Where You are Going to Get Hit

As a six-time veteran of getting struck by a car on my bike, this topic interests me greatly.  I did some sniffing around and came up with some interesting statistics.  These are a result of a Google Scholar search, among other resources, but I’m not going to list all the citations.  I’ve spent seventeen years in public health research; you’ll just have to trust me when I say I know a sketchy source when I see one.

* You are going to get hit on an arterial – that is, on a through street with relatively higher speeds.  Think Sandy Boulevard, NE 33^rd Avenue, SE 52^nd Avenue.  Eighty percent of all bike-car accidents occur on arterials.

* You are going to get hit at an intersection – half to two-thirds of all accidents occur at intersections.  However, certain features of an intersection make a difference, and car traffic volume is not one of them.  Visibility, size of the intersection and traffic patterns matter more.  Also, typically, you’ll be hit by a driver making a right turn in front of you.  Whenever I approach an intersection with a car in a position to turn right in front of me, I watch the right front wheel; that’s the first thing that has to move for the car to make a right turn.  Also, if the car is braking quickly to try to turn before I get to the intersection, the front end of the car will dip down from the braking action – another sure-fire clue.  Same deal, but opposite wheel, for a car trying to turn left in front of you.

Combine just these two figures, using the high end of the intersection figure, and you are eight times more likely to get hit traveling through an intersection of an arterial than you are in the middle of a block on a side street. 

* Males are nine times more likely to get hit than females.  Anecdotally, I frequently see bicycle marauder couples barreling through traffic with the male in the lead and the female behind, looking very nervous.  The city of Portland judges the safety of a cycling route network by the percent of riders using it who are female.  In the core region of the city, which has a very mature cycling network, about half the cyclists are female.  In the east outskirts of Portland, which has a much poorer network, about ninety percent of riders are male.  So which comes first, the nerve to ride where there is no network or a cycling style that invites accidents?  Answer: what’s the difference?  When you’re hit, you’re hit.  If you’re a guy, you wait one second before you try whatever you’re going to try.

* You’re going to get hit in a roundabout – one study found that bicycle accidents increased 41%(!) in an intersection when a roundabout was installed.  The purpose of a roundabout is to slow car traffic down.  Hah!  Any cyclist knows roundabouts are insanely dangerous.  They cause the cyclist to weave into the lane of parked cars, disappearing temporarily from the line of vision of the driver who is trying to get around us, then popping up suddenly at the roundabout exit.  The rule of riding is always to hold a straight line if you can.  And I think car drivers imagine that the width of the road remains the same through roundabouts, which it doesn’t.

* You’re going to get hit by a car going fast.  Although traffic volume didn’t affect the accident rate in intersections, speed did.  When auto speed exceeds 30mph, the rate of bicycle-car accidents jumps way up.  The problems here are the reaction time of the driver and their belief that if they’re doing thirty or so miles per hour, there is no way a cyclist could keep up, so the mere act of passing said cyclist means they’re no longer in the picture.  Give me a mild downhill on a smooth road and I can hit thirty pretty easily.  I constantly check my speed in traffic not because the speed at which I’m travelling is inherently unsafe; car drivers simply don’t imagine I can go that fast, that’s what makes it the speed unsafe.

* You’re going to get hit in poor visibility.  Night and deeply overcast skies come to mind, but think also of those first Spring days in Portland when the sun pops out and everyone forgets their sunglasses at home.  If you’re having trouble seeing, so is everyone else.

* You’re going to get hit around a bus stop.  Buses are huge vehicles, and the visibility of the driver – whose main worry is for the pedestrians waiting for the bus – can be quite poor.  A bus is also one of the few vehicles that routinely pull over to the curb, sometimes quickly, as in when a rider pulls the stop signal cord at the last minute.

So then, your perfect nightmare?  Being a guy riding through a high-speed roundabout in poor visibility right where a bus stop is located.  They might as well measure you for hospital traction now.  

Life as a Schnook

“When a thief meets the Prophet, all he sees are His pockets.” – Sufi saying

If bad habits are hard to break, they’re impossible to forget.  That’s why, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous never considers people ‘former’ alcoholics even if they’ve sworn off drink for life; the presumption is that alcohol never releases its grip on one’s life.  In an otherwise forgettable film called Tango Assassin, Robert Duval plays an alcoholic assassin who, although he no longer drinks, after a hit dips his fingers into whiskey and dabs it on his face.  He might not drink but he has to smell it, be near it, he can not deny the allure of it.  It’s a mindset, and it doesn’t change. 

