“Moral weightlessness” of cyclists?

[arlrider]

@Orestes Munn 97616 wrote:

While segregated facilities are great, I still worry about their ultimate effect on my ability to use the road when I want to and without harassment by motorists.

Yep. The M street lane is the epitome of this in my book. I rode M street home in the afternoons for the better part of 3 years. No bike lane, no problem. Traffic was either flowing and flowed right around me, or was gridlocked and I picked my way through. Everybody got along fine. In the city’s infinite wisdom, they installed their cute little lane that looks like it was designed by a 2nd-grader high on crack. Now we have mixing-zone hell, constant door threat from passenger sides, blind right hooks, the lovely bike stoplight there at 22nd that begs some out-of-towner or oblivious Marylander to make a right on red and wipe out a whole pack of us. Not even to mention Advisory Board’s constant limo blockage of the lane, buses at the Fairmont that unload right into the thing, gravel piles, heaps of wet leaves, and sections where so much pavement has fallen away that the lane looks like the Cliffs of Moher. And about 20 other things I could complain about.

But the second I pull into a traffic lane now that we’ve got our own little segregated infrastructure? Honks, swerving, yelling, etc. Great result.

[PotomacCyclist]

@baiskeli 97607 wrote:

To put a finer point on it: at least among some Americans, a bike is what you ride before you get your driver’s license. Driving = adulthood. Though this has changed a great deal, and some young people don’t rush out to get their driver’s licenses the day they are old enough.

Well, it sometimes reduces conflicts with cyclists and others, so that’s a good thing. It could be a statement that bikes are important and belong. Some people see it as a waste of their tax money on a “hobby” though.

Many more young adults are delaying when they obtain a driver’s license these days. Plus many of the so-called millennials have begun to move to urban centers with convenient mass transit and walkable and bikeable areas. Most people still drive nationwide, but not in some areas, including D.C. Transit and walking are very popular among D.C. workers, with cycling moving up in popularity too.

In D.C., the combination of more bike infrastructure plus the growth and popularity of Capital Bikeshare (CaBi) have begun to change the overall culture and perception of cyclists. Cycling is seen as more of a normal part of life in this area, although of course there are still some who cling onto rabid anti-bike attitudes and misinformation. Cycling in this area is far from perfect, so I welcome continued improvement of infrastructure, attitudes, behavior by all users of the roads and trails and bikeshare. But when you look at what cycling was like 10 years ago (when I didn’t ride at all, and never even considered the fact that I might someday start to bike frequently), it really is a big improvement. So there’s that.

[Orestes Munn]

Oh yes. Biking is big. Legislators and planners differ only in degree of friendliness to cycling. The proliferation of bicycle shops in the last decade is staggering. Cycling appears in ads from every cheesy HMO, clothing manufacturer, and yogurt fermenter. (No auto maker or oil baron loses a penny when someone buys a bike.) Cycling has become more embedded in the culture than at any time since the 1890s.

…and yet, somehow, it sucks like 1975 out on the road and I’m 58 instead of 19 and living in a contributory negligence state.

[DismalScientist]

I recall 1975. It was the beginning of a bike boom. There was very little bike infrastructure. Yet, I don’t remember that it sucked. I think the level of suckyness has more to do with the amount of traffic and location rather than time in history.
This area sucks due to the general attitude of all traffic, be it drivers, cyclists, or pedestrians. However, it is getting better.

[Crickey7]

@DismalScientist 97682 wrote:

I recall 1975. It was the beginning of a bike boom.

I remember biking in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. If you may recall, the saying in buying bikes and bke parts for a long time was “Cheap, light or strong: pick two.” The bikes from that era allowed you to pick one. The friction shift derailleurs on my 12-speed Peugeot were made out of cast aluminum, possibly the worst material ever used for bike parts.

[Orestes Munn]

@Crickey7 97695 wrote:

I remember biking in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. If you may recall, the saying in buying bikes and bke parts for a long time was “Cheap, light or strong: pick two.” The bikes from that era allowed you to pick one. The friction shift derailleurs on my 12-speed Peugeot were made out of cast aluminum, possibly the worst material ever used for bike parts.

