Walking home yesterday — all of 3/4 mile — I saw five separate incidents of people being silly on the streets. Upon seeing the first one, I thought: Oh, good blog post! Then the silliness just kept coming to the point where I thought: Oh, different blog post! And the silliness continued this morning — the last incident being a guy who tried to squeeze me at a stop sign and then ran the sign.

So here’s my upshot: Cars and bicycles, as media that allow us to write and interpret a text called the street, are separated by massive differences but share at least one uncomfortable trait: both moving machines encourage humans to understand convenience as a primary value of writing the text of the street. Within this similarity in an important difference — perhaps only of scale.

Author Robert Pirsig once wrote that riding in a car was “just more TV” because one experiences the world through a screen. Indeed, one is separated from the world by the screen in a way similar to the separation TV creates. This situation encourages people to understand other street users as objects.

The bicycle has no screen. One of its greatest strengths as a mode of transportation, however, is also a problem: Bicycles are fun to ride and encourage us to move, and keep moving, based on the sheer joy of ease of movement and maneuverability. How can this be bad? Well, just hang out for a few minutes at the 4-way stop at Hammons and Cherry. (There are actually people who argue that stopping at stop signs is difficult because — and this is just a head-scratcher  – getting moving again is somehow inefficient and difficult.)

Both sources of bad behavior are equally self-righteous, and, therefore, utterly galling.

Among the silly incidents I saw yesterday was the near collision of a bicycle and a car at National and Grand in which both parties were displaying, in the particular ways of their given media, a self-righteous disregard for other road users.

We have a cultural problem on our streets that finds its expression in the media of bicycles and cars: lack of courtesy, civility, care — take your pick. To the extent that these qualities are lacking in the driver (of any vehicle and for whatever reason) is the extent that our streets are sites of fear and danger instead of a commons where we all benefit from our collective investment.

Now you’re ready to listen to my recent interview on KSMU. I used my grumpy voice.

Technorati Tags: bicycle advocacy, bicycle culture, bicycle safety, car culture, crazy drivers, cycling, pedestrian safety, traffic law, transportation, walking

Keep your hand up if your computer has ever glitched while in use, i.e. lost its internet signal or crashed or done some other annoying thing that basically ended its functionality if even for a few seconds. Ahhhh … all of you

Now imagine a computer driving a car.

Yes, that idea is absolutely insane.

Now, as a technical and scientific curiosity aimed at learning more about what we can get computers to do, I’m all for messing around with the driverless car. Looks like great fun!

But, in practical application, what happens if the car loses its GPS signal for even a moment? What happens if the computer hits a glitch even for a moment?

Disaster.

Disaster is what happens.

Disaster is what the State of Nevada is asking for in passing regulations to pave the way for driverless cars.

People will pay with their lives for this stupid mistake.

But … we already pay with our lives for a human-controlled system — upwards of 40,000 deaths per year (up with which we would not put if these lives were lost to airplane crashes or terrorist attacks). So, really, what’s a few more deaths to advance fossil-fueled technology?

Technorati Tags: car culture, traffic, traffic law, Transportation Planning

I’ve rented three cars in 2011 — to go to Florida for a winter vacation, to go to St. Louis on a class field trip (I’m working on a certificate in urban planning at MSU), and to go to this conference.

On the previous two rentals I noticed that the rental agents were amusingly nosy — asking personal questions about such things as where I’m going, who I’m going with, what I do for a living. But this week the agent, a young guy, was so ham-handed about it that it got me wondering — is this a homeland security thing?

This utterly tactless person asked me straight up (paraphrased):

1. Where are you going?
2. What’s the purpose of the trip?
3. How long will you be?
4. Who’s going with you?
5. What do you do for a living?
6. Is the trip business or pleasure?
7. Will I get time off from work for the extra time?
8. Where do you work?
9. What do you teach?

I gave him amusingly evasive answers Ain’t none of his business what I’m doing with that car as long as I bring it back in good shape and manage not to violate the contracted rules.

I say utterly tactless because he was trying to disguise his (corporate?) nosiness by being conversational. But that skill was beyond him — perhaps stunted by too many hours playing Halo.

So what gives? Is this SOP in the age of homeland security? Are car rental agents just bored silly? Do the rental companies need this information for some reason?