It isn’t just Duval’s character, or just alcohol.  There are gambling addicts who no longer gamble but can still give you precise odds on games of chance.  Just by driving through a neighborhood, a person who used to break into houses can tell at a glance which ones are vulnerable and exactly where; they don’t even have to think about it, they just know.

What do you do with knowledge like that?  Well, recovering substance abusers often become substance abuse counselors, recovering gamblers counsel current gamblers.  Gambling cheats who get caught hire themselves out to spot other cheats.  Former thieves consult in various ways about security, former hackers are hired to try to break into data systems. 

And maybe former traffic hellions start blogs about responsible cycling.  Even though I’ve been hit six times by cars, and although I think my days of flouting traffic laws and norms are long behind me, I still know exactly how to flout them.  I pull up to an intersection and can tell instantly when the timing is right to squirt through the cross-traffic because the oncoming cars, while they don’t have time to pass by at their current speed, do have time to brake enough for me to get across.  Right-of-way and room on the road don’t matter, if the other guy can slow down in time to let you do what you want.  Just ignore the honking horn.  This actually works almost all the time – if you don’t get hit trying it.

Perhaps like other patterns of bad habits, one is never fully ‘cured’ of riding in traffic like a hellion.  And just like a reformed alcoholic in a bar or a reformed gambler at the blackjack table, when sitting at a traffic light and watching current hellions blow by again and again, it can be more than a little tempting to join them.  Waiting patiently for the light, doing the right thing, can make a person feel like a schnook.

In the next-to-last scene from Goodfellas, mob soldier-turned-snitch Henry Hill has been relocated to a nameless cookie-cutter suburb as part of the Witness Protection Program.  He complains about ordering pasta and marinara sauce but getting egg noodles and ketchup.  He complains that there’s no action.  His reward for a life of crime, for getting caught dealing cocaine and having all his crime buddies turn their backs on him, for turning state’s evidence, is living the rest of his life like a schnook, a sap, a patsy, a sucker.  It’s the hardest part of going straight because let’s face it, doing something wrong and getting away with it is a thrill; otherwise, people wouldn’t do it.  It feels wonderful to get away with breaking rules, showing everyone that they don’t apply to you.  As Renton from Trainspotting said, “We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.”  It feels great.

Eventually, though, most everyone who breaks the rules stops doing it, even Renton, even Henry Hill.  Maybe some begrudging maturity process kicks in, maybe people just get too tired to game the system anymore.  Maybe they have kids and realize that breaking rules is really fun but it’s no way to get along in society.  Or maybe they get hit enough on their bike that they finally concede that one of these days they’re not going to walk away.  Ultimately, breaking the rules is just not sustainable except for the very lucky, skilled, cruel few.  For most of us, it just can’t last.

But there’s more of an upside to being a schnook than surrendering to conformity.  It’s hard to believe when you’re plugged into the thrill of rule-breaking but there’s actually something comforting about not breaking them, about sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change, knowing it will change and knowing you’ll then go confidently on your way.  A light near my work used to take forever to change; each day as I approached it with the crosswalk sign flashing, the urge to sprint through yellow-then-red was very hard to resist.   Depending on how close I was I can’t say I resisted that urge every time, but I can say that both the urge to go and the urge to resist were there every time, duking it out in my head.

Then the other day I noticed that the light was changing much more quickly.  Someone down at city traffic control noticed the problem and fixed it.  Now there’s no urge to run it; it’ll change in a minute.  Now I don’t have to think about it.

Maybe that’s one of the upsides to being a schnook: you have more time to think.  It’s like a retirement in a way; your stress level drops, you’re calmer, you’re not looking over your shoulder for the driver you pissed off to come back for revenge, or the motorcycle cop you hadn’t spotted but who witnessed the whole string of laws you just broke.  You’re free to look forwards, not backwards.  That tax return you filed five years ago?; it’s fine, you did it right, you didn’t cheat.  You’re not getting any calls from the IRS.    

When you’re not worried that your world might collapse in a few short seconds it’s easier to enjoy, and you’re less tempted to chuck it all over for those briefer thrills.  Me?  Tonight I’m going to ride home like a schnook and ignore any traffic feats of derring-do that may present themselves.  There may be no peaks on the way home, but there won’t be any valleys, either.  It may not be possible to say I’m cured but for me, it’s fun enough now just to ride a bike. 

