Wearing A Sign To Send A Signal

Most of the time, cycling is good for your health.

There are moments, though, when it can raise your blood pressure, especially if you ride in traffic.

In such a moment, you might be riding as far to the right as you can in the traffic lane because there's no shoulder or bike lane.  It's night, and someone drives close enough to tear off the back of your glove.  Oh, and that car has it's high-beams on.  And the driver honks repeatedly.

If the driver acknowledges you, it's usually with a gesture they don't teach in etiquette classes or words they don't teach in basic English or Spanish or whatever-language classes. 

If Dani Motze hasn't experienced that exact scenario, I am sure she's experienced something just as scary and irksome.  The 28-year-old Reading, Pennsylvania resident says she's been harassed, followed and run off the road in 11 years of pedaling her city's streets.  Oh, and she's been hit by a car.  Another time, she was "grazed"--ironically, when she was on her way to a meeting about cycling.

So, a year ago she took to wearing a sign:

"May Use Full Lane--Change Lanes To Pass"

Her objective, she explains, is not to crusade for the right to ride in traffic. That's already canonized the laws of Pennsylvania, as in most other states.  Moreover, the Keystone State has a "four-foot rule", designating the berth drivers must give cyclists when passing them.  What she wants, she says is to "educate" motorists as well as cyclists.

Motze, who is a social worker and online magazine editor as well as a cycling advocate, says that what she wants is to take the lane in cities and towns, not on highways with 60 MPH speed limits.  That, really, is about as good as we can hope for in the absence of physically separated bike lanes with provisions for turning and crossing intersections.

She sometimes drives a car she shares with her husband.  But most of her commutes and errands are done on her bike, and she sometimes rides for pleasure.

How have drivers responded?  Some well, some not so much, she says.  But, for them most part, in the year Motze has been wearing the sign, "people have been passing me with no issue," she says.   

Test Rider’s Remorse?

If someone were to steal your bike and bring it back a week later, what would you do?

If you are a bike shop owner and the machine came from your inventory, you most likely would call the cops, which would be understandable—and what Anthony Karambellas did.

He is the manager of The Cyclist shop in Costa Mesa, California.  A week earlier, Paul Verdugo Jr. took a $5000 BH Ultralight Evo Disc for a “test ride,” leaving only an ID card.  Apparently, Verdugo built a rapport with shop staff based on his knowledge of bikes.

But Verdugo decided to return the bike, not out of any sense of guilt, but because he was “tired of being recognized,” as he told Karambellas when he called the shop. He took the bike because he’d been a “bike geek” all of his life but couldn’t afford the bikes he wants.  That revelation, not surprisingly, helped the authorities to connect him to other thefts from area bike shops.

Karambellas gave the call to shop owner John Marconi, who arranged for a Lyft car. He also assured Verdugo that there weren’t any police officers at the shop.

Marconi, of course, fibbed. Officers hid in the bathroom and in a delivery van outside the shop.

Verdugo faces charges for stealing, not only the bikes, but the ID card he gave when he took the BH for a “test ride.”

What We Came From?

Being a writer and English teacher, I'm irked by overused (and often inappropriate) words and phrases.  It drives me crazy, for example, when a literate, erudite interviewer asks a good question and the interviewee begins his or her response with "So."  

Another annoying language tic is the use of the word "evolution" when "development" makes more sense.  I even heard someone talk about the "evolution" of medical devices.  Trust me, if you've ever had a mammogram or been treated with a vaginal device (I know that at least half of you haven't!), you know that some medical devices haven't "evolved" much!

And so it is with bicycles.  Writers facing deadline will refer to the "evolution" of the bicycle when they're describing how the Draisienne became today's computer-designed machines.

Then again, they might not be too far off the mark:

Hmm... Maybe the bicycle has "evolved" more than humans have--or, at least, more than humans ever will if we don't get rid of war.

I’m Not Crazy About Their Steaks—Or Bicycle Infrastructure

I have never been to Omaha, and I have met only two people who hail from O.N.E. (Omaha, Nebraska) in my life.  So I won’t make any generalizations about it.  I will say, however, that the seem to have made the same mistakes in bicycle infrastructure planning and construction countless other places—including my hometown of New York.

While city officials are congratulating themselves for stringing together a “network “ of bike lanes that will allow cyclists to get around in the city, local cycling advocates are making the same justified criticisms one hears all over this nation.

From what I can see, local officials think that all you have to do to make a bike lane is to paint lines on the side of the road, and all you have to do to “connect” them is to install a few signs.

I’d protest by boycotting Omaha Steaks, but It wouldn’t change their thinking.  Besides, I’ve never ordered Omaha Steaks before and very rarely eat steak at all.  I’m not a vegetarian, but—I know that this will seem like heresy to some—I’m not so crazy about steak.  Or most bicycle infrastructure I’ve seen.  And I probably won’t like Omaha’s infrastructure, either.

Night, Rain And The Ocean

Yesterday I did something unthinkable for a blogger:  I went for a ride that stretched from the afternoon into the evening, and didn't take any photos.

