NY Time article: Moving Targets

[Chris (shredbette)]

interesting article from NY Times (saw this posted on baystatecycling
Google group)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/fashion/10bikewars.html?ref=todayspaper

August 10, 2008
Moving Targets
By JAN HOFFMAN

IT seemed like a good idea at the time.

Save gas money, be environmentally correct, lose weight — just by
biking to work. And so after two decades, Dan Cooley, 41, saddled up a
silver 21-speed Raleigh in April to make the daily two-mile commute to
his nursing job at a senior citizen center in Louisville, Ky. In four
months, he lost 15 pounds. Way to go, Dan!

Friday morning, July 25, around 6:50 a.m., he was pedaling on a
residential street, wearing his green hospital scrubs, when a
Volkswagen roared out of a driveway in front of him. Swerving to avoid
the car, Mr. Cooley cursed loudly and rode on.

The driver and his passenger cursed back. As Mr. Cooley pulled over to
the sidewalk, the car turned onto a driveway, knocking him off his
bike. In Mr. Cooley’s narrative, the passenger, swearing, jumped out
and pummeled him. Then he got back into the car, which zoomed away.
Mr. Cooley lay prostrate on the sidewalk, bloodied, with a concussion
and a torn ligament.

“We’ve had a car culture for so long and suddenly the roads become
saturated with bicyclists trying to save gas,” Mr. Cooley said 10 days
after the attack, still feeling scrambled, in pain and traumatized.
“No one knows how to share the road.” He doesn’t plan to bike to work
again this season.

Every year, the war of the wheels breaks out in the sweet summer
months, as four-wheelers react with aggravation and anger to the two-
wheelers competing for the same limited real estate.

This summer, the number of new cyclists has increased strongly across
the country. In June, nearly 11,000 first-time riders participated in
Denver’s Bike to Work Day. Dahon, makers of folding bikes popular with
commuters, reports a 30-percent sales increase from a year ago, with
many models having been sold out since the spring. Transportation
Alternatives, a bicycling advocacy group, estimates that 131,000
people cycle daily in New York, up 77 percent since 2000.

Like Mr. Cooley, the newbies are lured by improved bike lanes as well
as the benefits of exercise, a smaller carbon footprint and gas
savings. But talk about a vicious cycle! With more bikes on the road,
the driver-cyclist, Hatfield-McCoy hostility seems to be ratcheting
up. Cycling: good for the environment, bad for mental health?

Having noted the uptick in aggression, Michelle Holcomb, a cycling
instructor in Dallas, now carries a secret weapon. Recently, as she
cycled into an intersection at a four-way stop and began turning left,
a driver at the cross street revved and shot through, laughing as he
missed her front wheel by inches. “Smile for the camera,” muttered Ms.
Holcomb, who videotaped the incident with her new helmet camera.

In this dogfight, bigger’s impact is always much, much badder. But
smaller is hardly better-behaved. It’s especially true in city
traffic, where pedestrians add a third volatile element to a compound
already wildly unstable.

Last Thursday evening, at the peak of Manhattan rush hour, Howard
Savery was crossing Broadway at 40th Street with fellow bipeds.
Abruptly he reared back, just avoiding a crash with an impatient
cyclist, racing through the red light.

“Well, that’s a first!” remarked Mr. Savery, a banker, who was heading
home to Staten Island.

First time he’d nearly been knocked over by a cyclist in Manhattan?

No, corrected Mr. Savery: “That’s the first time one of them actually
beeped at me. Usually they run you down silently.”

In spot clashes around the country, the hostility this summer has
erupted in baroque violence:

¶A Brentwood, Calif., doctor was charged with assault. Police say he
intentionally braked in front of two cyclists, with one smashing into
his rear window and the other crashing to the pavement.

¶In bike-utopia, Portland, Ore., where 6 percent of the people cycle
daily — the national average is under 1 percent — a cyclist knocked
off his bike clung desperately to the hood of a moving car. And a car
passenger fought with a cyclist after yelling at him to wear his
helmet.

¶Last weekend, Utah state police arrested the driver of a pickup
truck, suspected of plowing intentionally into cyclists on a morning
ride.

Isolated, freakish events, certainly. Indeed, some cycling advocates
say that as riders in their communities have become a customary sight,
civility by motorists has improved. But overwhelmingly, on blogs and
Web sites nationwide, drivers and cyclists routinely describe shouted
epithets, flung water bottles, sprays of spit and harrowing near-
misses of the intentional kind.

Psychologists and traffic experts say the tension rises from many
factors, including summer road rage and the “my hurry matters more
than your hurry” syndrome, exacerbated when drivers feel captive to
slower-moving cyclists.

And then there’s old-fashioned turf warfare.

One recent morning, BikeSnobNYC, the cycling blogger, was riding to
work in a downtown Manhattan bike lane. Suddenly, an S.U.V. pulled in
front of him, reversed and slipped into a parking spot. Mr. BSNYC
veered and took out a camera.

“I’m working on a project,” he told the driver. “I’m taking photos of
people who almost kill me.”

Recounting the exchange during a phone interview, his dudgeon only
grew. “He says I’m lucky he was looking out for me because I don’t
belong in the ‘most busiest city in the world’ on my bicycle,” said
Mr. BSNYC, whose closely guarded identity is part of his mystique.

Red-flag words, and from a driver “with Jersey plates” yet? A
provocation to any cyclist, especially one who later posted the photos
on his blog.

