I’m in the Philadelphia area for vacation. Tonight I went into the city to take my kid to a free concert at The Piazza at Schmidt’s – a new urbanist project in the inner city of Philly. The original urban plan for Philadelphia featured a dense grid pattern and fairly narrow streets. The results of this are still readily apparent. My route to the plaza took me up 5th Street — two narrow lanes running one way north with parking on both sides. It’s really quite a squeeze to those of us used to driving (cars and bicycles) in the Midwest. (Full disclosure: I grew up here, so I knew what to expect street-wise.)
Further, the speed limit along 5th Street is 25 mph. I saw many bicyclists on this street and others in the area. Guess where they were riding.
Now, if it were me, I’d be right in the middle of the right-hand lane. With a 25 mph speed limit and two lanes going one way, there’s no reason to be riding anywhere else. Add this fact: So much traffic that no one — no matter what they are driving — is actually going as fast as 25 mph. More like 20 mph at best.
Every bicyclist I saw — seven or more on this one street — was riding inches from parked cars on the extreme right. There were outside lane stripes creating a parking shoulder on both sides. Everyone of these bicyclists was on or inside the shoulder stripe so close to parked cars that they had zero margin for error.
And the car drivers? Well, they just passed them with inches to spare because, well, the bicyclists were outside the lane and inviting them to pass with inches to spare.
I was totally freaked out.
To the bicyclists of Philly: Please please please please take the lane. I do not want to be the one who runs you over when a door pops open and you react by darting left.
I slowed way down and waited to change lanes before passing all of them.
Really. This was scary.
Oh, and that’s not all. I saw several bicyclists pass lines of cars stopped at lights with only inches to spare between car doors on the left and right. And they ran the lights once they got to the intersections.
OMG!!!
I was glad to get out of there.
Want to die on a bicycle? Ride like these folks in Philly. It’ll happen soon enough.
Comments 10
Andy, in truth, this instead illustrates just how safe cycling really is – that people can routinely ride in such a way and there is no carnage. I’m not a fan of portrayals of even bad cycling as death defying because it is simply not true. Even if you ride against traffic in the dark without legal lighting and you run stop lights, your chances are pretty good. With only token intelligence, your main danger while cycling in traffic is due to UV and the heat. And there’s the rub. Cyclists do dumb stuff and it seems to work for them. As a result, they do not feel a need to learn best practices.
Posted 07 Aug 2011 at 5:35 am ¶Steve… Thus the wonder of POV. Do you understand how I can completely agree with you and still feel freaked out by these cyclists as a car driver?
Posted 07 Aug 2011 at 8:42 am ¶Seems ironic that Philly cyclist follow in “far-to-right” (FTR) position when PA law has no restriction.
Even if there is local, city FTR law, it likely would be superseded by State law.
Riding in a “door zone” must be a cultural thing? What do you think?
Posted 07 Aug 2011 at 12:28 pm ¶Danc… Well, Steve could also have correctly pointed out that I may be over-generalizing based on limited data. But, yes, culture.
Posted 07 Aug 2011 at 7:45 pm ¶“Even if you ride against traffic in the dark without legal lighting and you run stop lights, your chances are pretty good. ”
I remember reading somewhere (the cyclist’s manifesto maybe?) that a really disproportionate amount of cycling fatalities were people riding the wrong way at night.
But yeah, that these folks could do exactly the thing that will get you killed and not get killed shows that cycling is safe.
Posted 07 Aug 2011 at 11:43 pm ¶Michael… re: safe Yes and no (given the example). It also may be that cycling is safe under these circumstances because car drivers make it so, i.e. the cyclist’s own behavior is alarming and dangerous, but good car drivers mitigate the danger. Consider that as a hypothesis.
My conclusion from this would be: These bicyclists are “safe” because of the good behavior of other road users; they would be far safer (i.e. even lower chance of injury/death) if they drove their bicycles in a way known to mitigate danger.
Leads to the question: Which is safest: Taking responsibility for one’s own safety or leaving your safety up to the behavior of others?
Posted 08 Aug 2011 at 5:53 am ¶Having experienced something quite similar recently, I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days. I live in a Southern college town (not too different from yours), but I spent most of the summer in Cambridge/Boston, Mass. (not too different from Philly). I know exactly what you’re talking about. It seems to me, though, that there are two different issues here:
1) Blatantly illegal cycling. That is, running red lights, salmoning, passing (other bikers) on the right, failure to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, etc. Everybody knows it’s against the road rules, but people think they’ll never be ticketed, and they’re probably right about that. I found that very, very few cyclists in Cambridge actually waited for the light to change. The police can fix this stuff pretty easily by handing out some tickets, and I think it’s definitely time that they started. In big cities where biking is really taking off, it’s time to institute some law and order.
