Pretty impressive work and tells a lot about what is going on in Rosewood.

Penny Farthing bicycles on good pavement.

But times change and by 1972, the masses of wheelmen or cyclists that dominated the roads of the late 19th century across the world had dwindled to individual cyclists dodging the ubiquitous automobile, at least that had happened in the United States and to some degree in England.

In China, and other developing regions, the bicycle remained the primary means of personal transportation. In more developed areas of Europe, namely Holland, Germany and Denmark, the governments had made the decision to step back from the auto centric model of society and encourage the use of bicycles. It is important to recognize that this change began to occur as cities in Europe reconstructed after the World War II and the change continued after the boom of consumer spending that exploded after World War II had driven these cities to the brink of auto apocalypse. These countries, with walkable cities that developed centuries before the advent of the automobile, decided to stop tearing down their heritage to provide space for automobiles and began giving space back to people.

John Forester, a traffic engineer, first stated his vision of “Vehicular Cycling” in his book Effective Cycling, “Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.”

Through John’s association with the League of American Bicyclists and his publication of Effective Cycling, the concept of Vehicular Cycling became inculcated in the only national education program for cyclists. Some of the instructors in this program became, at times, such proponents of the concept of vehicular cycling that a proposal to construct bicyclist specific accommodations on the roads became controversial. In the interests of full disclosure, I am one of those instructors and I will continue to argue against poorly designed and constructed accommodations.

Change is difficult. But, change is inevitable. In the 40 years since the concept of Vehicular Cycling was promulgated, society has changed. In places, Portland, OR and Minneapolis MN come to mind, the bicycle and bicyclist have become a significant proportion of the transportation mix. Under these conditions, the concept of vehicular cycling begins to become less compelling for groups of cyclists. It may be time for a paradigm shift.

Vehicular Cycling is the most important safety factor for individual cyclists that has ever been conceived. But it is less relevant when the system must adapt to try to deal with masses of cyclists.

In the United States the limitation of two abreast for bicyclists is ubiquitous and in some states single file is encouraged. The average Chinese or Dutch cyclist would fall off of his bike laughing at the concept.

In the early ‘80s I traveled into Beijing on business. On my first trip, the car that conveyed me from the airport to my hotel was one of the few motorized vehicles on the road. Bicyclists ruled the roads.

A typical configuration of the major thoroughfares was a central four-lane, two way pavement for motor vehicles with the occasional automobile. Flanking medians separated this road from bordering multi-lane roads filled with bicyclists. Filled means filled. Cyclists packed the pavement from curb to curb and extended as far as one could see. Cyclists were moving 10 to 15 abreast.

To cross this human river by automobile was an interesting exercise in patience and luck. The driver of the motor vehicle would turn right at an opening in the flanking median and inch (literally) forward. The cyclists would continue to flow past as the car moved slowly through the throng. At some point, the flow of cyclists would change from moving in front of the car to moving in back of the car and the motorist could begin to accelerate and continue on his way.

This was no time to be discussing vehicular cycling.

As long as we have individual cyclists moving in traffic, the principal of vehicular cycling is profoundly correct. It is the best way to decrease the risk of riding in traffic to an acceptable degree.

Once; however, we begin to have cyclists in groups moving through our streets, the precepts that drive vehicular cycling begin to have less and less application. When cyclists dominate the streets and most motorists are also cyclists, then I would argue that vehicular cycling, while still valid for the individual cyclist, is not the best way to maintain an acceptable level of safety for those masses of cyclists. At this point, infrastructure is required to provide space for the motorists as well as the cyclists.

How do we get from here to there? Copenhagen has done it, Amsterdam has done it and Portland is doing it. Do we even want to go there? Of course we do, the benefits that accrue from a significant portion of our population cycling are well known and overwhelmingly persuasive. But it requires significant change in our infrastructure, education and judicial systems. Why don’t we have traffic safety education in our elementary schools? Why do we wait until someone is 15 to begin?