So why did I do that?  Well, it wasn't intentional.  In fact, the ride itself wasn't intentional.  Oh, I got on my bike because I wanted to.  I didn't, however, plan my route or destination.

And I decided not to take my phone with me.  No phone, no photos.   In this day and age, not carrying an electronic device seems like a radical idea, or simply unimaginable:  My students, especially the younger ones, tell me they simply can't imagine being without their devices.  I, of course, explain that being without electronic gadgets was the normal state of affairs because, well, we didn't have those things.

So, perhaps, it was inevitable that while riding the way I rode in my youth, I would take roads to destinations that were part of my younger years.

So I pedaled to the World Trade Center and took a PATH train to Newark, on a lark.  From that city's Penn Station, I rolled and bounced the rutty streets of industrial and post-industrial urbanscapes down to Woodbridge, where New Jersey State Route 27 meets State Route 35.  Once I passed the stores, take-out restaurants and professional offices that are just as utilitarian and charmless as they were when they were built--but imbued with more character than anything that might replace them--I rode into an enclave of pickup trucks and "muscle" cars with their actual and implied "Make America Great Again" bumper stickers.  On one of those streets, a guy who looked like he'd just been released from the nearby Rahway prison danced with a skeletal (including her teeth) young woman in full-goth mode and black spike-heel pumps to death-metal music blasting from a car.  I applauded; they smiled and waved to me.

That was in a town called Sayreville.  Next town down the road, Old Bridge, a buzzard buzzed just over my head to something lying on the side of the road.  The town after that, I skirted Lake Matawan along Monmouth County Route 516 to Keyport--where, depending on whom you ask, the Jersey Shore begins.  From there, I took a series of side roads to another lake--or is it a pond?--and turned by a firehouse onto State Route 36 at Airport Plaza, where I used to get on or off the bus to see or leave my parents when they were still living in the area.

Although Route 36 has three lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 45 or 50, depending on which town you're in, it's really not a bad road for cycling.  For most of its length, it has a wide shoulder and drivers don't pull in and out to pick up or discharge people, or double-park, and trucks don't idle in them while making deliveries.  In other words, it's safer than almost any bike lane I've ridden in New York.  Plus, it's interesting to see the landscape change from something that wouldn't look out of place in The Deer Hunter or Silkwood (funny, that Meryl Streep was in both of those movies) to farm stands and, finally to the Highlands, where you climb a long (but not steep) hill, then descend, to the bridge that connects the "mainland" with Sandy Hook and the narrow strip of land between the Shrewsbury River and the Atlantic Ocean. It's sort of like like the strip between the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and the ocean in Florida, with colder weather and without palm trees.

In the "Deer Hunter" part of Route 36, there's a store that sells hunting, fishing and scuba-diving gear, and offers lessons.  Dosil's is owned by one of my high-school classmates and the sign looks as if it hasn't been painted since he took over the store.  I am sure he and his family are doing well, at least financially, but he was one of those kids of whom you knew that he would never leave North Middletown.  He wasn't a bad kid, and I rather liked him, even though he was very different from me.  Perhaps having been wrestlers during our first two years of high school had something to do with that. (After that, we both played football--he, the American kind and me, the kind the rest of the world plays.)

Anyway, whenever I go over the bridge, I know I'm headed to Sandy Hook (if I turn left) or to Sea Bright and Long Branch (if I turn right). I chose the latter, possibly because it had begun to rain lightly around the time I saw Dosil's and the showers came and went as I crossed the bridge and started down the isthmus.  Even though McMansions have replaced the bungalows and cottages Sandy destroyed on some stretches of the road, I like seeing that stretch of beach and ocean under gray skies, especially with a light rain or drizzle.  When I was younger, I sometimes felt that it was a reflection of myself in some invisible mirror.  I still feel that way--or, at least, the memory of feeling that way is still very strong.

After eating my "lunch" by the beach in Long Branch, it was more like dinner time and I knew I had, perhaps, an hour of daylight remaining.  And the light showers had turned into full-blown rain. Still, I continued riding, along the shore.  I thought I'd go to Asbury Park and either take the train home, or turn back toward Long Branch.  Instead, from Asbury, I continued along boardwalks and streets called--what else?--Ocean Avenue.  You might say that I was hypnotized by the streetlamps, with their penumbras of mist, and buoy lights that faded--or was the darkening horizon over the sea so strong that it became the ambient light of that evening?

Finally, in Spring Lake--after 105 kilometers (about 65 miles)  of riding from Newark's Penn Station, I turned around and rode the 20 kilometers back to Long Branch.  The rain seemed to lighten as the skies grew darker, until the rain stopped just before I reached the station.  Maybe it seems like child's play to a racer in training, but I'd say that at this point in my life, riding about 80 miles on a ride that began around two in the afternoon isn't bad.  But, more important, between that ride, and not having my phone, I was doing something I needed to do, though I didn't realize it until I was on the train back to New York's Penn Station.