2) Riding in the door zone. Unlike the blatantly illegal stuff — where everyone knows it’s wrong, but thinks he can get away with it — this is a case where people generally think they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The cops, unfortunately, often agree. Like you say, it’s culture, and I’m not sure it can be changed. I definitely got more abuse for taking the lane in Boston than I ever do here in NC — and while that may have something to do with the generally abusive tone of driving in Boston, I think it does say something about what people consider culturally acceptable. And, frankly, taking the lane in Boston means that you go just as slow as the cars, which pretty much negates the reason for biking in the first place. So I’m not sure I’d advocate riding there the same way I ride in Greenville, or you ride in Columbia. What makes more sense to me would be 1) a painted buffer to try to discourage the worst door-zone riding, and 2) enforcement of speeding/reckless biking. I think it’s possible to ride fairly safely to the right of the car traffic, with parked cars to the right, but it’s not easy and it shouldn’t be done at very high speeds. Even if you take it easy (around 10 mph), you’re still going way faster than the cars, most of the time; the tighter the squeeze, the slower you need to go. I do think that taking the lane is very important in suburban environments, but in a dense city I’m not sure it makes sense.
Posted 09 Aug 2011 at 9:28 am ¶I think sometimes we confuse “less safe” with actual risk probability. Face it, even unsafe cyclists get away with risk taking most of the time just as motorists almost always get away with speeding without consequences. For at least two reasons. One, that other people make allowances, such as taking evasive action to avoid a salmon-swimming cyclist, or avoiding an unlit night rider. Secondly, that as with most complex accidents, even if a cyclist (or motorist) screws up, he has to have the timing exactly correct to have a crash. Think of it this way–on many of our roads, the actual average speed exceeds the posted speed. But crashes are very rare compared to vehicle miles per day.
Since in most cases, cyclists don’t crash after doing something dumb, there is not an impetus to improve. The status quo works, even if the cyclist is occasionally honked at or sworn at. By contrast, I suspect if cycling stupidly was more akin to walking behind the targets at your friendly pistol range when the line was shooting, or riding off a mesa cliff while distracted, cyclists would be a little more careful.
As a kid, I was one of the “trap boys” at my dad’s gun club until I got my own shotgun and started competing. One did not poke one’s head out of the clay pigeon bunker (thick concrete) without putting up the red flag first and waiting for the rangemaster to call the line to cease fire. That was a protocol one took very seriously. It was pretty obvious what was happening to those clay pigeons…
Posted 09 Aug 2011 at 11:08 am ¶I have lived in the Boston area for 40 years now, and I have ridden in keeping with my rights and responsibilities as a driver since 1977, when I picked up a copy of John Forester’s book Effective Cycling at the Bicycle Exchange store in Harvard Square, Cambridge.
I claim the lane when it is appropriate. I do have to slow down sometimes when traffic is congested. That’s life in the big city. I do sometimes filter forward past the congestion, but only at 5 mph, and carefully avoiding the right-hook and left-cross risk. How I do this is described in my booklet Bicycling Street Smarts, chapter 9 (I don’t know whether I can insert a hyperlink here, so just do a Web search for it).
I find that I have very little problem with motorist harassment. This has to do with being predictable, and beyond that, making my intentions clear.
Most of Cambridge’s bike lanes are in the door zone, as you describe, and are useful to me in only one way: to make filtering forward possible more often. The bicycle sidewalks which Cambridge has now turned to installing are less than useless for me; you may do a Web search on “Concord Avenue dream and nightmare” — about a street which used to have *good* bike lanes — and see why I say that.
The basic problem of which the blog poster complains has to do with the large student population in the Boston area — most icyclists are young and inexperienced with riding in urban traffic; with the lack of cycling education — the colleges and universities fall through on this — and with a faulty understanding of risks. Been there, done that, from 1971 through 1977 when I picked up Forester’s book.
It’s sort of ironic that Boston was repeatedly described as the worst city in the US for cycling. With its rather slow streets, large variety of routes between most destinations and compact layout, Boston is better for cycling than any other US city of comparable or larger size, in my experience — as long as you have the necessary skills and knowledge. Not so good for children or for novices, but it works for lots of regular commuters.
I offer a very mixed report on Boston as its city government now at last discovers bicycling. Some of what is being done is good and useful but much isn’t.
Posted 09 Aug 2011 at 4:46 pm ¶Hi, John. Links work here, at least when I’ve used them.
For others. Street Smarts is here:
http://www.bikexprt.com/streetsmarts/usa/index.htm
Concord Ave Dream and Nightmare
http://john-s-allen.com/blog/?p=859
Posted 09 Aug 2011 at 9:07 pm ¶