My route to ECI and CSI

I discovered John Forester’s book Effective Cycling in 1978, before there was a League course. I had already cycled as an adult for 14 years, including 7 years in which I rode in Boston-area urban traffic and two years taking recreational rides and overnight tours. I was ready for the book’s instructions about bicyclists’ rights and lane positioning, I had to try these techniques only a few times to discover that they worked.

I began writing for bicycle magazines around the same time, first Bike World. I wrote only a couple of articles for this magazine, then Bicycling. My writing for Bicycling started with my commenting on technical errors which I recognized, with my engineering background. My first articles for were on mechanical topics, but I also took up writing articles about riding skills. I worked from home in the Boston area, with occasional visits to the Bicycling offices in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, during which I stayed at the home of John Schubert. Work for Bicycling Magazine led to my being listed as a contributing editor on the magazine’s masthead. I also landed a contract to write a book to be published by Rodale Press, publisher of Bicycling Magazine: The Complete Book of Bicycle Commuting. This book covered what I had learned from Forester about riding skills, but with some additions. Notably, my book  also covered riding in circular intersections (traffic circles, rotaries — no modern roundabouts yet) and winter riding. I included chapters on topics of particular interest to utility cyclists which Forester had covered only lightly or omitted. The book was illustrated with photos mostly by my friend Sheldon Brown, and drawings by Rodale artist George Retseck.

During that same time, I became increasingly skilled as a bicycle mechanic. Many articles I wrote were on mechanical topics. I built up and maintained my own bicycles.

I became an Effective Cycling instructor in 1982, working under my proctor, Richard Talbot. Reflecting the knowledge evident through my writing, I was able to be certified as an instructor following written and road tests, without having taken the course.

I became the main contributor to Bicycling’s In Traffic column, repeating and expanding on the matieral which I had written in my book.

In 1984, I jumped ship from Bicycling magazine along with several of its editors and took up writing for their new magazine, Bicycle Guide. It lasted for several years before it folded.

In 1985-86, Crown publishers had me prepare an updated version of Glenn’s Complete Bicycle Manual. This included much new material about equipment, particularly internal-gear hubs, and riding-skills information. Most of the new illustrations were photos that I took.

in 1986-87, Pat Brown at Rodale Press asked me to prepare a version of the traffic-skills section of The Complete Book of Bicycle Commuting for Rodale to offer as a premium booklet — Bicycling Street Smarts. And in the late 1990s, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation adopted this as the Pennsylvania Bicycle Driver’s Manual.

In 2003 I ran for Regional Director of the League of American Bicyclists, and was elected. I served on the League’s Board for 6 years and was a member of its Education Committee. One of my major efforts was in editing a book on bicycling skills.

I taught a reduced 20-hour version of the Effective Cycling course in the 1980s — leaving out the material about bicycle maintenance, which most people were going to leave to a bike shop anyway. I taught the further reduced 10-hour version around 2010 but was seriously unhappy with the quality of the teaching materials. It was good (!) that the League’s PDFs weren’t locked against change, because I had to move, rotate and resize images of bicycles and motor vehicles so they made sense.

I have looked through the League’s more recent materials and they are slicker, but they don’t cover traffic skills consistently and thoroughly enough to satisfy me.

I took the CyclingSavvy course in 2011 and the training to become an instructor in 2017. I learned:

  • Greater assertiveness in lane positioning -most usually, leaving a bike lane entirely rather than riding along its left edge, when that would encourage close passes;
  • Making lane changes in one step rather than two;
  • Group riding tactics: merging from the rear, riding in an orderly double file, communication within the group;
  • Taking advantage of traffic-signal timing to turn into a street when it would be empty, and immediately entering the appropriate lane rather than having to negotiate with motorists and merge across (though I was good at that).
  • A better approach to teaching, with excellent instructional materials and a guided discussion method.

I teach CyclingSavvy courses a couple times per year, contribute to the Savvy Cyclist blog, and serve as Chair of the Program Committee of the American Bicycling Education Association, the parent organization of the CyclingSavvy program.

