't think about the relationship scooters have with the infrastructure, and their unfortunate decision to keep the cap in place makes scooters not accepted on the sidewalks and not accepted on the roads - a stance which is breaking micromobility.

If people accept people ride bikes (and yes, scooters) for work or for fun, they'll look out for them more. If drivers are trained to look out for bicyclists again and again they'll do it. And if they drive slower, they'll be able to react to the slower-moving bicyclist faster.

A good number of strip malls in San Jose do not have bike racks but they have jammed up parking lots. The two are related.

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition - based just a few blocks from San Jose City Hall - put together a virtual 'get well' card of sorts for the Mayor. Please send Mayor Sam Liccardo good thoughts - we need him to return to work and look at biking in San Jose with new eyes and hopefully keep making sure the city gives even more infrastructure and acceptance to cyclists. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

*Hopefully the electric vehicle tax incentives will go away soon. 

How Stamford and Honolulu Are Making Streets Less Safe

Intersection of Hoyt & Summer Stree in Stamford - Summer 2014. A pedestrian in the crosswalk was killed there shortly before I took this photo.

Motorists in Honolulu - and, sadly, in the city of Stamford - are being given a new tool in their utility belt of Blame Assignment.  

I'm talking about banning the use of cell phones while walking. "Distracted texting" or "distracted walking" as it is sometimes called. We've all probably seen the footage of a distracted pedestrian or two walking into an open manhole or the like and there are cases of a person distracted by a phone and walking into the path of a car - but the practice of banning the use of a cell phone while walking is not the way to make streets safer.

In fact, if I wanted to kill as many pedestrians or cyclists with motor vehicles as possible I'd push for such a law, and push hard.

From Summer 2014. Is the intersection any safer?

Here's why: the balance of power on the street is in the favor of cars to begin with. If I'm walking or biking and a car hits me at 40 miles an hour, chances are excellent I am going to the morgue. The driver - as long as he or she is "remaining at the scene and cooperating" - is going to Maaco. 

Power is also in the hands of the motorist because of the implicit bias in way too many news articles about cars hitting pedestrians. A few years ago, in an article for the Stamford Patch, I pointed out that almost every piece about a car hitting a pedestrian talked about whether or not the person struck was in a crosswalk - and that people want the answer to that question to assign blame to the pedestrian. 

Very, very soon, "Was he/she holding a cell phone?" will augment the old "Was he/she in the crosswalk?" question. Just another way to shift blame away from the motorist and toward the pedestrian. 

Here's my prediction: Streets in Stamford and Honolulu will not see fewer pedestrian deaths. They'll see more because it'll be all the easier for a driver to face little if any repercussions from striking someone. 

Do I think pedestrians and cyclists should take more ownership over their safety - following the rules of the road and looking both ways? Of course I do. But when I put one foot on the street to cross and the approaching driver is going too fast to stop that is a problem with the speed of the motorist - not whether or not I am holding a cell phone in my hand.

That is yet another important thing to remember: even if you follow the ordinance and cross with the phone in your hand - at your side and away from your eyes - that isn't going to matter if you are hit. The driver will be conscious and will be able to give his or her statement to the police that you were holding a cell phone which will be found at the scene. Because you - the unconscious, bleeding pedestrian - can't give your statement to the police that you weren't using the phone, the deck is stacked against you once again. 

It's also a bit unnerving to see a city in Connecticut essentially create an ordinance that chips away at a state law that says drivers must yield to pedestrians who are at a crosswalk. The no-cell-phones-while-walking-rule essentially turns that around. This is motorists - many of whom are also using their phones - saying: you stop what you are doing and you yield to us. 

If you agree and live in Stamford, politely call or email Stamford's Board of Representatives - especially John Zelinsky, an architect of this ordinance - and tell them not to enact this. Do not be rude in any way or use swear words. I am not kidding.  

