Altercation in Rock Creek Park Today. Insight?

[mattotoole]

Yup, the good ol’ National Park Service – harping on relatively minor hazards, while totally ignoring a lot of very dangerous situations in their jurisdiction.

It’s as if they’re trying to advertise being all about safety and order, while totally incompetent at providing it.

[consularrider]

@DCAKen 83769 wrote:

One point not discussed is why there is a “Walk your bike” sign on the trail here to begin with. That location wider than several other sections of the trail, like here or here.

The NPS also puts yellow diamond dismount and walk bike signs along the MVT where it crosses streets and for the too narrow Memorial Bridge underpass. Are the ones on the Rock Creek trail diamond or rectangular?

[mattotoole]

^^^A mounted cyclist is a lot narrower than a dismounted one, which/who might block a whole path without any easy way to let another slip by.

But it’s as if a person on a bike is inherently unstable and precarious, about to run over or crash into anyone or anything around them. So the only “safe” thing is to make them get off — ridiculous.

[krazygl00]

@lordofthemark 83766 wrote:

4. Cyclists are not responsible for the behavior of other cyclists any more than drivers or pedestrians or blacks or whites or gays or straights or gentiles or jews are so responsible for members of their group. Anyone is free to alter their own behavior for the sake of optics if they choose (I note that I personally am generally more of a “compliant” cyclist than a “momentumist”) just as one is free to support cycling in many other ways.

This is kind of the Collective Salvation of the cycling world. I don’t really begrudge anyone from taking this stance, but the benefit is dubious to me at best. I prefer as more effective the posture of asserting rights not because of having proven ourselves – through some kind of vague cultural referendum – collectively worthy of them, but because they are both the law, and buttressed by the founding principles of our society, and that my rights as a cyclist are individual rights that belong to me right here and now, regardless of prior actions of others.

[KLizotte]

^^The problem arises when a lot of cyclists behave badly and society decides to take away our “rights” because of the scofflaws. Or, people jump to conclusions, as humans are apt to do, and automatically assume a cyclist/driver will do XX because they have seen so many others do XX.

And remember that kids internalize how cyclists and drivers behave and learn from them.

I say be a good citizen and set a good example; there are real world externalities associated with good and bad behavior. Such is life.

[cvcalhoun]

I don’t know how much of this is actually bad behavior by cyclists, and how much is the fact that so few people cycle. A motorist who sees a pedestrian doing something inconvenient for the motorist is probably a pedestrian at other times, and thus more likely a) to recognize that the action is legal, or b) to have some sympathy for why the pedestrian is doing it if it is not. By contrast, a cyclist is often assumed to be doing something illegal even when that is not the case. And people are far more censorious of cyclists who do things that are illegal but not unsafe (e.g., going through a red light when there is no traffic coming, which may actually be safer than trying to start up at the exact same time as the cars do) than they are of pedestrians who do the exact same thing.

We talk about making illegal actions by cyclists more “unacceptable.” But many times, just riding legally is already unacceptable to a lot of people. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been riding legally and carefully on the street, only to be told, “Get onto the sidewalk.” And if I ride legally and carefully on the sidewalk, I get, “Get onto the street.” If people learn that they will be yelled at whenever they ride, then they either stop riding or learn to ignore the yelling. And if they do the latter, social pressure becomes ineffective as a way of moderating behavior.

When drivers routinely violate laws, we look at why they are doing it, and try to change the conditions. For example, when violations of the speed limit are an issue, we set up speed traps (on major highways) or install speed bumps (in the subdivisions). We also ignore minor violations (driving a few miles over the speed limit) in favor of getting the ones that are an actual safety hazard. What we do not do is to treat all motorists badly because some violate the law, or to expect motorists to comply with the law simply out of the goodness of their hearts.

I would love to see the same thing happen with cyclists. On the running red lights thing, for example, let’s have green lights for bicyclists that start a few seconds before those for motorists, so that a bicyclist who waits for the green light won’t be risking getting hit by a car turning right that doesn’t see the cyclist. Let’s have tickets issued for people (pedestrians and cyclists) who go through red lights when there is traffic coming. And let’s treat pedestrians and cyclists who go through red lights when there is no traffic coming the same way, whether that means ticketing both or neither.

@KLizotte 83808 wrote:

^^The problem arises when a lot of cyclists behave badly and society decides to take away our “rights” because of the scofflaws. Or, people jump to conclusions, as humans are apt to do, and automatically assume a cyclist/driver will do XX because they have seen so many others do XX.

And remember that kids internalize how cyclists and drivers behave and learn from them.

I say be a good citizen and set a good example; there are real world externalities associated with good and bad behavior. Such is life.