Posted in Bicycling | 4 Comments

About Corking

“Corking” (unsanctioned ride marshaling, blocking intersections) is common practice on many urban rides that do not make arrangements with authorities. Corking is an element of what I’d call “vernacular cycling.” It is illegal, but police come to look the other way and even cooperate when they realize that they can’t manage the situation.
Why corking? The expense of a police detail may be prohibitive for the ride organizers; there may in fact be no organization beyond a ride announcement on social media; bureaucratic red tape may be inconvenient or expensive; and “corking” fosters a sense of empowerment over car culture with riders who are comfortable riding on streets as long as they are in a herd.
The lack of formal organization and legality has some serious disadvantages. A ride with corking is, from a legal point of view, an unauthorized parade. Riders can be held at fault in insurance claims in crashes that involve violations of traffic law, and ride leaders — if it can be determined who is responsible — can be held at fault and sued for promoting illegal behavior that leads to crashes. Insurance does not cover the organizers or riders, as it does on rides which are run by established sponsoring organizations which instruct riders to obey the law.
Attitudes on rides with corking range from who-cares, or in-your-face antagonistic (typical of Critical Mass rides) to party-like, often with blaring music system pulled on a trailer behind a bicycle, to friendly and convivial (as on the Jingle Ride held every December in Cambridge and Boston, where riders dress up in Santa Claus, reindeer, Cat in the Hat etc. costumes, engage with bystanders and stop at a few points along the route to sing schlock Christmas songs — Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and the like).
It might be, in time, that ride marshaling duties could be assigned with less red tape, but for now, “corking” reflects unwritten, unspoken and generally uncharitable understandings between ride organizers and their followers, the police and the non-participating general public.
Posted in Bicycling | 1 Comment

Roger Geller’s categories conflate characteristics.

Aligning characteristics which do not necessarily go with one another is to create a preordained conclusion and a stereotype. Examples: red-headed and hot-tempered; male and sexist; dumb and blonde. A respectable study would not lump characteristics together, but rather, describe each characteristic precisely and then study correlations between them.

Portland, Oregon bicycle coordinator Roger Geller’s four categories of cyclists each conflate two characteristics in this way: Strong and Fearless, Enthused and Confident, Interested but Concerned, No How, No Way.

Below is  an illustration from the Web, showing Geller’s categories. There are actually 16 categories, as each of the characteristics could be either present or absent. Comments are below the illustration.

Roger Geller's typology

* Fearless is not necessarily strong. This category perpetuates the myth of bicyclists’ success on the road depending on speed, and the spandex-clad road warrior. I am old and so, slow, but fearless because I am skillful. People who train for fitness (often indoors) but lack bike handling and road skills are fast and fearful.

* Badvocacy’s driving force is people who are enthused but not confident. Counterexample: my son learned how to operate in traffic on the back of our tandem, but now as an adult doesn’t choose to ride a bicycle — he is confident but not enthused. What he learned, though, serves him very well as a motorist.

* Interested but concerned: Many people are concerned and uninterested. They don’t ride bicycles and worry about my safety as I am about to ride away. Others are interested but unconcerned. They ride bicycles or have friends and family who do, and are not consumed by worry.

* No how: literally, can’t ride a bicycle because of a physical, sensory or mental impediment (so much for the idea of “all ages and abilities”). No way: — can’t afford to keep a bicycle, it was stolen etc. The two terms recited together are slang term which refers to aversion, but the illustration is of a man with a cane, who has an impediment (no way).

A study was conducted based on these conflated categories, to reach preordained conclusions.

I like to demonstrate and teach  how cyclists can be confident, safe and fearless without necessarily being strong — that is my goal as a bicycling instructor.

Levels of traffic stress depend on skill level, not only on riding environment as indicated in the image below the four categories. And as been indicated elsewhere, comfort does not equate to safety with infrastructure that introduces hazards and creates a false sense of security. For example, width of bike lane is included in the list of factors in the illustration, but not dooring risk.

Posted in Bicycling | 6 Comments

Patricia Kovacs’s review of crashes in a two-way separated bikeway

Patricia’s review is here.

She reports an increase in the number and rate of crashes on Summit Street in Columbus, Ohio following the installation of a two-way parking-separated bikeway on the right-hand side of this one way street.

A cyclist recorded a video of his own crash on this bikeway, the crash on 9/14/18 which Patricia reported. A motorist blocked the bikeway after having pulled out to look left past cars parked between the bikeway and travel lanes. The bicyclist was coming from the motorist’s right.

There is also a dooring hazard: too little space between the bikeway and parked vehicles.

Apologists:

An article in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. This is now in an archive and requires a user login. It is also available through public libraries in the Columbus area.

Carless Columbus article is here.

Posted in Bicycling | 5 Comments

Video added to Franconia Notch State Park pages.

My suite of pages about the Franconia Notch State Park Multi-Use Trail in New Hampshire now includes a video of a ride on the Trail.