One thing we do know, change of this magnetude is not easy and it is not simple. It is not just about putting in cycletracks everywhere and it is not just about teaching individual cyclists how to ride in a vehicular cycling manner. We must envision a future where cycling is a normal part of the transportation mix and work to make it reality.

The future of 20% mode share (percent of all trips) for cyclists is not unrealistic in the US, there are parts of Portland where this is happening now. But that which makes bicycling so important to a society is also one of the things that makes it difficult to define how to move forward. Bicycling is ubiquitous, everyone does it to some degree. The issues are too large to be able to grasp easily. The changes that are needed are too vast and beg for vast solutions. Humans don’t do vast well, we need to focus.

Change begins at the grass roots. A person decides to get on a bike, right here, today. A merchant decides to create a parking space for bikes in front of her store . People decide to ride in the clothes they have on. But these changes have to be supported by the “system.”

And the system is made up of people. When the mayor begins riding to work, when the head of public works begins riding more, when taxpayers begin voting for pedestrian and bicyclist facilities because they make more sense then additional space for cars…then we know that we are on the right track. Then we can begin to create policy that favors a balanced transportation system, an appropriate use of different types of vehicles using appropriate infrastructure.

The revolution is not going to be complete in my lifetime. But it has already begun. When the signs “bicyclists may use full lane” or “share the road” become irrelevant then we will know we are on the way.

Vehicular Cycling is the best way for individuals to cope with traffic. But it is not the solution for most cyclists when 20% of our trips are made by bike. We need to define new cycling paradigms to fuel the revolution.

How about “You on your bike!” or “Me on my bike!” or maybe both “All of us on bikes!”

Lynette is a writer, film maker http://trafficconebag.com and great friend…at least I think so. But one of the best things she has done is design the “Traffic Cone Bag.” I carry a laptop or iPad almost all the time and the TCB is pretty nearly perfect. With the black side turned out I can just slide the iPad or laptop inside or there is a pocket on the outside that snaps and can hold the iPad.

The iPad slides easily inside or in the side snap pocket. It doesn’t look like a bag I would be carrying a laptop or iPad in.

iPad in the new case slipped into the outside snap pocket. When the orange side is out the pocket is inside and hidden.

Here is the link if you want to buy one of the bags. http://trafficconebag.com, Lynette has a great blog  (http://trafficconebag.blogspot.com) and also can be found on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/trafficconebag)

Simple idea, great execution. After traveling around places that don’t have a lot of what we take for granted every day she felt a need to have a simple bag that could be used to carry stuff and provide visibility on the road and be suave enough to carry into the nicest places. Voila!

In the interest of full disclosure, Lynette sold me my original bag without the current improvements but she has offered to send me one with the reflective stripe and the new TCB snap.

The bags come in two sizes and they are not cheap but the are well made and mine shows no sign of wear after almost daily use since 2010. I’ve got lots of bags, most of them messenger bags that go over one shoulder. The traffic cone bag is the right bag to go to the post office when I need to take a few shirts to mail to customers. I use the small fixed rate box to send out T-Shirts and as you can see at least four of them would fit easily into the large TCB.

Traffic cone bag with one USPS small fixed rate box. I can get four boxes in easily

The orange side has two pockets that can hold a big water bottle and the little loop is great to hang reflective tabs or a light for night riding. I like it. On of the additions I have made is to put a small carabiner between the straps in front to hold them close together.

Two pockets on the orange side hold a water bottle and the loop is good for lights or reflective tags.

Lynette also put up a little fun film that she did in Albuquerque about me and my iBag or man bag.

http://trafficconebag.com

Bee Cave, TX sits at the confluence of three major state roads, Hwy 71, FM 620 and FM 2244. One of the traditional training rides for roadies in the Austin area (the Dam Loop) goes through Bee Cave so weekends can get congested. The local bicycle club, the Lake Travis Bicycle Club, has a Tuesday ride that takes that route as well.

