Metal versus flesh

As a cyclist active in advocating for road safety and cycling infrastructure, I know very well the arguments for the inevitability of car use. Indeed, I personally have a somewhat sour perspective on the nature of these two arguments: our opponents seem to me to argue cycling is only possible when the weather is warmer than 22 degrees and cooler than twenty, for people who are younger than twenty-two and older than twenty-four, in the months before July and after June. I have certainly heard someone at a public meeting claim they could not ride a bicycle because they were over forty-five. As I recall, I was fifty at the time, and I still ride my bicycle at 67.

Beyond the excuses of age and weather, the other arguments against cyclists and cycling reflect the dark sides of our culture: the appeal to conformity, the association, now quickly fading, of the automobile with all things "cool" and masculine, or the risks of cycling, meaning, in too many cases, the prevalence of  violence on our roads, in the form of negligent or outright homicidal operation of motor vehicles.

A tide in the affairs of men...

By now, most people know a massive container ship, named The Dali, struck a pier or support of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, plunging eight road workers into the water. At this time, rescue efforts have failed to find six of these workers, and the authorities now presume assume they have died, either in the accident or in the cold water shortly after.

Most news reports to date have emphasized the absence of information, saying authorities do not know what caused the disaster. We do not know exactly what caused The Dali to lose power at the worst possible time, but we do have a general sense of  the sequence of events. The ship quite clearly suffered a major failure in the engine room. The crew dropped the anchor, which did not stop the ship. When the crew or pilots saw their vessel drifting into the bridge, they sent out a Mayday, which allowed the port authorities to stop traffic on the bridge; this certainly saved lives.

Reasons to Worry, Reasons Not To

 By Gage Skidmore
via Wikimedia Commons

Right after the election in which a minority of American voters put Donald Trump in the White House, I began to see online articles suggesting Mr. Trump and his supporters have a brilliant agenda for working the end of American democracy. Some articles I have read suggest Mr. Trump's intellectual incoherence actually has a brilliant covert purpose, and his operatives have a plan of such speed and subtlety that Americans standing up for tolerance and freedom can only hope to watch helplessly as Mr. Trump and his minions construct a fascist state.

I wish I knew these articles grossly overestimated Mr. Trump's native abilities.

Homeland Security photo

I wish even more that the best outcome of Mr. Trump's coming administration looked less chaotic and miserable. Donald Trump and his friends on the right wing of the Republican party may not have a brilliant plan. They still can, and probably will, inflict four years of absolute misery on the poor and dispossessed in the United States. We have already seen an appalling increase in bullying and harassment throughout the United States and even in other countries. The Republican Congress looks set to dismantle even the minimal social safety net in place in the United States. The next four years look set for more catering to the wealthy few at the expense of children going to school hungry. Unless the course of the incoming administration changes, the leadership they provide will reward the worst behaviour by police and public officials at every level.

At best, a man who has paraded his ignorance and prejudices will soon have the ability to give orders to the most powerful and destructive military on the planet. He will also control the world's most sophisticated surveillance apparatus. This frightens me. It frightens a great many people. It should.

How not to argue for the rights of cyclists

When cycling on streets and roads where motorists may have permission to operate their vehicles, cyclists have the right to decide our lane positions for ourselves. Human vision has a narrow acute range: the optimum resolution of our eyes covers just a few degrees. To cope with this limit, aviators train to scan the sky in small sections; without this training, surface motor vehicle operators focus on the road in front of the vehicle. Cyclists occupying the center of the lane have the best chance motorists will see and avoid us. Visibility plays a particularly critical role at intersections, and there cyclists riding to the side have the greatest chance of coming into conflict with motor vehicles.

There you have the safety case for cyclists riding in the center of the lane. It exists in tension with another safety imperative: separating traffic operating at different speeds, to avoid the need for sudden changes in speed and to minimize the consequences of an impact. Those two hazards: getting sideswiped by a driver passing too close and getting hit by a driver who sees us too late define the choices for cyclists. Taking all the risks and the known limits of drivers into account, it makes a lot of sense for cyclists to ride in the center of the lane when we don't have, at minimum, an adequate bicycle lane, and, preferably, a protected bike lane. Most of us who ride in North America can't count on bike lanes every where we go, or even most of the places we go. Most of us need to take the lane, and taking the lane serves us best when we do it without fear and without apology. At an absolute minimum, cyclists have, and ought to vigorously defend, a right to make our own choices about where in the lane to ride.


I ride in the center of the lane because I consider it safer. That covers it in three words: I consider it safer. John Forester and some of his supporters clutter the issue with irrelevant and frankly offensive detours from the single objective that matters: getting everyone from point 'A' to point 'B' alive and uninjured, notwithstanding the presence of two-tonne steel bombs.

Wait, what?

It looks like we started a trend.

Just over a week and a half ago, a driver came up Jane Street in West Toronto and managed to jump the curb and hit a small apartment building. The force of the crash threw the engine block halfway across the street, and shrapnel sprayed the fronts of buildings 15 meters away from the crash site, denting window mouldings and chipping stucco. The passenger of the car died, the collision damage made the building unstable and the city evacuated the residents.

One collision such as that makes sense: freak accidents happen. Then, a little less than a week later, another driver crashed into a convenience store at Harbord and Bathurst, in the middle of Toronto's downtown.