I know I live in San Jose now, but I miss Stamford. I miss Lorca. I miss Rippowam Labs. I miss Exhale. I miss the art scene and I really want to go to Danger Gallery. I miss free plastic grocery bags. I miss being in the same time zone as 98% of my family. I miss living close to Indian, Greek and Mexican restaurants that deliver. I miss rappelling Santa.*

What I don't miss is the 1970s-style pro-car bias that clings to some people like a disease in the Constitution State. Every road user matters and I have zero interest in telling someone that their much-loved wife, husband, sister, brother, dad, mom or friend isn't coming home because, well, we want drivers to get to where they are going one light faster. 

The aftermath of a bike crashing into a car never, ever looks like this.

By the way, Stamford: I know there is a mayor's race coming up - and friends who still live there know it too. If you are running for mayor (or, running for re-election) I have four words: please check your inbox. Cycling with Candidates is returning. More on this in a few days. 

Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

*In Stamford, that is A Thing - and it is a wonderful Thing. Check out the Stamford Advocate coverage. 

New Video: Don't Park in the Bike Lane

This happens way too often in way too many cities. 

I haven't created a compilation of offenders but I have created an ideal world: where people who park in the bike lane are swiftly punished and where the community comes together to bring the punishment. 

Oh: and a 1973 Lincoln can be dismantled by half a dozen cyclists in 30 seconds. 

Thanks for watching, thanks for sharing, and thanks for riding. 

Biking Nations: Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan

Four weeks ago I was able to put wheels down in a new nation and make Japan the 15th country I’ve ridden a bicycle in. 

A small side note: even though this post is mostly about Tokyo I actually began the ride in Kyoto after I found myself there (thanks to the beautiful, why-don’t-we-have-these-in-the-U.S.? Shinkansen - the bullet train) with a few hours free - plenty of time to take the Bike Friday out of the case, set it up, and hit the road.

Kyoto is a beautiful city. And there was something I loved about it that I couldn’t put my finger on until later: I wasn’t The Only there. Japan was the 15th country I had ridden a bicycle in and in other countries I often felt like The Only. But in Kyoto, I wasn’t The Only cyclist:

* on a folding bike

* riding for fun

* wearing a helmet

* wearing ordinary clothes or Lycra shorts bought on clearance

And the rule of The Only applies to the cyclists you run into as well. In the U.S. you might find a random woman with a child on the back of her bike, but in Kyoto (and later, Tokyo) you’d often see two or three in a row - often carrying two kids.

There’s just something truly welcoming about a cycling culture that has such a wonderful mix of people and equipment riding around. Bike equivalents of minivans and sports cars were everywhere. And I also noticed another truism: the more a business loves cyclists, the more cyclists love that business back. A lot of places had tiny parking lots just for bicycles right in front.

Another one I adored was at the Kyoto Zoo - spotted after closing hours. Made me think how much I want parking minimums for cars to go away in the U.S.

While I was marveling at the bike parking lots I realized nearly all of Japan’s cyclists had something I didn’t: a kickstand. Yes, the much mocked appendage of the American cycling world was actually in high demand in Japan. Most of the time I wanted to shop somewhere, I’d flip the bike over like I was changing a tire and lock it to itself. 

This may look odd to my U.S. cycling friends. But that is how it is done as bike theft is apparently rare. To show you how rare here is a photo of a lock display at a bike shop. Unlike shops such as, for instance, NYCeWheels in Manhattan, you don't need a spotter to get any of these off the shelf. 

I also love checking out the different cycling signage when I visit a new country. For instance, I just loved the sharrow symbol in Kyoto. The bicycle has a basket! I even said it out loud as I was biking by. They actually want and expect cyclists to ride around the city and participate in commerce! Japan: I want that stencil.

One thing I had to do was buy a bike bell since I read somewhere that all bikes in Tokyo require one. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money and in a bargain bin at a R’s Cycle bike shop, Japan delivered as only Japan can. 

