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

Technorati Tags: pedestrian safety, urban design, walking

Tom Vanderbilt takes a 4-part look at walking in America in Slate:

Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the termpedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of “Everybody Walk!,” the “Campaign to Get America Walking” (one of a number of such initiatives). While its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy.

Technorati Tags: walking

I disagree with the narrator’s comments about driving this intersection on a bicycle. It does not require one to be “hardcore.” It requires one to understand traffic — a function of education. But until such education is accessed by more people, this will appear to be a difficult intersection to travel.

Technorati Tags: bicycle advocacy, bicycle education, cycling, pedestrian safety, traffic design, walking

How hard is it for a bicyclist to stop at a stop sign or red light?

Really. How hard?

Answer: Not hard at all. I know this because I 1) Ride a bicycle everyday in traffic, and 2) I stop at all stop signs and red lights.

Now I acknowledge that there may be a few, limited circumstances in which stopping is not appropriate or  not safe. I can’t think of any examples at the moment, but I’ll bet a few Carbon Trace readers can.

That said, for the most part (and with the acknowledgement above), I believe failure to yield to proper traffic controls — e.g. stop signs and traffic lights — is a failure of morals. It is a declaration that the person failing to stop is simply too damned important to be inconvenienced by such trifles. (Note: I do not accept the typical excuse that it is somehow difficult to stop in terms of cycling efficiency. That’s just a silly excuse to run stop signs springing from the hegemony of sport cycling in our culture.)

Do you protest?

Let’s just ask Dionette Cherney what she thinks about the need for bicyclists to follow traffic laws.

Oh, wait. We can’t ask her because she just died because a bicyclist ran a red light and hit her causing a head injury.

Even if there were no laws governing traffic, even if there were no orders of right-of-way, bulling ahead without regard for the safety of others would still be wrong.

Technorati Tags: bicycle safety, cycling, traffic law, walking