Just this week,  someone else drove an SUV into a building in the Beach, a neighbourhood in the city's east end. This time, the crash killed an occupant of the building: an elderly woman preparing for a morning dance class.

Really, Toronto motorists? Seriously? I get that some things come in epidemics, but driving cars into buildings? Some people really need to ditch the car or the truck and start riding a bus.

Four words closer to the safety of life

In one of his more recent screeds against cycling, Jim Kenzie, the Star's car reviewer, wrote this chilling sentence: "We still kill more pedestrians and motorists on Toronto roads than we do cyclists."

We shouldn't kill anybody. I'll say that again: we shouldn't kill anyone. We should never accept death as a price for anything. Any violent death, any injury, in the course of any activity means that something went wrong and needs correction. When it comes to automotive technology, and the million odd deaths it causes world-wide, we need to do a lot of correcting. We need a safety culture.

The safety cultures I know best, marine and aviation, have four defining principles, summed up in four words: priority, transparency, authority, and accountability.

Start with priority, as in the safety of life has absolute priority. Nothing trumps the word unsafe. Not convenient, not fast, not efficient, not cost-effective. Having a deadline does not justify an unsafe act. Money does not justify a lack of safety.

All I want for Christmas...

is a safety culture on Ontario's streets, roads and highways. And some respect for vulnerable road users would be good, too.

Beware

the Jabberwock, my son. Oh, and the two-tonne steel bomb with the driver who thinks everyone on the street should wear high-viz or stay at home.

Operating a powered vehicle on public streets for your own convenience, pleasure or profit is a privilege. That privilege comes with responsibility. That responsibility is simple: do no harm. If you can't drive safely for any reason, don't drive. Driving safely means, at a minimum, not hitting pedestrians with the right of way. Period. It does not matter what the pedestrian has chosen to wear. If you think you can make a legal right turn on red but you can't tell for sure if you see a pedestrian waiting to cross, don't make the turn until you have made sure. If you get an impression that you see motion at night, you probably do: in darkness, the human eye does a better job detecting motion than shape. That fleeting impression of something moving could mean a human being, and until you've identified it, stay stopped. You and your car can mange to wait to make the turn, but the pedestrian can't make do without their life. Adjust your speed to the visibility. If you can't see a pedestrian in a black coat in a crosswalk in time to stop, slow down until you can. You will get where you want to go a whole lot earlier if you don't have to stop to explain how you injured or killed someone along the way.

Motorists keep putting more and more onerous conditions on vulnerable road users. It has to stop now. The appetites of car users for speed and convenience already dominate most of the usable public right of way. Motorists have an unconditional responsibility not to injure pedestrians using the limited public space left them. Don't hit pedestrians in crosswalks, at four way stops, in crossovers, or on the sidewalk. Just don't do it: full stop, no excuses.

Safe Cycling II: Lighting the way

I have said before that I think cyclists have two obligations: not to harm another vulnerable road user, and not to die on a ride ourselves if we can avoid it. One practical and legal consequence: we ought not to ride on sidewalks. Another: we ought to ride with lights at night.

Any light beats no light at all. When I ride, I carry a couple of spares that I can offer to cyclists I encounter who don't have lights on. I personally carry two lights on my front handlebars, and a tail light. I also carry a small bag under my saddle with spare batteries. I have one flashing light on my handlebars, and one steady light. I cycle this way because I believe
strobing lights make it difficult to track and predict my speed. My flashing front light indicates my presence very clearly, but I think having only a flashing light would make it harder for other road users to see where I'm going or how quickly.

What a close pass feels like

As the title on the video says: this video is not about blame. It's about what a close pass feels like on a bicycle. It's a plea for motorists to allow at least a meter when passing a cyclist. I think it may help to make a case for legislation, proposed in Ontario and enacted in a number of American states and elsewhere, to require motorists to give cyclists a meter, more or less, of space.

Safe Cycling part I: Sidewalks

In the introduction to this series, I wrote that I believe cyclists have a moral obligation to the vulnerable users we share the roads with and to ourselves and the people we love: do no harm. Do not hurt or kill a pedestrian or another cyclist, and do not die on a ride if you can by any means avoid it. That means I have one top ethical and practical rule: do not ride on sidewalks. Riding on sidewalks endangers pedestrians, as two fatal collisions between sidewalk cyclists and pedestrians in Toronto over the past five years make tragically clear. But sidewalk cycling also endangers the cyclists who do it. Cyclists who come off the sidewalks at speed run a far greater risk of colliding with cars than cyclists on the road. Even a relatively slow cyclists moves at twice to three times the speed of the average pedestrian; motorists at intersections have to look farther or more frequently to see cyclists riding into the road. Not all motorists look far enough, and cyclists riding from the sidewalk to the street risk turning directly into the blind spot of a right turning driver. Over even a short ride, a sidewalk cyclist will ride through many intersections. It only takes one misjudgment with a single pedestrian, one driver failing to look far enough up the sidewalk, to turn a ride into a tragedy. 

Don't do it. If the road frightens you, and Toronto has plenty of frightening roads, then find a safe route. Ride on a side street, through a park, on a shared use trail, use the bus to skip over a dangerous stretch of road. Riding on the sidewalk won't solve your problem.