I was only in Kyoto for about a day and a half. Far too little time to spend in a city where they shot the bamboo grove scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

The lovely ride in Kyoto was good practice before I unpacked the bike again in Tokyo. It was also going to be very humid and raining every day (or parts of every day) during my time in Tokyo and I was glad I didn’t have to get used to riding on the left before I checked in to the beautiful Keio Plaza Hotel to unpack my bike once again. 

Three days I pushed the bike in and out of the hotel and only got smiles from the staff - the way it should be. In addition to having a Hello Kitty room (that I did not stay in) they also have a fantastic convenience store on the ground floor and in-room coffee.

This style coffee maker - which I had never seen before - is actually very common in Japan: tear open the pouch, pull apart the little paper arms, rip the perforation, set it on the cup and pour hot water in. This is the coffee from Kieo Plaza Hotel. The artwork is mine. But I’m getting off the subject.

Tokyo is not like Kyoto. It’s yet another city on this planet that is choking itself to death with cars and isn’t realizing it. The traffic lives up to the legend. 

I don’t know if the rain or the added stress of riding on the left was affecting me but I found Tokyo to be a confounding city. Roads twist, turn and go under and around each other. And when it appears a road is closed to bikes the shared sidewalk doesn’t always follow the same route the cars go. Even though I had one of those pocket wi-fi things that you rent at the airport that gave my iPhone access to maps, I still managed to get lost several times. 

I also noticed something I didn’t care for: the sharrow symbol - when you could find one in Tokyo - looks like this:

Obviously, it is a lot narrower than the one in Kyoto but my other beef was that if the stencil was any further than the left it would be on the sidewalk. 

And that, as it turned out, was directly related to the other different thing about Tokyo compared to most other places I’ve ridden: the shared sidewalk culture: bikes are invited and encouraged to ride…there.

My first day was riding aimlessly around Tokyo to figure out how the city breathed. It reminded me a lot like New York but it was a lot harder because of the whole ‘riding on the left’ bit. Years ago, in London, I found that when making a turn on a bike share bike I’d absently drift over to the right side of the road only to be in the path of a Reliant Robin or something. So I made it a habit of always bringing my own helmet with me when traveling and moving my helmet mounted rearview mirror from my left side to my right as a visual cue to pedal on the left. 

Still, my American brain, shaped by pedaling on the right for decades, would instinctively look for dangers that weren’t there and I had to second-guess every ordinary move I’d make (like looking over to where a nearby motorist would be but seeing an empty seat, a baby or small dog because all cars are right-hand drive) It was like patting your stomach, rubbing your head, and doing your taxes while reciting the Greek alphabet. 

But still a lot of fun - especially when I’d notice people who looked like they were commuting to work or going to on a formal dinner date. Yes, America: you can ride in your normal clothes and shoes.

I soon discovered that like many other cities I’ve ridden in: the faster you ride, the less stressful it is. I did end up having to visit another bike shop for a rather peculiar reason: thanks to the wind noise the little pink, smiley propeller made on my new bike bell I bought in Kyoto, I missed the rattling sound that came from the Bike Friday’s stem in Tokyo: the nut that held it in place fell off and was lost forever. I found Flame Bike - a helpful little shop - and replaced the missing nut. 

I decided to get out of the city on my last day. Drenched by the rain biking through the traffic-choked streets of downtown Tokyo (and not willing to join the masses that ride bicycles while holding an umbrella) I decided to pedal west towards Tama Lake - hopefully along a bike path I read about on TokyoByBike.com. 

But before I made it that far, I was already thankful for choosing to leave the middle of Tokyo: with fewer cars on the roads and not as many stoplights, I was able to open up the throttle.

In keeping with Biking Nations tradition, I didn’t have a plan for lunch. Lucky for me I didn’t have to subsist on popsicles like I did when riding in Delhi and Gurgaon because I found a noodle place. Signage featuring pigs on a tandem (w/ the last stoker eating noodles) got my attention. 