The most comprehensive treatment of the conditions of the trail is in the linked photo tour. The video is also intended to document conditions on the trail rather than to be entertaining. But it gets interesting at (also hotlinked in the YouTube description — click “see more”)

0:30 — Hazardous bollards with substandard spacing

4:35 — the Chute

17:15 — Tunnel under the highway

19:25 — Deadly curb with tire marks and scrapes

21:33 Another steep downhill and underpass

21:50 Path becomes sidewalk in door zone

26:55 28:30 — Lafayette campground, bicyclists instructed to ride on left.

33:20 — Another underpass with bollard and blind corner

43:09-end — odd termination at parking lot at south end, entry from Route 3 is unmarked and requires crossing to left side of parking lot exit.

This is a standard-definition video which I shot with my first helmet camera. I have deinterlaced it, raising it to 60 frames per second, and stabilized it so the quality is quite acceptable. I’d like to go back and see what changes have occurred over the past 13 years. Or if anyone else is riding thorough there with a helmet cam…

Posted in Bicycle facilities, Bicycling | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Seen on the Superpedestrian site

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s the main photo on the home page of Superpedestrian, which manufactures the Copenhagen Wheel, a bicycle hub motor that looks like a huge M & M candy.

Wrong kind of pedals, sorry

No, the problem isn’t anything about the motor. The motor has many clever features. It is the easiest to retrofit of any, with its self-contained batteries. It has regenerative braking controlled by spinning the pedals backward. It is controlled from the rider’s smartphone and has a built-in lock, also controlled by the smartphone. (Let’s just hope though that the phone’s battery hasn’t gone dead…

But on the other hand, the pedals shown are meant to be used with toe clips and straps, but none have been installed. This kind of pedal is top-heavy and turns upside down when the foot is lifted off. The underside of the pedal is slippery and not shaped to fit the sole of the shoe. With soft-soled shoes like the ones shown, the appropriate pedals are double-sided, with a traction surface on each side, unless toe clips and straps have been installed.

Is the poor choice of pedals important? Well, for one thing it makes riding uncomfortable and for another, in my role as a consultant to attorneys in bicycle crashes, I encountered a case involving a man whose foot apparently slipped off a pedal. He took a hard fall and died. He had the same kind of pedals, and the markings on the bottom of his shoes showed that he always pedaled with them upside down.

Oh, and the foot of the rider in the photo is rather far rearward on the pedal, risking Achilles tendinitis, but also revealing that the rider hasn’t used these shoes much for cycling. Hey, it’s a posed shot. But on the other hand, such a basic gaffe in a publicity shot does not speak well for the company.

Info about shoe and pedal choices, in case you would like to go into detail…

Posted in Bicycling | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Throttled and doored

Sigh.

I stopped motion at 2:54 in this video.

The embedded image in the video is speeded up so you can’t get a good look at what it shows, but if you stop at the right place, you’ll see this. Check out the the upper left.

Throttle expert clueless about dooring

Throttle expert clueless about dooring.

Riding in the door zone at the speed which can be maintained on an e-bike — typical urban motorcycle speed! — is even more dangerous than at typical pedal-powered speeds. A Motorcycle Safety Foundation instructor’s hair would turn gray looking at this. Is the best advice different because someone is riding a machine with pedals and a motor, as opposed to only a motor? Maybe I should recuse myself from the discussion, as my own hair has already turned gray, and I ride machines with only pedals? Well, no, because I have reached gray-hair status without being doored.

Why do people endanger themselves like this? “Because this is a bicycle and that is what bicyclists do”?

No, actually. The primal fear of being attacked from behind, and the incessant stream of misinformation embedded in the design of door-zone bike lanes, promote this behavior. This guy, fully adult, speaks confidently on one aspect of bicycling but is totally clueless about another in a way that could easily cost him his life. Sorry about that.

Posted in Bicycle facilities, Bicycling, Bike lanes, Equipment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A better crosswalk treatment

This post continues the discussion in the comments below my previous post about a crash on the Pinellas Rail Trail.

So, first, because images can’t be embedded in WordPress comments, here is my photo of an installation on the Capital City Trail in Madison, Wisconsin, USA (photo taken 2002). The diamond-shaped lines are saw cuts in the pavement, into which electrical wires have been laid, followed by epoxy filler. The installation works as an upside-down metal detector, sensing bicycles which travel over it. A clever feature is that electronics detect which loop of wire  is activated first, to switch the traffic signal in the background of the photo only for bicycles traveling toward the crosswalk. The loops are set back from the intersection for advance detection. Above the white plaque on the traffic-signal pole is a pushbutton, so pedestrians can also switch the signal. This is the location in Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/mk4aI

The difference between bicyclists’ and pedestrians’ operating characteristics was a major issue addressed in the comments on the previous post. As discussed in the comments on that post, a traffic signal may be used at a crosswalk, as at this location. The red-yellow-green traffic signal is for traffic in the street and there is a pedestrian signal for the crosswalk. The pedestrian signal was the only option available under national engineering standards at the time of this installation.

