If you ride your bike to work, someone--a co-worker, a friend or possibly a supervisor--will inevitably ask, "Isn't it dangerous to ride on the streets?"
The short answer I give is, "Well, everything is dangerous on the streets!" That is true epistemologically and, I suspect, empirically.
The more accurate answer is that doing anything on the streets is dangerous if you're not careful. Crossing some streets is probably even more dangerous than driving or cycling on them, if you don't pay attention to signals and other things in your surroundings.
Now I think I know why, after so many years, I hear the same question from non-cycling commuters. An article someone sent me opened with this insight: "A bike accident, unlike a car wreck, tends to live on in the memory even if you didn't see it happen."
I can't count how many times the question about safety is followed by some anecdote about so-and-so's brother or friend who was maimed in a clash between bike and car. On the other hand, I've never heard anybody tell a friend or co-worker a gruesome story about an auto accident when someone is about to drive somewhere.
Part of the reason for the discrepancy between bike and car anecdotes, I believe, has something to do with the fact that in most places, we're vastly outnumbered by the number of people who drive their cars to wherever they're going. Because there are fewer of us, there are fewer bike accidents overall, as well as per capita. Thus, any story about one of our mishaps stands out and is thus easy to magnify. And, as Ben Szobody, the writer of the article, points out, anecdotes stay in the mind longer than facts.
More than one study has shown that, statistically, you have less of a chance of getting into an accident, let alone incurring injury or meeting your demise, on two wheels than on four. Such is even true in South Carolina, where Mr. Szobody reports and which has the second-highest (after Florida) bicycle fatality rate in the US.
Still, people's fears and stereotypes trump realities. (That is one reason why there are so many poorly-designed and -constructed bike lanes.) I guess that is the condition of being a minority, albeit one that is growing. The best we can hope is , if we can't get more people out of their cars and onto bikes, that we can at least have a motoring population that better understands the realities of being a cyclist.
What do you do when you're riding and have an unexpected roadblock?
Normally, you go around it by taking a slightly different route. But, sometimes that's just not possible, or feasible. Such was the case when I was crossing back into Queens on the Pulaski Bridge:
Just as I got onto the bike lane, the gate swung shut and warning bells clanged. This meant, of course, that the drawbridge was about to open.
It's far from the first time I've encountered a bridge opening when I wanted or needed to ride across it. At least, today I wasn't really in a hurry. I had moderate time constraints: I'd had to attend to a few things later in the day, so I had to get home, shower and prepare myself. But I'd budgeted more time than I thought I would need.
The wait for the bridge didn't seem particularly long. At least, the weather was nearly perfect, and even the normally turbid (and sometimes rancid) waters of the Gowanus Canal were nearly a reflection of serenity as the boat churned through it.
What was interesting about this wait, though, is something you may have noticed in the photo: I was far from the only cyclist there. In fact, I can scarcely recall seeing so many other bikes and riders at any other opening of a drawbridge. As it turned out, there were just as many cyclists, if not more, waiting on the other side of the opening.
That there were so many cyclists makes sense when you realize that the Pulaski connects what have become two of the greatest concentrations of cyclists in the NYC Metropolitan Area: the neighborhoods of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens. I can remember when both of those communities were blue-collar enclaves in which almost nobody rode two wheels. It seemed that the only time I saw other cyclists, besides myself, in those neighborhoods or on that bridge was when the Five Borough Bike Tour transversed them.
Some of the cyclists I saw today weren't even born then.
Today I am going to create a post that will get lots and lots of views for all of the wrong reasons. I will express shock and moral indignation. (What other kind of indignation is there, really?) I will protest some more...and more. And, well...we all know what happens when the lady doth protest too much.
Sometimes I think a good working definition of the word "model" is "someone who is better--or, at least more attractive--than the product he or she is being employed to sell." Such is the case with the young woman in the ad for Crescent Bicycles, which appeared in Bicycling! in 1975 or thereabouts.
The bicycles she was trying to entice young men into buying were made in Sweden and bear no relation to velocipedes bearing the same name that were made in the USA at the end of the 19th, and the beginning of the 20th, centuries. The bikes looked cool in a funky '70's sort of way: orange paint with checkerboard (that, I think, was supposed to represent a checkered flag) graphics. That, actually, was fairly surprising for something that came out of the land of Queen Christina.
Even more surprising was the workmanship--or, should I say, the lack thereof. This was even true on the higher models made from Reynolds 531 tubing. I worked on a few of those bikes and found, not only fairly sloppy braze works around the lugs, but globs of molten metal that cooled into unfinished edges of metal at the points where the bottom bracket shell and seat lugs met the frame tubes. This made it difficult to fit parts such as bottom bracket cups and seat posts accurately.
Perhaps the worst problem of all, though, was the toe clip overlap. Mind you, I don't mind some toe clip overlap. But I think that had my shoes been any bigger, I could have flicked the quick-release lever on the front wheel with my toes. All right, that's an exaggeration. But I don't recall any other bike--not even the most extreme track machine--that placed a rider's lower digits so close to the front wheel spokes. As Michael Kone and Sheldon Brown wryly noted, most of these bikes probably "met untimely deaths in commuter hell accidents."
Those young women really should have been wearing helmets and using foot retention!
