This is the last hard conversation, and then we’ll get back to the fun stuff.

 

I believe in individual responsibility. I also believe that we are influenced greatly by our environment. There’s enough blame to go around that we can have individual responsibility for our situations and at the same time be victims of circumstance.

 

I’ve previously discussed how drivers have a large responsibility, and a person walking also has a responsibility– 0.000351 times the responsibility that drivers have.

 

When a person driving an automobile hits a person walking, the person driving is responsible and the person walking is responsible. The degree of responsibility depends partly on the math I’ve already discussed, but there are other factors specific to the incident and what each person was doing at the time. Both parties have some responsibility and at the same time are to some degree, victims of the circumstances.

 

It’s easy to see how the person walking is a victim. He is the one who is hurt or killed.

 

It’s not as easy to see how the driver is a victim. She won’t be hurt and her vehicle will suffer little or no damage. There will be almost no legal or financial repercussions, as long as she didn’t leave the scene and wasn’t impaired.

 

But she is a victim.

 

My friend says he would be traumatized if they hit a person, and if it was fatal his life would be ruined, even if he was completely innocent of wrongdoing. As a driver who is passionate about walking and bicycling, that is even more true for me.

 

We are victims of a society that makes it easy to drive and encourages people to drive, requiring and providing very little training for drivers. For comparison, Finland has the most difficult 2-part driving test, Germany requires 4 driving tests, and the UK has a 43% pass rate.

 

We are victims of land use patterns that cater to the automobile and mandate driving, because it is so far from our homes to our schools, stores, work, churches, and other destinations.

 

We are victims of poor transit systems because we have invested so heavily in highways and so little in buses.

 

We are victims of road designs that encourage driving above the speed limit, which is already too high for the safety of people walking, in the name of ‘safety’– wide roads, cutting down trees, and long, straight sight lines.

 

One of the recent pedestrian fatalities in Columbia involved a 17 year old driver who was probably texting or driving distracted. She may face jail time in addition to her mental anguish. She is certainly to blame for her carelessness, but she is also a victim. Young people make mistakes, but her mistake cost someone’s life. She is a victim because we encourage our young people make their mistakes with a 2000-pound killing machine.

 

We all have a responsibility for safety, but I want to change our environment, our laws, and our systems so that we have fewer victims. You can help me do that by joining the Missouri Bicycle & Pedestrian Federation.

 

It’s another hard conversation. Today, I want to debunk an argument I hear from bicyclists about other bicyclists. But first, let me preface this with a disclaimer. I believe bicyclists should obey traffic laws for our own safety. I agree that bicyclists should obey traffic laws. What I disagree with is why we should obey traffic laws. We should obey traffic laws for our own safety, not to prove a point.

“If bicyclists want to have their own lanes, they must obey traffic signals.”

“Why should drivers share the road with cyclists if we can’t be bothered to obey the law and do something as simple as stopping at intersections?”

The premise of these statements is that if every bicyclist obeyed traffic laws, we’d be welcomed to the road with open arms. No one would honk or yell or pass too closely. Drivers would miraculously start paying attention and not right-hook a bicyclist who is legally in the bike lane that just happens to put the bicyclist in the path of the right-turning vehicle. Drivers would look as they open their car door and no bicyclist would ever get doored again.

Why should drivers share the road? It’s their road to share or not to share. If I’m not in a car, it’s not my road. I say this in all seriousness, even though I pay for the road through my tax dollars, because possession is nine-tenths of the law. Automobiles own the road because they have it under their wheels right now.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when automobiles were new fangled inventions and people hated them. Automobiles were fast and noisy and they killed people. Automobiles conquered the road, and now people love them. Automobiles are still fast and noisy and they kill people.

Bicyclists and pedestrians would do well to study history and find out how automobiles conquered the road. Maybe we could learn a trick or two. Automobiles did NOT conquer the road by saying, “Hey everyone, stop killing people, behave yourselves, and maybe they’ll let us on the roads.” Automobiles conquered the road by blaming the victim. Automobile interests such as car manufacturers, oil companies, and construction companies created something called the jaywalker in the 1920’s. They got pedestrians banned from roads, restricted to sidewalks and crosswalks, and blamed for their own deaths.