More recently, bicycle signals have been added to the toolbox, and they are useful at a crosswalk because of bicyclists’ different operating characteristics — for one thing, to allow bicyclists, who travel faster than pedestrians, to enter the crosswalk later. Experimentation by former Denver bicycle coordinator James Mackay showed this approach to produce no change in bicyclists’ behavior, but to make it legal, see https://web.archive.org/web/20101212050451/http://www.atssa.com/galleries/clean_titles/031408_BicycleTraffic.pdf

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A crash in Toronto

Have a look here: https://globalnews.ca/news/6209332/video-cyclist-struck-markham/

So, who was at fault, but more importantly, because an ounce of prevention is better than a ton of cure, who could have prevented the crash?

The bicyclist came from the right, pushed the button for the walk signal (and the driver wouldn’t know for which direction) and continued to face left on a stale green and a don’t-walk signal, conveying the impression that he was going to cross from right to left on the next walk phase. The driver could have looked and seen the bicyclist, decided that the bicyclist was going to wait to cross from right to left, and then turned attention in another direction. When the traffic signal changed to green, the driver had to have been looking at it to start up right away. At that moment, as the walk signal also changed, the bicyclist abruptly turned 90 degrees to the right and started crossing parallel to the traffic entering the intersection on the green.

My evaluation: Either the bicyclist of the driver could have prevented this crash. The driver could have checked (again?) for the bicyclist. The bicyclist is a damn fool for sending the wrong message about the direction in which he was heading, and not checking whether the motorist would yield. The driver is at fault for reckless driving, colliding with the bicyclist, for leaving the scene of the crash and driving facing oncoming traffic. The bicyclist was legally at fault because riding in the crosswalk is illegal in Ontario. I don’t ride or walk my bicycle in crosswalks, unless it is unavoidable, and I usually find it safer to ride, because I can get across faster. However, I don’t like this law, because it provides an easy excuse to blame the bicyclist when someone else was at fault. This is not the law everywhere and it is not the usual law in the USA, where bicyclists for the most part have the rights and duties of pedestrians when riding in a crosswalk.

Posted in Bicycling, Crashes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Crash on the Pinellas Rail Trail

An article about a car-bicycle crash on the Pinellas Rail Trail in Florida is on the Cycling Today Web site. Please view the embedded video there before reading the rest of this post.

There is a lot of nonsense about this crash in a Facebook post and comments. Many people just looked at the dual-pane image at the top of the post, and claimed that the crash was fake news. It wasn’t. I commented:

I have identified the intersection (actually, technically not an intersection, see comments) and directions of travel from the street sign in the video, also from landmarks including the end of a guardrail, a pole near the stop sign, which will be visible if you move forward in the linked Google Street View, and the locations of tactile pads. (The Pinellas path is intended for pedestrians to keep to one side, hence also the two bollards dividing the path into thirds.) The pushbuttons just before the path light up something (rapid-repeating rectangular beacons) on the yellow signs with their solar arrays, but that doesn’t show in the video. The pushbuttons on the near side of the intersection are, however, not positioned where a cyclist riding in the middle lane, as intended, could reach them.

I don’t think that the closer of two bicyclists coming from the far side of the intersection pushed the button there — the video starts when he is already in the intersection, but he is going too fast to have accelerated from a stop. (I was wrong about this. A better, longer version of the video clip shows him pushing the button.) So, the motorist in the second car, which hit the bicyclist, did not have a warning to stop (that is, not a sign or signal requiring a stop.) — and does not have a stop sign, as the yellow, diamond-shaped warning sign does not require a stop (nor do the beacons). The motorist could easily have been distracted by the other car passing on the right and not have noticed the approaching bicyclist until too late to avoid a collision. The motorist is culpable at least of leaving the scene of the crash. The bicyclist failed to stop at a stop sign (though it is a troublesome stop sign: crossing is possible in a shorter gap without stopping, and I have already described the problem with the location of the pushbuttons). Another requirement at a stop sign, though, is to yield and instead, despite seeing the approaching cars, the bicyclist exercised extreme victim behavior, throwing up his hands rather than to attempt any evasive action, either braking or swerving. He didn’t even stop pedaling. What a clusterf**k.

(Further weirdness: the stop sign has no force under the law — see comments.)

I have read that the police say that the lights were flashing. How do they know this? The only way the would know is from an eyewitness.

Posted in Bicycle facilities, Bicycling, Crashes, Traffic Signals | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments