Many of Reed’s fellow cyclists are criticizing him for not using the paved shoulder, even though Texas law does not require it, and also permits cyclists full use of a lane that is too narrow to share.

If Reed was riding on a roadway with a shared use path next to it in a state that has a mandatory sidepath law, many, if not most of you would support him, even though some of you might prefer to ride on the path.  Most non-cyclists however, would not understand why he wasn’t using the “bike path” because riding on the road is “so dangerous.”

If he was riding on a roadway with a narrow paved shoulder or bike lane that was full of debris and was staying out of that shoulder or bike lane, once again, many or most of you would support him, even though you might use the shoulder or bike lane.   Most non-cyclists however, would not understand why he wasn’t using the “bike path” because riding on the road is “so dangerous.”

If he was riding on a roadway without a paved shoulder, bike lane or sidepath and controlling the lane, many or most of you would support him, even though you might hug the edge.  Most non-cyclists however, would not understand why he was on the road at all, because riding on the road is “so dangerous.”

From the sound of how the Ennis police and Ellis County sheriff’s departments are behaving, I think they could have just as easily cited, jailed and convicted Reed for any of those types of circumstances, because they believe — in spite of a complete lack of evidence — that roadway cycling is dangerous and causes delay and chaos on our roads.

When I was pulled over for controlling a narrow lane in the City of Orlando, I heard the same kind of absurd and ignorant arguments from the cop who pulled me over.  Fortunately, there was no bike lane or paved shoulder present, and I was able to talk my way out of it.  Last week an off-duty sheriff’s deputy told me to get on the sidewalk.  Many will say, “Well that’s different,” but it’s really not; all of these police actions stem from the same bogus belief, not from their understanding of the law.

The real problem we face is not so much how our laws are written, but what people believe about cycling.  When we cyclists criticize Reed for cycling in the way he does, we are reinforcing the belief that roadway cycling is dangerous, and therefor irresponsible.

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A note about impeding traffic.  I looked up the traffic counts for the road Reed’s been using at the Texas Department of Transportation website.  It gets about 18,000 cars per day; rather low for a four-lane highway.  Reed’s first arrest happened at about 2:30 p.m., which is well “off-peak.”  Using standard traffic planning estimates, I’d guess the road was seeing roughly 3 to 4 cars per minute per lane, or one car passing ever 15 to 20 seconds.  How can one possibly think changing lanes to pass a cyclist is any sort of problem in such a situation?  By comparison, the street I ride to work during rush hour is a 3-lane one-way.  Each lane sees about 12 to 13 cars per minute, or one every 5 seconds (of course they actually come in platoons).  But even with much heavier traffic, motorists rarely have to wait more than a few seconds to pass me, and most don’t have to wait at all; they see me early and change lanes.

“We are, when on our bikes, timeless kids crawling fast; experiencing what we had (and lost) when the conscious mind began to impede us.”  – Robert Seidler

At the end of my essay Which Cycling Politics: Doom or Possibility? I presented two stories for cyclists to live by.  One in which we see ourselves as vulnerable, pleading to the government to give us a place to ride; the other in which we present ourselves as confident equals, fully entitled and capable of using the existing roadway system.

Stories can have great power.  For thousands of years people have told stories – myths – to illuminate how we should move forward toward fulfillment.  While the word “myth” often has negative connotations in our culture, often disparaged as “somebody else’s religion,” or something foolish or untrue, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote that one of the key purposes of mythology is to psychologically carry us through the stages of life; from the dependency of childhood to the responsibility of adulthood.  With a truly mythological perspective, one doesn’t worry about “facts” (not that they are unimportant) as much as a universal truth.

Campbell wrote extensively of the mythological Hero’s Journey; in which the hero hears a calling (often resisting it at first), undergoes transformation and trials, and comes out the other end with new wisdom, freedom and power.

You can read on it more extensively here:

It’s a story of such universal power that every culture has some version of it, and our culture has told the story over and over, including in many books and films.  George Lucas was heavily inspired by Campbell in his writing of Star Wars, and Campbell lauded the original film trilogy as a superb retelling of the Hero’s journey brought into the technological age.

To make an analogy between cycling and Star Wars, if Luke Skywalker had used the strategy of the “please give us a place to ride our bikes” side of bicycle advocacy, he would have asked for a barren little moon to live on where he wouldn’t have gotten in the Galactic Empire’s way.  And spent the rest of his life as a slave.

Most people in government have bought into the bicycle traffic myth.  When they say “bicycling in traffic is dangerous,” they rarely understand what they’re talking about.  They can’t explain coherently why it is dangerous, and have no idea how to remedy the risks of cycling.

Their “common sense” (in the most original sense of that term) of cycling is that small, slow and vulnerable users and large, fast and massive users cannot safely share the same roadway. This common sense isn’t based on any objective data, but on experiencing large vehicles passing fast and in close proximity while on a bike (because they’re hugging the edge) – a scary experience for many – and hearing sketchy fatality reports on the news.  People conflate the scary feeling of being passed close with the fatality stories and assume the former is the cause of the latter, when more likely the death involved some other violation of the basic rules of traffic.

Former Bogota, Columbia mayor Enrique Peñalosa has notably claimed that “A city should be so constructed so that it is safely navigable by any seven-year-old on a bicycle.”  A laudable goal, but is it practical and affordable, or even possible within our current land use configuration?  I’m afraid not.  As long as people in the suburbs have the need and money to travel long distances to work and shopping, they will demand that they be able to do so at speeds that make it unsafe for that seven-year-old on a bicycle to travel freely.  No bikeway design can remedy that problem.  We are far from ready to convert four- and six-lane arterials into woonerfs.  We are stuck with suburbia for at least decades to come.  People are not going to willingly let their large lot, single family homes be torn down to be reconfigured into pods of high density.

Over the past six decades we have created a type of wilderness on many of our arterial and collector streets.  Dangerous things run wild there.  Pre-civilized tribal peoples certainly didn’t put their seven-year-olds out there with the dangerous animals; they kept them safe in camp. Take the bicycle out of the equation for a minute.  Would you let your seven-year-old walk along this road, or cross it, unescorted?

Putting a six-inch high wall (a curb) between those wild things and our kids will not keep them safe, whether those wild things are cars or bison.  So the “seven-year-old bicyclist as design vehicle” argument is bogus.  It makes for good political rhetoric, but unrealistic traffic policy.

Our tribal ancestors understood the continuum concept of allowing kids to be exposed to risk when they were ready – both through training and maturity.  The problem today is most parents don’t understand the risks, so they don’t know how to train their kids or set boundaries for them.

Where this animal/car analogy breaks down – to our benefit – is that the bison are us.  We can change how they/we behave.  Ultimately it’s changing the way we see our streets that will make them humane again.

And we can change the manner in which we see our streets.  I wrote of this in my review of the book Fighting Traffic.   Such a change happened in the late Teens and early Twenties of the 20th Century.  We went from believing our streets were public utilities open to a multitude of uses – commerce, play, and socialization as well as travel – to thinking of them as a commodity paid for by motorists for the purpose of going fast.  It is that perception of the street that is the key to change.  Asking to be shoved into bicyclist reservations alongside the “adults” in cars is just reinforcement of that motorist mindset.

The Galactic Empire of Star Wars could just as easily be our current Gasoline Empire.  This Empire, which I named The Tyranny of Speed in another post, depends entirely on the belief that streets are primarily for fast-moving cars.  Overthrowing the Empire will require people behaving in ways contrary to the Empire’s desires. Segregated bikeways are not at all contradictory to the Empire’s belief system; indeed, they fit it perfectly.  (Some even claim that the concept of the bike lane originated in the motor-centric traffic engineering realm; and that while it was pitched as a “safety improvement,” the real agenda was keeping bicyclists from slowing down motorists.)

In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin wrote:

“You cannot buy the Revolution.  You cannot make the Revolution.  You can only be the Revolution.”

“Being the revolution” is a Hero’s journey.  One moves from childhood to adult.  From childish cycling – the playground, the sidewalk, staying out of the way of the adults – to adult cyclist; an equal, negotiating and standing up for one’s needs and principles.   Does a free and empowered adult ask permission to do the right thing?  Does she ask to be segregated from other adults in order to avoid upsetting them?