Inside, I waited for my order and drank water while Meghan Trainor’s No and other fine U.S. exports played on the restaurant sound system. Thanks to the wi-fi device, I went over the map on my phone: just 7.1 km to go to get to the lake. And I was going to get properly fueled. 

As usual: when you don’t speak the language you can rely on the international language of money and pointing, and that language didn’t fail me. I ate well. I also drank well: even though I had a Camelback I discovered, completely by accident, Pocari Sweat which is a well known sports drink there. At one of the numerous vending machines all over Tokyo, I put in some Yen and chose what I thought was water but it was a product called Pocari Sweat. 

Discovering it was good, I ended up buying a bottle almost every time I stopped. 

Pocari Sweat: Bought By Accident. Awesome on Purpose (Fly me back there and I’ll film a commercial like Bill Murray did in Lost in Translation). 

My satisfaction at the restaurant wasn’t even dented when I discovered the rear tire of the Bike Friday had gone flat. I found shady spot nearby and changed it out (while humming No) before pressing on - and reasoning I should replace the aging tire before my next trip. 

Completely by accident, I ended up finding the bike path.

This is a beautiful path and, as advertised, it led me to Tama Lake. I don’t know very much about it but the silence of being there was the perfect counter to the noise of downtown Tokyo I had experienced the day before. 

After resting, taking photos and just enjoying the moment I left Tama Lake and followed the bike path to Rt. 5, which I followed most of the way back. I stopped at a bike shop I neglected to photograph to check it out and buy a tube and noticed a lot of clouds coming in. My streak of riding in the rain was about to come to an end - but I was still having more fun and moving faster than these people. 

Pretty soon I heard something I hadn’t heard in well over a year: thunder. Cyclists on both the sidewalk and the road began to ride a lot faster, and I did the same. I did get a few sprinkles on me but managed to get back to the Keio Plaza Hotel around 3:00pm with about 41 miles on the odometer. Minutes after I got the bike to my room, the sky opened up (the rain was so bad it caused local flooding that made the evening news)…and my rear tire had gone flat once again. Since I wasn’t planning to ride the next day anyway and the tires have to be deflated before going on the plane I decided not to fix it until I returned to San Jose. 

The next day I got to visit the Mori Art Museum and head up to the top floor so I could have a good look at the city I had spent a few days biking in.

It wasn’t until I looked almost straight down that I realized what was amiss: there was a lot of car traffic - a lot. And try as it might Tokyo can’t clever its way out of it - it actually needs to change the infrastructure to give more to cyclists and less to motorists. 

And it brings me back to the shared sidewalk thing: by putting cyclists and pedestrians together in the same space, they have to negotiate with one another to get around while cars get more of the streets for themselves - and I was in Japan before Pokemon Go was released. Meanwhile, on the streets, it seems ‘share the road’ means electronically retracting the rearview mirror of your Honda Fit as you blast by a cyclist and have it slowly slide back as you accelerate away.*

This philosophy isn’t just flawed, its deadly. More cyclists die per capita in Japan than in the U.S. So if there are any urban planners in Japan who are reading this: your high-speed trains are beautiful enough to make me weep. Your space shuttle-complicated toilets are sublime. And your umbrella management systems are thrilling. 

So I’m sure you can handle road diets and just use your collective brilliance to redesign your streets in such a way that people will use their cars less, use their bikes more, and get more people to where they want to go faster and alive. Thanks for everything, Kyoto and Tokyo (especially the little pancake sandwiches sold in convenience stores that have butter and syrup in the middle. Nitrous oxide for my legs, they are). And to all: thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

* That actually happened on the ride back from Tama Lake.

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?

DIYBIKING.COM Reviews the Blaze LaserLight

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be in London, where I visited Blaze to check out their signature product: the LaserLight. Other than holding the light in my hands and seeing how good the image looks on carpets on cubicle walls, I didn’t get to spend much time with it. 

But now I finally have one so I’ll be able to give you a more thorough review (Full disclosure: I write a regular series of cycling articles for Blaze's Blog but my initial impressions of the LaserLight were written long before this relationship began - and I am not being paid to write this post). 