I picked 1975 (might have been 76) because I was in my second year of college, got the racing bug and was introduced to the outer-suburban roads of Southeastern PA, after having grown up riding around the streets of Manhattan. I had never been assaulted simply for the act of riding a bicycle before.

As to gear, that year I got a nice little used Coppi frame with a Campy group and tubulars. I loved that bike and rusted through two paint jobs from the sweat I generated on it. It was light and strong enough (except for the crevice-corroded crank arm, which nearly neutered me). I didn’t mind the friction levers.

As I remember, the bike boom had been in full flower for a few years, because we all had UO-8s, Fujis, and Atalas in high school and the coolest kids had PX-10s and Paramounts.

[Crickey7]

I think the issue in the early 1980’s was that manufacturers were desperately trying to reduce weight, but the technology and materials they had available to them were not really up to the task. You may recall a brief obsession with drilling components. Then, of course, we saw the creation of the oversized aluminum frame with its astonishing lightness but incredibly harsh ride qualities.

The bikes we have today are truly wonderful. Light, fast, reliable and comfortable. Nostalgia is fine, but I’d ride a 2015 Roubaix frame with 105 components over any bike made before 2000.

[Orestes Munn]

@Crickey7 97699 wrote:

I think the issue in the early 1980’s was that manufacturers were desperately trying to reduce weight, but the technology and materials they had available to them were not really up to the task. You may recall a brief obsession with drilling components. Then, of course, we saw the creation of the oversized aluminum frame with its astonishing lightness but incredibly harsh ride qualities.

The bikes we have today are truly wonderful. Light, fast, reliable and comfortable. Nostalgia is fine, but I’d ride a 2015 Roubaix frame with 105 components over any bike made before 2000.

I just put new old-stock Dura Ace 7800 and Ksyrium Elites on my 1983 Peter Mooney. I take a Burkean, incrementalist, approach to updating bike gear.

[acorn]

I am wondering- why do we think that there are a lot of drivers who hold negative atttitudes towards cyclists? I ride every day and very rarely encounter a driver who is deliberately rude. In fact, I have found that drivers tend to be careful and polite around me. When a driver does something that might be dangerous to me, I can almost always tell that the driver was being inattentive (texting, talking on phone) rather than deliberate.

I think that our perception of this issue is strongly influenced by the small minority of people who are hostile to cyclists and make a lot of noise about it- ill-tempered newspaper columnists, people who write angry letters to the editor and leave comments on online articles, people who say anti-cycle things at public forums, etc. I think that this is a small minority, but since they make so much noise and are often so over-the-top with their rhetoric, they get a lot of attention.

[Crickey7]

What, this thread isn’t about bike weight? My bad.

[mstone]

Well yeah, of course it’s a minority of motorists who are actively hostile. Cyclists tend to give them a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s pretty easy for a nut job to kill or maim us without consequence, regardless of how many other motorists are perfectly decent humans.

[Steve O]

@mstone 97709 wrote:

Well yeah, of course it’s a minority of motorists who are actively hostile. Cyclists tend to give them a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s pretty easy for a nut job to kill or maim us without consequence, regardless of how many other motorists are perfectly decent humans.

But this goes both ways. Most cyclists are not crazed maniacs out to buzz small children on the trails and knock over old ladies in their quest for a KOM*. But non-cyclists (and even we, too) tend to give them a disproportionate amount of attention. It upsets us that no one notices the vast majority of perfectly decent cyclists.
That said, I understand the difference between the potential damage a nut-job driver can do compared to a nut-job bike rider.

[bobco85]

@acorn 97705 wrote:

I am wondering- why do we think that there are a lot of drivers who hold negative atttitudes towards cyclists? I ride every day and very rarely encounter a driver who is deliberately rude. In fact, I have found that drivers tend to be careful and polite around me. When a driver does something that might be dangerous to me, I can almost always tell that the driver was being inattentive (texting, talking on phone) rather than deliberate.

