November 16th, 2008
Sac Bee Cycling Article
In my hometown paper today:
The Conversation: Can bikes and cars coexist?
Drivers are asked to share the road, and bicyclists need to do their part
By Daniel Weintraub
dweintraub@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008 | Page 1E
Driving home from work after dark a couple of weeks ago, I was just about to turn left off a busy commercial street near my house when I spied, out of the black, a cyclist coming at me from the opposite direction. He was clad in dark clothes, had no light or visible reflectors on his bike, and was powering, head down, as fast as he could go.
I paused, muttered something to myself, then prepared to turn again. This time I saw a second bike, which at least had a tiny, dim light, and I waited for him to pass as well. Figuring there might be one more, I peered into the darkness, and when I didn’t see anything, I began my turn. Half way through the intersection I took a final glance out my passenger window and saw, coming at me, one more cyclist without a light. I sped up and made it through safely as he passed behind me.
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9 Responses to “Sac Bee Cycling Article”
Sadly this was published in the same paper:
http://tinyurl.com/5lbd2n
Too bad the author can’t walk or ride that 1.2 miles he drives to and from his office.
Sadly? After reading the article it appeared to be little more than the standard recantation that cyclists are permitted to use the roads. The author, an occasional cyclist, lamented the enduring misunderstanding about the law amongst drivers, but cited that progress had been made in making cycling safer in the past six years (although his stats might be dubious).
From the response to the article, however, it is unclear what is the greater moral failing, the criticism of a cyclist for riding without a light or the fact that the author was, gasp, driving.
If our goal is to grow cycling we need to make it accessible to non cyclists. While there are several things to do on this front two major things come to mind. 1) Preventing car/bike collisions by engaging drivers and cyclists in a dialogue about how we can share the roads safely. 2) Not everyone finds a cycling culture premised on entitlement and moral superiority particularly inviting, therefore we should probably talk about ways to convince drivers why cycling is fun instead of condemning them for disagreeing with us.
An aquaitance was rear ended and badly inured by a motorist here in Australia.
The reason that the driver gave for the incident was that the sun was shining directly into his eyes so he did not see the cyclist. The court found him not guilty.
It would appear therefore that the law is; that if you cannot see where you are going, it is Ok to just keep right on driving till you hit someone
re: Mike’s response
Don’t judge so quickly because a person lives 1.2 miles from home. A person drives a car because of scheduling, there might have been errands or meetings to attend to run during the business day, the need to remain dressed in business attire during the day, there’s a passenger, the need for securing possessions during shopping, bad weather, a bike light that doesn’t work, or a bike that doesn’t work or is in the shop. Not everybody is so lucky to have the option to ride a bicycle everywhere they go. It would be nice, but not always possible. Just because they work in an office, doesn’t mean they are tethered to the office.
My two cents
Darryl
Good points, Darryl, but still. The dude could walk that distance most days in a few minutes!
“Sometime biker”? Jeez.
Scott
“The need to remain dressed in business attire during the day” is an excuse not to walk or cycle 1,2 miles? Frankly, that’s ridiculous. That type of reasoning should be viciously mocked. He probably walks 1,2 miles in the course of his workday. What are you going to do about that, glue him to the chair?
I don’t get the impression that the author is a “cyclist” per se. Mostly I think he was playing the devil’s advocate on both sides of the topic in an attempt to get a rise and stimulate conversation. The article was posted in a section of the online paper called “The Conversation” that appears to be modeled after the staff blogs on other news sites…
Riding fast at night with your head down, no light, and through an intersection? I can’t explain it, but I think Darwin attempts to in one of his books.
@ Darryl:
Fair enough, but 1.2 miles would take 20-30 minutes for a healthy person to walk, without breaking much of a sweat. The ’sometimes’ cyclist author seems to be concern trolling for the good of all those other cyclists out there. If he and everyone that lived 1.2 or even 3-4 miles from work walked or rode most days (not even all the time…) think of what a different world our cities and towns could be.
He’s clearly fit enough to be a ’sometimes’ cyclist. There are ways to shop on a bike and keep your goodies safe. And does it ever rain in California? Seems a perfect place to ride and walk about…
And to really think about it… cycling is often seen as this horribly difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable thing to do - but if we really look at what it takes to get a car on the road, fueled up, and with surfaces to drive on - we’d see that driving really is a complicated way to convert $$$ into motion. Nothing more. Its a horribly complicated and messy affair that has come to dominate our cities, towns, and countrysides through brute force. There’s nothing simple, clean, or even elegant about it. Aside from not having to break a sweat to get from A to B a car is just a tool - just like a bike. One that takes a multi trillion dollar industry to engineer, create, and fuel, and another trillion dollar industry to promote, insure our vehicles, and then another to upkeep our roads. The ghastly cyclist without a light is always seen as the scofflaw and villain in all of these typical arguments, when really, I think driving is the villain, robbing our cities and towns of civility, choking our air with pollution, warming the globe, paving over our earth, and generally demeaning incredibly mobile, adaptable human beings into ‘operators’ who trade physical work for the push of a lever and the turn of a wheel to get from A to B. The cost of cycling might be sweat and dealing with the weather - but the cost of driving… can we add it up?
*note - I drive, sometimes quite a bit. And I ride, often times quite a bit - for sport, for fun, and for utility. Its a fact of my current work / life / ride / family situation. There is no 1 answer - but the holier than thou drivers always criticize the holier than thou cyclists about traffic laws, rights of ways, and concern troll for safety. If the author wanted to do some good for these cyclists that he so desperately wants to help he should get off his veiled soapbox and maybe do a little outreach from his newspaper to the community - bike lights are cheap - he could hand them out along his arduous 1.2 mile commute and start doing some real good for those heathens that don’t know any better.
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