While I’m now in the position to write about the LaserLight in a non-abstract way, I can confirm that my initial impressions were correct: it’s a sweet light. 

The design of this thing wasn’t phoned in: it has heft due to its construction (Blaze has geekalicious video clips of how it's made on their site) but it just made me confident it would be hard to break. The light comes with a special, bright green charging cable with magnets that attach to the charging area on the top of the light. It’s made that way to help it stay water resistant. The only downside is if you lose or damage the hard-to-lose bright green cable you have to order a replacement. Also, since the magnets don’t click into a recessed space on the light (like a MacBook does) the cable can get bumped out of place if you charge it on a cluttered workbench.

The bracket that attaches the LaserLight to your handlebar exudes confidence - especially when you measure it against lesser brackets (an extra Blaze bracket can also be ordered separately if you have multiple bikes).

When it is on the handlebars it doesn’t feel like it will ever come off - and that’s important.  A quick rummage of the 304 reminded me that I’ve found quite a few bike lights in the road.

From left to right: a taillight I found in Darien, Connecticut, another I found in Redwood City, California and a bike headlight - that looks like E.T.’s severed head - I found in Strasbourg, France. I use the latter two frequently. I also have a functional taillight I found in New Canaan years ago I still use on my Bike Friday. 

That’s why the bracket is an unsung innovation: your bike light won’t work effectively if it falls off your bike. 

Once you have the bracket in place on your handlebars, Blaze recommends you position your light so the laser image appears “five or six meters” from the bike. Unlike Blaze, I am not going to make my American audience Google ‘meters to feet’ so instead I’ll use the unit of measure “about 1.5 times the length of a Fiat 500.”

As cool as the bike light is, we have to remember it - and a lot of bike lights for that matter - aren’t made for the cyclist. They’re made for the people the cyclist comes into contact with on the road. Many of these people are rushed, clumsy, angry, tired, distracted, have dirty headlamps, haven’t replaced their windshield wipers since Nixon was in office, and drive vehicles that can kill us. 

To illustrate that point I put my LaserLight on a clamp attached to one of my speaker stands - tied with my City Bike and my hospital room table as the best $5 I’ve ever spent at a tag sale - and set it at the same height as my handlebars. 

Mindful of the time I was shooed away by the Stamford police when trying to test bike lights in real world conditions, I wanted to be quick when I hustled out onto a street in San Jose. 

I first set the stand about five feet behind my parallel-parked car, turned on just the LED light, and got behind the wheel so I could look in the rearview mirror. 

Now that isn’t too bad but imagine what it would look like on a busy street with a lot more lights. And admit it: when you un-parallel park, you give the mirror a fleeting glance before you look out the windshield and drive off. 

But that’s where center-stage feature of the LaserLight comes in: when it is on, this is what the driver will see out the windshield - and that’s if it doesn’t catch their eye as it zips by the side window. 

The Blaze LaserLight doesn’t send a message to drivers that they own the road and we don’t. It sends a message to that one driver who will ease off the gas or pause an extra few seconds before turning when they see it.  And that’s important to remember: there are a over a billion motor vehicles zipping around out there. You can only be killed by one of them and, to paraphrase Nathan Fillion’s character from the cancelled-too-soon Firefly: “the trick is to die of old age before it finds you.”  

This bike light - when used in conjunction with responsible riding -  raises the odds you’ll die of old age. Not only that, but because it is such a conversation piece (sometimes, with motorists who roll down their window to speak with you at red lights) it raises the profile of cycling. When I’m passing several pedestrians and hear one of them exclaim “Look at that bike light!” I think that maybe, just maybe, a conversation about driving less and biking more takes place long after I’ve pedaled out of earshot. Visit Blaze.cc or ask your local bike shop to buy one. It's north of $125 most places - but I've met the people who designed the thing: they're worth it and so is the light. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.