[KLizotte]

@cvcalhoun 83822 wrote:

I would love to see the same thing happen with cyclists. On the running red lights thing, for example, let’s have green lights for bicyclists that start a few seconds before those for motorists, so that a bicyclist who waits for the green light won’t be risking getting hit by a car turning right that doesn’t see the cyclist. Let’s have tickets issued for people (pedestrians and cyclists) who go through red lights when there is traffic coming. And let’s treat pedestrians and cyclists who go through red lights when there is no traffic coming the same way, whether that means ticketing both or neither.

I appreciate the sentiment but given how many (read: the vast majority) of cyclists who ignore the lights (and the signs at every intersection informing them to follow the ped signals) on the 15th St cycletrack, I have little hope that we can count on our fellow cyclists to act sensibly.

In fact, I was getting a little annoyed the last time I used the cycletrack at rush hour because I didn’t want to have to deal with a grisly accident.* I also had a cyclist almost go up my backside because I stopped at the red light and cursed me out for it. Sigh.

If we can’t even act predictable, alert and legal (PAL) amongst ourselves on the cycletrack….

*The reason cyclists are instructed to follow the ped signals is because the cars can turn left on green arrows and cyclists were flying thru on the green arrows without looking right.

[mstone]

@KLizotte 83826 wrote:

If we can’t even act predictable, alert and legal (PAL) amongst ourselves on the cycletrack….

Please stop. There is no “we” and “ourselves”. It is completely possible to ride a bike without joining a cult. It does no service to further the idea that all cyclists are responsible for the behavior of all other cyclists. Nor is there any benefit in focusing on cyclist behavior and insisting that, if each cyclist were just a little better at following the law, then everything would be sunshine and roses. I tend to view this as a modern day scrupulosity; just as the medieval church recognized that there was a problem on obsessive concern for following religious proscriptions to avoid divine retribution, I think there’s a problem with obsessive concern for following traffic laws in order to avoid SUV retribution–especially if that concern is compounded with the discredited notion of collective punishment.

[cvcalhoun]

But what I suggested was a multi-pronged effort, including enforcement measures. In the case of motorists, we don’t write laws saying what the speed limit is, and then assume they will behave sensibly. We put up signs and try to make sure the speed limits are sensible for conditions and set up barriers (timed traffic lights, speed bumps) to discourage violations and choose to ignore minor violations and have police patrols out there giving people tickets for bigger violations. I suspect that if we just left it to motorists to find out what the law was regarding speed limits and took none of those other measures, we’d have as many motorists doing 90 mph on the Beltway as we now have cyclists running red lights.

With cyclists, we rarely do any of that, and never do all of it. On the one hand, we rarely have police ticketing people even for the most reckless behavior. On the other, we have a whole lot of intersections in which the needs of bicyclists are ignored altogether–e.g., having bicyclists start up at the same time as cars so that they will get clobbered by right-turning cars that don’t see them, or having lights that will change only if a car (but not a bicycle) arrives at the intersection.

I seriously doubt that the innate character of cyclists is all that much different than the innate character of motorists. In fact, I suspect that the very same people who breeze through red lights as cyclists don’t do so as motorists. What we have is a system in which violations by motorists are dealt with by coming up with a comprehensive effort to figure out how to curb the violations and no generalized hostility toward motorists, while violations by cyclists are dealt with by generalized hostility toward all cyclists and no real effort to figure out how to solve the problem.

@KLizotte 83826 wrote:

I appreciate the sentiment but given how many (read: the vast majority) of cyclists who ignore the lights (and the signs at every intersection informing them to follow the ped signals) on the 15th St cycletrack, I have little hope that we can count on our fellow cyclists to act sensibly.

In fact, I was getting a little annoyed the last time I used the cycletrack at rush hour because I didn’t want to have to deal with a grisly accident.* I also had a cyclist almost go up my backside because I stopped at the red light and cursed me out for it. Sigh.

If we can’t even act predictable, alert and legal (PAL) amongst ourselves on the cycletrack….

*The reason cyclists are instructed to follow the ped signals is because the cars can turn left on green arrows and cyclists were flying thru on the green arrows without looking right.

[thefalcon3a]

Before this gets too far off topic…

Thanks everyone for your comments on the situation I encountered. I mainly just wanted to check to see if either I blatantly missed something, or maybe if there was some sort of history at that particular area that I came into at the wrong time. To be fair, I likely would have not walked my bike in that narrow section I was approaching, so the guy would have had a sort-of-but-only-because-the-sign-is-dumb valid argument, had he waited 10 more seconds to start yelling at me.

To the comment about a mounted cyclist taking up less room than one walking: Because of this altercation, I obeyed the sign just after the zoo where there’s a narrow sidewalk on a bridge after a tunnel. Ironically, I got an angry look from an oncoming jogger who had a hard time getting past me. Had I been mounted, I would have stopped and moved all the way against the railing to leave her a lot more room.