Bicyclists can blame the victim, too– drivers see themselves as victims. When an automobile kills a bicyclist or a pedestrian, the driver is a victim, despite the lack of legal repercussions. I’m not being sarcastic, I absolutely mean that. Most people I know would never be the same if they accidentally killed someone. That would be traumatic. The driver is a victim of a culture that makes it so easy to kill someone.

Bicyclists won’t get automobiles to share the road by stopping at stop signs. We’ll conquer the road by blaming victims, blaming drivers who kill bicyclists, not by playing nice. I’m not advocating that strategy or saying it’s right, I’m saying that the evidence suggests this strategy would be effective. Or maybe there is a more palatable path to equity.

Obey traffic laws for your own safety. Stop telling bicyclists that if we play nice, drivers will share their toys– it’s not true.

 

Let me start by saying that people who are walking, which is everyone who can walk, have a responsibility for their own safety and a responsibility not to involve an innocent driver in their own unfortunate tragedy.

I wanted to start with that, because every time I try to explain what I’m about to say, the first and only response is, “Pedestrians have a responsibility, too.” This is victim-blaming.

This is the sort of thing that has been on my mind that prompted my last post, “A hard conversation“. This is the actual hard conversation. I’m about to explain why people driving have 2,848 times more responsibility for safety than people walking. People driving need to be 2,848 times more careful than people walking. If “Pedestrians have a responsibility, too,” I agree. Pedestrians have 1/2848th the responsibility that drivers do.

When two objects collide, such as a person and a car, the amount of energy released and the damage caused are a function of mass and velocity: how heavy the two objects are and how fast they are moving relative to one another. KE = ½mv².

Let’s take a 158 pound person walking at 3 mph. Let’s call this 158 X 3² = 1,422 Responsibles. I made up the unit “Responsibles”. (Don’t worry about the units or the 1/2, it’s all relative so they’ll cancel out.)

Collide her with an oncoming car that weigh 2000 pounds and is traveling at 45 mph. 2000 X 45² = 4,050,000 Responsibles.

4,050,000 Responsibles divided by 1,422 Responsibles is 2,848. When you are driving a 2-ton killing machine at 45 mph, you have to be 2,848 times more careful than I do, I mean than our 158 pound person does, when walking.

A pedestrian has 1/2848th or 0.000351 times the Responsibles of a driver. A bicyclist on a 25 pound bicycle moving at 10 mph has 1/221th or 0.004519 times the Responsibles of a driver, and 13 times the responsibility of the pedestrian. The pedestrian and bicyclist have virtually 0 the Responsibles of a driver.

What does 2,848 times more responsibility look like? If our walker’s responsibility means looking up from her phone and looking both ways before crossing the street, our driver should operate his 2-ton killing machine with the utmost caution and extreme vigilance, constantly alert. He should scan the road for people and check for people at crosswalks.

By the way, if he slows down to 20 mph, he can reduce his responsibility to merely 563 times that of a person walking.

“With great power there must also come great responsibility” (Spiderman)

It’s been quiet on my blog lately. I won’t say “I’ve been too busy to write” because it’s just not true. Bicycling, talking about bicycling, and writing about bicycling are activities that I love, and no matter what else is happening, I find time. The problem is, I haven’t wanted to write about what’s on my mind.

When you do or are anything that most other people don’t know much about, you get offensive questions and you hear offensive things. Whether it is your missing limb, your paperclip collection, or your mode of transportation, people who have never seen someone like you or never heard of your favorite pastime will say and ask things that are offensive and sound horrible to you. They say things out of ignorance, trying to be clever, or pure cussedness.

A friend whose career now revolves around getting people to walk and bicycle more admitted that when he was younger, he honked at bicyclists on the road. Before I started bicycling, I said ignorant, offensive things about bicyclists. In high school, I made jokes such as, “How many points is that bicyclist worth? How many for that pedestrian?” I drove everywhere and didn’t know anything about bicycling and walking. I thought I was funny.

That sort of ‘joke’ sickens me today. It sickened me before a truck hit my daughter. I have a hard time identifying with people who say such things, even though I said them once myself. I have a hard time seeing them as people who don’t know about bicycling and people who are trying to be funny. I can only see them as mean, horrible people saying mean, horrible things.