The most important thing the Hero does is inspire others to follow in his path.  In him they see the possibility of a better future.  Even the primitive Ewoks were inspired by Skywalker’s example.  Indeed, those Ewoks played an integral role in the defeat of the Empire.

But Empire’s can be defeated by means other than force.  Campbell wrote, “Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth.  If you spend all your time thinking about what you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it.”  Once again, such a strategy is well suited to the cyclist’s situation.  Most people have positive feelings about cycling; it has a primal power over us.  Robert Seidler believes it taps into memories of early childhood, while we were crawling, experiencing movement for the first time.  Now we are in much the same position as that crawling toddler; head up, torso leaning forward, arms and legs down, but now with immensely greater freedom.  (Of course this head-forward position is not essential for the enjoyment of cycling, as any recumbent rider will tell you.)  Focusing on the positives of cycling is the most effective strategy we can use.

(By “defeating the Empire” I don’t mean eliminating cars.  I simply mean ending their hegemony.)

Where we have been failing for so many years has been with marginal education and outreach programs, and with messages that reinforce the Empire’s agenda.

“The adventure he is ready for is the adventure he gets.”  – Joseph Campbell

First things first.  If Obi-Wan Kenobi had told Luke right off the bat that he was going to confront Darth Vader in a duel, Luke would have been frightened out of his mind.  Instead, Obi-Wan focused first on building Luke’s basic skills in training for a “simpler” task – rescuing Princess Leia.  Similarly, we don’t start out by teaching cyclists to confront the Gasoline Empire on the worst arterials or in the political arena, we just get them comfortable with the skills of traffic cycling.

We show them what is possible.  Like this. (Mindful cycling can defeat mindless motoring.)

And this. (A light saber duel can also be a dance.)

The average American cyclist believes safe roadway cycling without special accommodation is like lifting an X-wing fighter with one’s mind – impossible.  Those of us who know better have to learn how to be Obi-Wans and Yodas; the shaman.  Campbell described the shaman as the one was drawn, by natural forces, beyond the commonplace.  Into – for lack of a better term – insanity.  Or at least seen as insane from the point of view of the rest of the community.  But traditional tribal cultures respected the views of the shaman; he was able to lead others to see new ways of dealing with the world.

That’s us – those of us who have left the fear of traffic behind and learned to be cycling Jedi.  It only looks supernatural to the uninitiated.

And that’s the role that awaits you if you’ll take it.

“Of course we have a deal. They get out of the way of our cars, we look the other way on the statue defecation.”

- George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld

The tyranny of speed rules over nearly every road in this great nation.  Florida is perhaps the tyrant’s most resolute stronghold.  It’s as if gravity or latitude or the warm climate (or perhaps the convergence of the three) have funneled that power into our peninsula from all across the land.  Hemmed in by the Everglades, the tyrant’s power concentrates even more as one moves into Broward and Miami-Dade counties.  It then squirts out along US 1, the Overseas Highway that runs from Key Largo to Key West.  The Highway is now mostly overwhelmed by the tyrant; its miles of ugly strip commercial development making it look like nearly any other four-lane highway.  If it weren’t for the palms and tropically-themed signs you might think you were outside Atlanta along some stretches.

N. Roosevelt: sidepath on the left side; destinations on the right.

One-hundred and two miles down the highway you enter the Conch Republic, aka Key West.  It’s the end of the road.  The tyranny of speed has pushed its invading wedge westward into the island along US 1, and its commercial minions — fast-food purveyors, big box retailers… — have come in behind to claim territory.  At its ironic intersection with Eisenhower Drive, it loses nearly all its power as it changes names from N. Roosevelt Boulevard to Truman Avenue and becomes a narrow, two-lane street.

Most of the tyrant’s soldiers relax and drop their weapons when entering this human-paced paradise, but enough keep their warrior mentalities to make trouble as they scatter throughout the fine grid of narrow streets.  The saner ones leave their cars at their hotels as they visit, or even sell them if they decide to stay and put down roots.

The End of the Road. Welcome to human-scale.