An observation: I definitely have noticed a lot of the yellow diamond “walk your bike” signs in the Washington area, and they have been in strange places where I’ve made the decision to disobey them. Someone noted crosswalks on the MVT… there’s one just south of the airport that I don’t understand, since there’s a clear view of a long stretch of a ramp that cars rarely are on. There’s another one around a corner exiting a tunnel, which I (in my infinite wisdom) decided is just as safe to slow down and ring my bell until I pass through it. It seems silly for NPS to make us go through the trouble of dismounting in the name of safety, when there are other ways to safely and more efficiently navigate these areas.

For comparison, I live about a mile from the Baltimore and Annapolis Trail, which has dozens of intersections with residential streets, and they all just have stop signs. I’m unclear on whether or not I’m legally obligated to dismount at those intersections, but I never do… As long as you prepare yourself with a good gear setting as you approach, it’s much faster to get through the intersection on the bike than by walking… I like to believe that the motorists stopping for me are appreciative of this. Many of the intersections have long and clear visibility of the streets from the trail, so I give them the good ol’ Idaho Stop (had to look that one up when someone mentioned it, and it seems like a great law). I use the Idaho stop when I bike in Baltimore all the time. I’m not interested in getting mugged, so I’d rather keep moving!

Follow up question: After my ride I had lunch in Washington Circle, where I watched a ton of cyclists on bike share bikes without helmets fearlessly disregard every traffic law on the books. I can’t imagine how frustrating that must have been for the people trying to drive through the circle… Do you all think bike share, while making biking in the city a lot more accessible, has made it harder for us more responsible riders to advocate for ourselves? If you’ve ever been downtown to the tourist areas, you know how awful many of these riders can be!

[PotomacCyclist]

I see CaBi riders break certain traffic laws. But I also see car drivers break multiple laws at every intersection (speeding, running red lights, texting while driving). Why is it more of a problem for CaBi riders to be running stop signs than for car drivers to blow through red lights at high speed (because they are speeding up to beat the yellow, don’t come close, and continue on through the light anyway)? Some days, I see drivers running the red light at one of every three or four intersections I approach (as a pedestrian or as a cyclist). On other days, it happens at almost every intersection. When I ride in a taxi or stand on a sidewalk and watch car drivers on the road, about a quarter to a third of them are texting or websurfing on their phones while driving. Police stings (in Maryland) have found that nearly all car drivers will fail to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk (at certain crosswalks). Helmetless CaBi riders really shouldn’t be the primary concern of anyone who is worried about safety or traffic efficiency. If car drivers are being slowed down by CaBi riders around the Mall, I don’t see that as a problem. There are a lot of pedestrians and cyclists there. Drivers shouldn’t be speeding anyway. (Surveys such as the recent one on King St. in Alexandria show that the majority of drivers exceed the speed limit.)

[lordofthemark]

My thoughts, updated, on the optics issues.

First let me introduce or re-introduce a classification of cyclists from Copenhagenize (because I think it helps to clarify things, and because I love to put things in categories) Compliant cyclists, momentumists, and recklists. Compliants obey every law. Momentumists care about their own personal safety, but living in a world where the laws frequenty do not recognize cycling realities, make reasoned tradeoffs. Recklists do unsafe things. Obviously this is a simplification, as there are folks who will behave as momentumists in certain places, as compliant in others, etc. And we can debate about what is safe, as well as about what is legal.

My sense though is that few cyclists are recklists, and that many who do are not the kind who read forums like this. The debate is mostly about whether, at the margins, someone inclined to be a momentumist should be more compliant – IE someone should avoid some particular illegal action they consider safe, for the sake of how it looks.

On the one hand – I agree with most of those who have said that will make little difference. First off, a whole lot of people who arent cyclists do NOT adopt the whole anti cycling thing – whether because they are greens, because they see econ benefits to cycling, or because they have close friends or relatives who cycle who have educated them. The anti lobby is real, and is very vocal, but sometimes I think its not as big as the noise indicates. Secondly, a lot of the opposition has nothing to do with cyclist behavior and safety, but is about cultural clashes – whether because its that cyclists are green/liberal/hipsters (we know of course that many are not, but thats the image in some places) or because bike lanes are “stuff white people like” (the folks with the latter concern sometimes have a genuine fear of the tangible effects of demographic change, and are not simply speaking out of emotion) Others simply are concerned about road space – they don’t WANT to share the road. And some simply, as pointed out above, do not understand either what is legal, or what is safe, for cyclists. The odds, therefore, that any one person choosing to stop at a red light they could have safely proceeded through, making a non-zero difference is small.