Technorati Tags: car culture

Imagine me doing the superior dance and chanting:

It’s working, it’s working, all this stuff we’re doing is working!

The second thing I saw was easy to catch:

Uh… WTH?

The young lady driving this thing apparently felt entitled to park on the corral to make her dash into the Mudhouse for coffee a bit more convenient. Never mind that a motorcyclist might have come by looking for a place to park (and they have been parking there!).

This sense of entitlement isn’t just a car-driven phenomenon. It’s pervasive in our culture. Makes one wish that the golden rule held more sway.

Technorati Tags: bicycle culture, car culture, crazy drivers, cycling

1. As I approached the 4-way stop at Walnut and South this morning, a cyclist passed me on the right and proceeded through the stop. I was positioned in the center of a narrow lane with parked cars along the road. The bicyclist is a guy I’ve seen before. From his style of dress and the kind of bicycle he rides, I have him pegged as a professor or some other (casual) professional.

2. Later in the day, again on Walnut, I was heading west and stopped to make a left onto Jefferson (two lanes, one-way south). Two roadies in full costume on expensive bicycles had passed me moments before. They were also going left. They stopped at the light just long enough for traffic to clear, then proceeded — which, as I understand it, is legally like a right turn on red. A little ways down Jefferson, however, these two pulled into Wilhoit Plaza and proceeded to ride along the walk in front of the shops — clearly illegal in Springfield.

3. On my way back home from the grocery this evening, riding with my daughter, we came to a stop sign at Cherry — a busy collector street — and were passed by a hipster on a fixie. I say “hipster” because he wore one of those cute little old-time cycling hats with the turned up brim. He made a left, passing us on the left — as a road salmon — and into oncoming traffic.

Why?

Allow me a modest proposal: Just as the automobile is a vehicle that seems to encourage a particular psychology in our culture, the bicycle is also a vehicle that encourages a particular psychology in our culture.

I’ve often cited the book Traffic (and added parenthetically that I think should be required reading for all humans). But I have rarely listed the full title, which continues: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).

One could write a such a book about bicyclists in traffic. Maybe this post will be a start in that direction.

Be that as it may, it occurs to me that just as cars and bicycles are modes of transportation they are also media, i.e. when we ride upon the street in the mode of bicycle we also write upon the street a text that is in large part influenced by the bicycle, and understood through the bicycle, as a particular kind of medium in our culture. If you’re thinking “Hey, that sounds like Marshall McLuhan,” then you’re right with me

A part of my modest proposal is the assumption that the bicyclists in the three scenes I experienced today were writing upon the street, with a particular medium, a message influenced by the medium itself and their cultural understandings of that medium and the way it conveys a message.

In this sense, it is a bit obtuse to simply suggest that they were doing something wrong.

It would make more sense, purely from a descriptive assumption, that I’m the one who is refusing to write the way I’m told by the culture and the medium.

(Never mind about the grammar of the language, i.e. the rules of traffic. Every great writer has charted his or her own path and, eventually, influenced usage. Further, usage is not sacrosanct, much to the sputtering consternation of language (traffic) nannies everywhere. Every generation writes its own rules and gives birth to concepts that speak for it. Languages grow and change, as they should. Deep structure cannot be open to negotiation unless one is willing to spin off into nonsense. But so many “rules” that purport to be essential to a successful text are no more than the fancies of a particular age.)

I am in the minority as a bicycle driver (i.e. one who follows the traffic rules as currently written with as little variation as possible) in part because I refuse to change my usage or fight the grammar. I am, therefore, standing somewhere outside the popular culture.

I am certainly not making an argument for ignoring traffic laws. I am, instead, trying to understand why so many bicyclists do ignore them. We (i.e. my discourse community) know it is safer to drive a bicycle — there’s really no debate there at all (unless one simply enjoys being absurd). I do not wish to assume that so many people are simply scofflaws. That seems wrong to me.

I am left, then, with these two thoughts:

1. The bicycle is a medium in our culture that encourages one to ignore the grammatical traffic fancies of our age as one writes upon the street.
2. Only two things seem to me to be the answer to “encouraging” people to write particular kinds of texts: 1) Re-education in the classic understanding of the grammar of traffic (a re-invigoration of a higher cultural expression and a search for its timeless and essential forms), and 2) traffic tickets.

Technorati Tags: bicycle culture, car culture, cycling, traffic law