The tyrant’s soldiers have a deal with the pigeon cyclists of Key West; the cyclists scatter out of the way of their cars, the tyrants look the other way when cyclists run red lights or ride with a beer in one hand.

I traveled to Key West over the first weekend of December with Keri Caffrey and John Schubert.  As we biked around the island we found ourselves running afoul of their pigeon-deal.  Not accustom to getting out of the way, we annoyed quite a few of the soldiers, and they made threatening motions with their weapons.  The problem became severe as we traveled N. Roosevelt; no doubt the leading edge of an army is where the fighting is the bloodiest.  The tyrant had provided the pigeons with a place to keep out of the way; something called a “bike path.”  The path was pleasant enough as it followed the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, but on some stretches the commercial minions had build driveways across it, and the soldiers were not terribly polite about yielding at those crossings.  At the very first driveway we were nearly taken out by one.

Our purpose that weekend was to introduce some key Conchs to the principles and practices of vehicular cycling.  In that we feel we were quite successful; all who attended our course said they saw real value in it.  The larger challenge for Key West though, is getting local motorists to accept vehicular cycling.

Conchs in Training

The local cyclists may feel the current situation is pretty good.  After all, bicycling makes up a far greater proportion of traffic on Key West than in perhaps any city in the nation outside of Davis, CA.  Eddie Marsh, proprietor of a pedicab and bike rental business, told us the tourists who rent bikes for a week usually return reporting that they had a great time.  But I wonder how many crashes are caused by their relatively new door-zone bike lanes and their sidepaths.  It’s common for untrained and inexperienced cyclists to be unaware of the conflicts posed by such facilities, and see only the “benefit” of “having a place to ride.”

I’ve been traveling to Key West since 1982.  During that first visit I noticed how some motorists were easily aggravated.  The juxtaposition of aggressive driving and the “mañana” mentality was surprising.   But it was still a fairly sleepy island at that time.  In ’85 I rode the Old Town section of the island with a friend and it was roughly the same.  My next visit in 1994 was as a budding bicycle transportation professional, spending a week observing and analyzing conditions and behaviors for an FDOT-led project.  Locals were increasingly concerned that cycling was becoming dangerous on the island, but many of our team routinely rode the N. Roosevelt roadway with no grief from the soldiers.  In 1998 I went down there for a Florida Bicycle Association advocacy-building effort.  The attitude from the locals was much the same as in ’94; “it’s a dangerous place; we need more bikeways,” yet I still saw it as a fairly easy place to ride.

Now, a decade later, they have those bikeways they asked for, and my perception of the island is that motorist attitudes towards cyclists are worse than they’d ever been.  Motor traffic levels are much higher (especially on N. Roosevelt) and motorists are much more intolerant of roadway cycling.  (So much for the theory that increasing the amount of cycling improves motorist attitudes towards cyclists.)  On the other hand, the locals we spoke to think things are pretty hunky-dory.  It’s so rare for American cyclists to say they live in a good place for cycling; one needs to respect that, so I question my own perspective.

When I visited in 1994 the cyclist crashes we were hearing about had little to do with the lack of bikeways; they were mostly instances of cyclists not yielding or otherwise violating the rules of the road.  I wonder what the causes are today.  Has safety actually improved along with its perception?  Nothing I saw this year would lead me to expect objective improvement.  But without actual data that’s just conjecture.

It’s an important question.  I hope someone can provide answers.  Because if Key West is perceived as a success while actual safety has been degraded, it becomes yet another misleading example in support of misguided planning and design.

The sad irony in this story is that Key West prides itself on tolerance.   “One Human Family” is the official city motto.  The mayor wrote that this motto “reflects our commitment to living together as caring, sharing neighbors dedicated to making our home as close to ‘paradise’ as we can.”  The city is known for accepting and welcoming those who wish to live differently from the norm.  Such tolerance does not, however, appear to extend to those of us on bicycles who behave as equals on their streets.  You can flaunt your sexual orientation or your outrageous artistic sensibilities, or wear a t-shirt that would get you thrown out of your mother’s house…but drive your bicycle like you’re a first-class citizen?  Now you’ve crossed the line, bud.