I think that our perception of this issue is strongly influenced by the small minority of people who are hostile to cyclists and make a lot of noise about it- ill-tempered newspaper columnists, people who write angry letters to the editor and leave comments on online articles, people who say anti-cycle things at public forums, etc. I think that this is a small minority, but since they make so much noise and are often so over-the-top with their rhetoric, they get a lot of attention.

I am invoking Hanlon’s law here: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I think the majority of driver-cyclist interactions where the driver does something dangerous around the cyclist can be attributed most of the time to driver stupidity/incompetance, sometimes distraction, sometimes being aggressive (I would call this “offensive driving”), and rarely malice.

That said, I think a majority of drivers while aware of cycling do not understand it (mostly because they do not cycle themselves). They do not know what it’s like to be in a bike lane, sharrows, neighborhood street, 3 lane highway, etc. at different times of day and in different types of weather behind/in front of/next to a truck, bus, car, etc. on everything from a quick trip to the grocery store to a century+ ride. They don’t understand that the Idaho stop you just did might have been safer and less disruptive to traffic even though it was clearly illegal.

It’s this misunderstanding that leads to people thinking bikes should be on the sidewalk, off the sidewalk, on the road, off the road, only in bike lanes/cycletracks/trails, etc., biking is so dangerous that no one should do it, and cyclists are scofflaws that only care about themselves and their kind. This general misunderstanding leaves people more vulnerable to being taken on the crazy train by anti-cycling folks.

TL;DR – Hanlon’s law applies to dangerous drivers, and non-cyclists don’t understand cyclists.

[mstone]

@Steve O 97714 wrote:

But this goes both ways. Most cyclists are not crazed maniacs out to buzz small children on the trails and knock over old ladies in their quest for a KOM*. But non-cyclists (and even we, too) tend to give them a disproportionate amount of attention. It upsets us that no one notices the vast majority of perfectly decent cyclists.
That said, I understand the difference between the potential damage a nut-job driver can do compared to a nut-job bike rider.

Right, you’ve already pointed out the false equivalency. So no, it doesn’t work both ways. You’re also responding to what I said without looking at the context: the question I was answering was “why do [cyclists] think there are […] drivers who hold negative atttitudes towards cyclists?” (And the answer was, basically, because it only takes one time for a nutjob in a black SUV to come up honking and yelling to create a very lasting impression.) The context is important because I was only answering a question: I have no desire to engage on whether cyclists or non-cyclists should or shouldn’t have perceptions about one another because that is in my mind completely irrelevant. Instead, policy should be guided by evidence-based identification and mitigation of actual risks. It doesn’t really matter if the guy in the black SUV hates my guts as long as he thinks it’s likely he’ll be penalized if he hits me and that keeps him from doing so. More to the point, I don’t care whether the motorist who’s speeding and not leaving enough space is doing it because they hate me or because they’re playing with their phone, I just want sufficient automated enforcement (and self driving cars) that the problem goes away. And I don’t care whether or not bad cyclists affect how 3rd parties view cyclists, I just want them punished when they engage in behavior that puts others at risk so that they don’t do that anymore.

I guess overall I think the idea that “moral weightlessness” is a policy driver is misguided. The real problem is the amorality of a society which rejects the introspection necessary to evaluate its own norms. People aren’t speeding because they think pedestrians lack moral standing, they’re speeding because, in general, they really can’t comprehend that their 10MPH “speeding freebie” significantly reduces the chance that their victim will walk away if they hit someone. They aren’t blocking bike facilities because they don’t think cyclists are worthy, they’re blocking bike facilities because they really believe that if the resources were instead dedicated to just a few more feet of pavement for cars, traffic would disappear and they’d be able to drive the way the car commercials promise. This is a failure of rational thought, not a failure of morality.

[jrenaut]

@mstone 97722 wrote:

Right, you’ve already pointed out the false equivalency. So no, it doesn’t work both ways…

I agree with you on what should and shouldn’t be driving policy, but I disagree that we can look past perceptions. I don’t think we can make real changes happen without at least understanding why people ride and walk and drive the way they do and how they view others riding, walking, and driving.

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