On the other hand its not zero. Doing something for the sake of optics MAY have some, albeit tiny, positive impact on the conversation. Ergo, if someone chooses to do something for the sake of optics, even when it adds no safety benefit and makes their ride harder or slower, I say thanks, you did something good for cycling. But I also say that for people who do volunteer work as advocates, those who give money to bike advocacy, those who model to their coworkers that bike commuting is possible, those who provide valuable information about bike routes, bike equipment, etc, = IE those who do a lot of other things for cycling. None of us do all those things, and just as I won’t judge someone who doesn’t do those other things, I won’t judge someone who does not take optics into account in deciding how to bike. I will continue to use the phrase “Predictable, Alert, and Lawful” as MOST of the unlawful things one can do are unsafe, and for inexperienced cyclists being 100% compliant is probably the best course of action. It takes experience and judgement, I think, to make wise tradeoffs. (That is of course, one reason to keep some potentially safe actions illegal, but to give LE discretion in enforcement)

[DismalScientist]

Maybe we should adopt a similar classification for drivers…

I would feel more sympathy for those who don’t like all cyclists lumped in to one group (and I am one of those) if more of us didn’t do something similar by lumping all drivers into those that speed, fail to yield, text, etc.

I generally agree with your classification system, but justification for acting as a momentumist seems lacking. Presumably, drivers could be similarly classified and we would raise holy hell if there were a significant number of momentumist drivers that would run red lights after stopping when it was safe. They could come up with excuses — it saves gas not to remain idling at a stop light when they could safely proceed. (I personally view that argument that it is safer to proceed on the red for fear of a right hook to be complete nonsense. If you really fear a right hook from a stop, you are likely positioning yourself incorrectly at a stoplight. I have never experienced a near miss in this situation.)

@lordofthemark 83899 wrote:

On the one hand – I agree with most of those who have said that will make little difference. First off, a whole lot of people who arent cyclists do NOT adopt the whole anti cycling thing – whether because they are greens, because they see econ benefits to cycling, or because they have close friends or relatives who cycle who have educated them.

Gee… I think the vast majority of drivers not adopting the anti-cycling thing are not greens, nor care about the economic benefits (that do not accrue to them), nor have close cycling friend. They simply are not a$$holes.

[lordofthemark]

@DismalScientist 83906 wrote:

Maybe we should adopt a similar classification for drivers…

Oh absolutely. There are plenty of drivers, for example, who routinely drive 5 MPH over the posted speed limit, and who do not come to a full stop before making a right on red in a place with no visible pedestrians. They are making a reasoned judgement of safety vs convenience tradeoffs, just as momentumist cyclists do. I would suggest that they make up an even higher percentage of drivers compared with those 100% compliant with the letter of the law, as compared to momentumist cyclists. And yes, neither those drivers, nor the mass of momentumist cyclists, are recklists.

And the same tripartite classification applies to pedestrians as well.

As for your discussion, as I said, there is room for debate about exactly what is safe, and why. I note that the reason for allowing right turns on red (which used to be illegal, IIUC) was precisely a momentumist argument – that allowing it saved gasoline, by reducing idling. The difference is that momentumist arguments from drivers tend to directly impact law and policy more than such arguments from cyclists. Simply because of the difference in size of the modes.

Note, I personally do not proceed through reds. Both because, as a slower cyclist, that will typically mean simply getting sooner to a place where I will need to stop. And because I just don’t feel like I have a good enough gut feel of when that would be safe, or safer than waiting. And because I just don’t find that many places where that would be appropriate in NoVa (in FFX its typically a good distance between reds, and there is plenty of cross traffic at them – the route I take most in DC is the Eye Street bike lanes, and I generally find that the ability to cross with the ped signal works well there – and I simply don’t ride in North Arlington that much). To me there is almost zero benefit to proceeding through the red, so I might as well act for the sake of optics. I do however find many places where it makes abundant sense to treat stop signs as yield signs – notably the service lane on Little River Turnpike, and certain spots along Water Street SW in DC. I have decided in those instances that the momentumist approach has considerable benefit, and the negligible optics impact is not important enough to change my behavior. Of course there are some folks who have mentally asterisked the law at stop signs so that they consider themselves not to be momentumists, though they are actually in technical violation of the law.

[dasgeh]

@lordofthemark 83899 wrote:

My sense though is that few cyclists are recklists, and that many who do are not the kind who read forums like this. The debate is mostly about whether, at the margins, someone inclined to be a momentumist should be more compliant – IE someone should avoid some particular illegal action they consider safe, for the sake of how it looks.

I disagree that the only reason to be a compliant vs. a momentumist is optics.

And I believe we’ve entered the world of Divergent. Now I want to jump into a moving train.

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