Never Growing Up

"Methinks I doth protest too much

And no matter what the people say

I'm gonna have to get in touch

With my inner adult someday” – Joe Jackson

I live in Portland, Oregon, where discussions of one’s inner child abound.  Portland may be the ultimate ‘do your own thing in a peaceful way’ city in the country, and the Inner Child who wants to skip rope, play Frisbee and on the swings and teeter-totter, and definitely NOT come in for dinner and homework is as iconic an image as any.  If anyone decides to name themselves Inner Child and run for office, I would not bet against them winning (I can see the campaign slogan now: Naps for everyone!). 

There’s something alluring about the concept, and there may be some substance in it.  I’m in the middle of the usual lifespan; my dad recently died at the age of 84, my granddaughter was born ten months before that.  I thought that by now I would be closer to ‘dad-like’ than ‘granddaughter-like’ thinking, but then this happened: several months before dad died, he told me, “I just don’t feel old.”  Don’t feel old?  The man walked with a cane, plotted his course through buildings based on the location of the bathrooms, spent twelve to fourteen hours a day asleep, and considered shopping for groceries and then making dinner a full day.  How does he not feel old? 

Soon after dad died, my daughter voiced something similar.  Mother to a ten-month old, she said she didn’t feel like a mom, or how she thought she’d feel when she became a mom.  Maybe she thought she’d receive some special endowment of wisdom and patience.  She always thought she’d be a mom, but didn’t think she would be a mom. 

Maybe as adults we always think of ourselves as being younger than we really are.  I no longer eat myself sick on junk food, and a glass of wine with dinner pretty much does it for me and alcohol these days.  Maybe I’m smarter.  I would say I’m considered by and large an upstanding member of the community.  So yes, there are differences between the current me and the younger me.  Yet maturity was never something I made a goal, it was more like something I reconciled myself to, that I talked myself into because it was good for me, like doing homework.  Something I’m glad I did once I’ve done it.

But if play and joyful self-expression are aspects of childhood, so are petulance, self-centeredness, even a shocking level of innocent and unintended cruelty.  I am thinking here of how my fifteen month-old granddaughter tries to pet the dog: by swinging at it. Something else I see her do: arrange everything just so to her liking.  Move one of her dolls and you’ll hear about it, believe me.

Since I was twelve, the bicycle has been a primary means of adventure; it is joyful exuberance to ride.  I would ride through neighborhoods I’d discovered and gaze at the houses that looked almost exactly like mine, but it seemed to me that the people who lived in them surely led far more interesting lives than I did.  It was a thrilling adventure, and I still feel exactly that way.  But back then I also reacted sometimes with impatience, indignation, a sense of hurt.  I personalized the objective, had an impulse to hit out.  And I liked everything just so: I chafed at having to wait at stop signs, snorted with indignation at various inconveniences in the path of my ride.  Thing is, I still feel those same things, and I even feel them in the same way.  Like my dad and my daughter, I find myself sometimes feeling about myself like I can always remember feeling.

But I don’t act on those feelings the way I used to, and therein lies the danger of idealizing the Inner Child.  Feelings come in packages, in sets; they can’t be distilled and only the good parts purified.  A childhood made up solely of dreamy wonder is a work of monumental revisionist thinking; a similar adulthood can only be unworkably wishful.  On the bike I hope that some part of me will always feel like a twelve-year old on an adventure, but to enjoy it I have keep a handle on childish responses of anger and resentment.  For that, I’ll need my Inner Adult.

Nothing Happened

My short two-mile commute was mildly harrowing this morning (wait a minute: is there such a thing as ‘mildly’ harrowing?).  Something along the lines of a Planes, Trains and Automobiles commute: Dogs, Cars and Cyclists. 

Riding down a neighborhood street a small dog came after me.  The dog itself wasn’t dangerous, but traffic was on the street, and unanticipated evasive maneuvers can be tricky.  The bigger highlight was that this dog has come after me before.  Its owners walk the dog without holding onto the leash even though they’ve seen it chase bicycles.  I lost my serenity:

“This is the second time your dog has come after me.  Why is it not being held?” I demanded to know.  The elderly male of the couple walked into the street and took up the leash and pulled the dog back.  “Are you hurt?” he inquired, with the obvious answer being ‘no.’  The dog had pulled up beside me but had not tried to bite, the implication was that I had nothing to complain about.  My noisy counter-points did not carry the day.

A few minutes later, approaching a right turn controlled by a traffic light, a car zipped ahead of me with about thirty feet to go to the light, crowded over to the right, cut off the bike lane, trying to beat me through the intersection.  Traffic held the driver up, though, and I was able to reestablish position and proceed with my own right turn safely. 