Driver-rider hostility has become worse this summer because legions of
cyclists are simply inexperienced. At least according to the drivers.
“They say the cyclists are all over the road and don’t know the
rules,” said Michele Mount, a spokeswoman for AAA of New Jersey.

“They pull out without looking at traffic,” she said. “They don’t
signal. I get that there is safety in numbers and they’re trying to
protect themselves, but there’s barely room for cars on the road, let
alone a bike lane.”

Even Mr. BSNYC piled on. “You can’t ride a bike in the city as an
adult the way you did as a 10-year-old in a suburban cul-de-sac,” he
said. “I see people riding like children on a sidewalk, or going the
wrong way down a street.” (Cyclists should ride with traffic, not
against it.)

A pandemic of obliviousness — earbuds, texting — further ramps up the
tension. Recently, Steve Diamond, ride coordinator for the Morris Area
Freewheelers, a New Jersey cycling club, saw what he called a trifecta
of irresponsible cycling: “A guy riding his bike without a helmet,
talking on his cellphone, with his kid in the bike attachment behind
him.”

There’s a whiff of class warfare in the simmering hostility, too.
During morning rush, the teeth-gritting of drivers is almost audible,
as superbly fit cyclists, wearing Sharpie-toned spandex and riding
$3,000 bikes, cockily dart through the swampy, stolid traffic to
offices with bike racks and showers.

On a Seattle blog, an observer howled: “Drown yourself in espresso and
tears!”

AT the opposite end of the class spectrum are cyclists who can’t
afford other transportation: often immigrants on clunkers, without
helmets or lights, heading to work at dawn or dusk.

“We need to find some way to let them know what the rules are,” said
Earl Jones, chairman of a bicycle task force in Louisville.

The ability of drivers and cyclists to trash talk and then disappear
into the anonymity of traffic further poisons the atmosphere. Dave
Schlabowske, the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for Milwaukee,
recalled a car pulling alongside as he pedaled to a meeting:
passenger, a child of about 6, rolls down window. No seat belt.

Driver, male, fixes Mr. Schlabowske with a glare, and then gives
instruction to small child. Obediently, child complies: he flips Mr.
Schlabowske an obscene gesture, shouts complementary epithet. Looking
triumphant, driver peels off.

To some extent, the hostility is a byproduct not only of the
abdication of common sense, but of widespread ignorance of state and
local laws. In every state, cyclists have the same rights and
responsibilities as drivers of motor vehicles. But in the particulars,
state vehicle codes and municipal ordinances vary. Consider the
frustrated driver who shouts to a cyclist, “Get on the sidewalk!”

In Los Angeles, cyclists may ride on sidewalks unless they exhibit
“willful” or “wanton” behavior. But in San Francisco, cycling on
sidewalks is forbidden, except for bike riders under 13.

The anticyclist hostility even follows riders into court. Just ask a
bike lawyer. For as surely as night follows day, with more riders on
the road, there is a small but growing peloton of lawyers specializing
in bike law, usually representing injured cyclists.

Gary Brustin, a cyclist and California bike lawyer, said anticyclist
fervor makes jury selection daunting. “They are white-hot about us,”
Mr. Brustin said. “They are seething.” In California, bicycle
plaintiffs lose two out of three cases that go to trial.

The anger has not gone unnoticed by officials around the country. A
dozen states now mandate at least a three-foot passing gap. In June,
South Carolina passed an antiharassment law to protect cyclists. This
summer, Washington, D.C., posted speed limits for cyclists on a
popular trail. New York City has been painting a green-striped bike
lane down Broadway, from Times Square to Herald Square. Complete
Streets bills seek to require that roads be designed for all users.

But the bottom line, say driving behavior experts, is that the
learning curve has just begun. Tom Vanderbilt, author of “Traffic: Why
We Drive the Way We Do” (Knopf, 2008), said that because drivers do
not expect to see cyclists, they don’t.

Therefore, said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American
Bicyclists, an advocacy group, the turmoil will abate when enough
cyclists are on the road, so that everyone learns to share the space.
As in Amsterdam. Or Davis, Calif., where nearly 15 percent of the
population cycles daily.

Will the Hatfields and the McCoys ever be able to coexist? Ground zero
for such tensions may be Woodside, Calif. (population 5,600, 14 square
miles), on the San Francisco peninsula, tucked in forested mountains.
Its famous switchbacks are so narrow they are often unmarked by white
stripes.

Woodside is host to hundreds of recreational cyclists on weekends. And
on many weekdays, a peloton known as “the noon riders” — as many as
100 cyclists from Silicon Valley businesses riding during lunch break
— blasts through.

“Mention the noon riders to anyone in town and you’ll see the blood
pressure go up,” said Susan George, Woodside’s town manager. One day,
she said, she rounded a bend and came upon them: “I slammed on the
brakes and they swarmed around me, screaming and yelling obscenities.
My heart was pounding. It was very scary.”

In September, Woodside will test a campaign known as Honor the Stop.
It’s the brainchild of Marc Evans, a San Francisco endurance coach
whose client was one of two cyclists killed this spring by a driver.

Honor the Stop features a pledge card and a two-tone wristband: black,
for those killed or injured on the road, and red, to represent the
wearer’s commitment to obey stop signs.

Woodside will distribute 5,000 bands. “It’s not a campaign just for
cyclists,” Mr. Evans said. “It’s for all road users.”

Does Ms. George, the town manager, have a fantasy that the noon riders
will wear the bands and politely stop at intersections?

“I have fantasy visions of the noon riders,” replied Ms. George, “but
it’s not necessarily about wearing these bracelets.”