Luckily, people who know me don’t say such things to my face, and if I refrain from reading the newspaper and especially the comments on news stories about bicycle and pedestrian wrecks, I can mostly avoid hearing or reading offensive things.

But I can’t shut my ears and eyes to every offensive remark. It is something I have to come back to when I’m talking to a new bicyclist who has just experienced harassment or has read for the first time comments on a news story about a pedestrian death. It is something I come back to when well-meaning law enforcement personnel blame the victim and vow to crack down on jaywalking.

Worst of all is when fellow bicyclists turn on their own, blaming bicyclists who don’t stop at stop signs for the vitriol heaped upon us.

It’s hard to talk about negative things like bicycle harassment when bicycling is so joyful. Bicycling has changed my life in so many ways:

I’m healthier. I lost 25 pounds the first year I biked without dieting. My resting heart rate now is 54 bpm.

I’m richer. I used to amuse myself on steep hills calculating how much gas money this bicycle commute was saving us that day. Including gas, insurance, taxes, wear & tear, and parking fees, I’ve saved thousands of dollars over ten years by not owning a 2nd car.

I’m kinder. Being on the receiving end of offensive, hurtful remarks makes me very careful not to say offensive, hurtful things myself.

I’m happier.

 

I had the opportunity to observe a Learn to Bike class, so that I could learn how to teach someone to ride a bike. Our student, Anna, is in her mid-20’s. She never learned a bike, she said, because she was too busy reading books. She’s in a PhD program as well as holding a full time job. Joe, the instructor, took the pedals off her bike and lowered her seat all the way down.

Normally I tell novice bicyclists to raise their seat. We try to position our seat so that we can sit on it with our feet touching the ground. That is a recipe for knee pain! Your seat should be high enough that your thigh is not quite parallel at the top of the pedal stroke, and your leg is slightly bent at the bottom of the pedal stroke. If it is that high, you will not be able to rest your feet on the ground when your butt is on the seat. You must get proficient at the ‘power pedal position’ to start your bike, and stepping down smoothly when you stop your bike. If those fellows could do it on those big wheel velocipedes, you can do it on your bike with a little practice.

Learning how to ride a bike is different. Joe lowered Anna’s seat all the way down so that she could sit on the bike with her feet comfortably and stably on the ground. With no pedals to get in the way, she pushed her bike around as she learned to balance. Joe uses the same approach when teaching adults or children how to ride– no training wheels!

“How do you do it?” she wanted to know, watching Joe coast down the hill holding his feet off the ground.

Joe explained that it’s impossible to explain. It’s a complex neural algorithm, and riding a bike is so complex that it is one of the most challenging things to program a robot to do. Your brain simply has to learn it, and it can’t be learned by consciously understanding how to do it.

Anna wants to ride a bike so she can bike to work and so she can do a triathlon! “Do you have a triathlon picked out yet?” I asked. I thought she might be aiming for next years’ Trizou.
“Yes, ShowMe Games in July,” she answered. She is learning to ride a bike so that in 2 months, she can do a triathlon!
“I guess you know how to swim already?” I asked.
“Yes, I learned last year.”

Anna is certainly ambitious!

Joe had selected a quiet parking lot with a gentle slope. Anna let the slope take her down, touching down with her feet to catch herself, then pushed with her feet to go up the slope. She did this over and over for an hour. She practiced on her own over the next couple days, and then we met again. This time, she was holding her feet off the ground for longer distances before catching herself. She practiced feathering the brakes to control her speed.

Next week when Joe meets with her, he’ll have her go back and forth down the slope in a serpentine pattern, which trains the algorithms for turning the bike. We turn the bike, not by turning the handlebar, but by leaning. Even experienced cyclists assume that turning the handlebar turns the bike, not realizing that it is their lean that turns the bike. After that, she’ll be ready for pedals!

Joe says it takes most people 2 to 4 hours of practice to learn to balance. Kids learn more quickly than adults. Anna, who has never had any experience riding a bike, may take a little longer than an adult who just hasn’t ridden a bike since she was 6.