And at my final light, at which right-turning traffic can continue on a green arrow while through-traffic is stopped, a cyclist turning right flew past me with inches to spare, just as the through-light was turning green and I was pushing off to go straight.

In every case I imagined the offending party saying the same thing the dog owner did: Are you hurt?  Did anything happen? 

Well no, nothing happened.  All parties to these encounters went on their way essentially unchanged.  Yet for each encounter, only fragile inches separated us from a ruined morning, from injury, from having much bigger problems to worry about.   

We’re a society that waits for something bad to happen before we take any action.  This is true from personal habits to national policy.  Prevention is not high on our list of priorities.  We’re not a people who ask ‘what if’ that often.  We dodge bullets and behave as if that is our birthright.

But when those bullets hit we yell, we accuse, we demand punishment of the guilty and compensation for the victims.  Only rarely do we put together our blithe indifference and our blind outrage.  We don’t see that often the reason things happen is because we assume that they won’t.  We ignore the fact that the usual difference between something and nothing happening is infinitesimally small, and that we can never know which situations will end up as ‘something’ and which ones as ‘nothing.’  When nothing happens we act as if we knew it all along.

But things did happen this morning.  Dangerous forces in the world moved dangerously closer to one another.  Every one of the people involved in all three encounters, I would say, had their mornings altered, their serenity diminished.  Only at our peril do we only allow these moments to pass unnoticed.  Only at our peril do we fail to allow the question ‘what if’ to govern our actions in trafficked space. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Cycling

This post is dedicated to the memory of Wouter Weylandt, who died yesterday in a solo accident during the Giro d’Italia stage race.  The best description of what happened is that Weylandt was descending and looking behind him to see what riders were following when either his pedal or handlebar clipped a low stone wall on the left side of the road, stopping the bike in its tracks and catapulting him across the road and into another stone wall.  All attempts at reviving him were futile.

This was one of the top cyclists in the world, a great bike handler, racing on a road closed to traffic.  Even under the most ideal circumstances, the fragility of cycling shows itself.

In trafficked space, equality of use notwithstanding, no one is more vulnerable than a cyclist.  Pedestrians move too slowly to hurt themselves that often; usually they have to be struck in order to be injured badly and they don’t (or shouldn’t) spend that much time in the actual street.  Vehicles, while traveling at sometimes dangerous speeds, nonetheless are designed to protect occupants during accidents.  As vehicle safety has increased over the years, motor vehicle crashes that result in serious injury or death have fallen dramatically.

Cycling, on the other hand, combines the most dangerous features of pedestrians and vehicles: the vulnerability of the walker, and the position on the road and much of the speed of an automobile.  Far more agile than a car, the bicycle is still not nearly as agile as a pedestrian, not nearly as able to get out of harm’s way quickly.  Without question, cyclists risk the most on the road.   

So if cyclists feel as though they are defending a lifestyle against long odds, this is the reason.  No one has more at stake on the road.  As indignant as drivers might sometimes be at their presence, the close calls and brush-bys that cyclist endure might damage the finish on a car or put a dent in a quarter-panel – they’ll send a cyclist to the hospital.  If there is a sense of entitlement to the road on the part of bicyclists, it comes from nowhere more fully than here.

Which begs the question: why ride?  Or at least, why ride crazy?  I’ll ignore all the great economic and environmental reasons to ride.  Certain activities, it seems to me, are almost genetic in nature.  Put me on a bike and I will happily work away for hours.  Turn it into a field sport or swimming or something and I’m done in half an hour.  From all I’ve read of Wouter Weylandt, he simply loved to ride, and for people like that, like me, nothing can substitute.

So riding crazy then; why do some cyclists take so many risks in traffic when the stakes are so frightfully high?  Rebelliousness, the flow of the ride, habit … nothing would seem to justify the horrific potential of getting hit in traffic, so I won’t try.  All I will ask is that drivers not punish riders through the use of their cars.  If you watch a cyclist blow a red light in traffic and it gets under your skin, please do not pass them with only inches to spare to show your disapproval.  Whatever they do isn’t enough to justify them ending up under your bumper, even if you have no intention of your actions leading to that.   And if ‘justice’ catches up them, may it be in the form of a police officer or maturity and not a life-altering injury.  Maybe they’ll take up racing and get their speed ya-yas out in a legitimate form.  Maybe they’ll turn out to be as warm and considerate a person as Wouter Weylandt was in his short life, and may they have a longer life to be that good person.  Please give them that chance.

Rest in Pease, Wouter Weylandt.