To relieve congestion at the confluence of the highways, Bee Cave recently constructed a four lane divided highway across the back of a beautiful new open air mall. The road, Bee Cave Parkway, is concrete, has curbs, 12.5 foot lanes and a 45 mph speed limit.

One good thing about this “by pass” is that there is no parking allowed.

Recently the city put up a number of “SHARE THE ROAD” signs showing bicycles. On two of the signs, one each way at the beginning of the parkway, the city added “BIKES MAY USE FULL LANE” signs.

Last night, August 28, 2012, cyclists gathered to hear a presentation to City Council with some pretty scary videos of close passes on the parkway. A number of cyclists presented to the council members including Robb Bush, Stanton Truxillo and a young racer who does 1,200 miles a month and placed 32 at the national time trials in his first year of racing!

Stanton Truxillo presenting to Bee Cave City Council

What really impressed me was the willingness of the council to listen to the discussion and respond. The moved and passed, unanimously, a resolution to direct that 10 “BIKES MAY USE FULL LANE” signs be place along the 1.5 mile length of the parkway.

The discussion also included bike lanes, they have room but that may not be the best way to go on that road especially for riders in a group. Narrowing the lanes and reducing the speed limit were also discussed. The council members have asked for a more complete report outlining the options and costs.

People get up tight about reducing speeds but the difference in total time for a 1.5 mile stretch is only one minute between 35 and 45 mph. And that assumes you will be going that speed for the whole time. With starting and stopping the difference for the entire trip will be less than 60 seconds and it will make a big difference in the severity of a crash and will also give drivers more time to avoid cyclists.

Bottom line…be open, talk things through and work with your elected officials. Lets try reason before attack. There is a time to take to the barricades but we should be doing all the other things first. The difference between Advocacy and Activism.

Normally we talk about degradation of the Styrofoam due to heat and sunlight. That may have occurred in this helmet as well but what failed was the adjusting mechanism which makes the helmet pretty useless.

I am not sure when this happened. When I picked up my helmet to go riding it was like this so I assume it happened the last time I rode. I haven’t crashed in years so that wasn’t the cause of the failure. Maybe old age.

The sticker inside the helmet says that manufacture date was Apr 2008 and the helmet is a Trek Sonic, a mid-price-range helmet. So I got at least 4 years out of the helmet before failure. That works out to about $15 a year for insurance against TBI if I do fall. I can afford that…in fact I can’t afford not to do that.

I think I will send helmet back to Trek and see if they have seen other failures like this or they can get an idea of what happened.

Got a new helmet at Bicycle Sport Shop (Research) and I’m back on the road. Got in 22 miles before the rain this morning. I just had to get the part in about the rain…LOL

I’ve looked at the old helmet and have found at least three cracks in the Styrofoam. I have never crashed so I think the cracks must come from packing the helmet in my suitcase with my folding bike. When the baggage handlers toss the suitcase around it must torque the helmet. Maybe that is what happened to the strap as well.

Here are some photos of the cracks.

Cycle-Tracks,
the old and the new in Austin, Texas

Anyone who has ridden Austin’s first attempt at a cycle-track, the 20-year-old two way bike lane on Great Northern, can be forgiven for being skeptical about Austin’s cycle-tracks. Built along the Union Pacific railroad side of Great Northern, this two-way bike lane on a two-way street is one of those oops moments. The concept is great. Build a way for cyclists to move out of traffic along this road that is long and straight and doesn’t connect directly to anything. This road should have low traffic volumes and speeds.

Separation of traffic looking south

This is a view southbound showing the large separation between opposing flows. Unfortunately southbound motorists face northbound cyclists with only a white line to separate the flows as show in the following video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5r-EwnIG4

Fast forward to April 2012 and the introduction of the latest and greatest in bicycle facilities for Austin, the two-way separated cycle-track on Rio Grande running right through west campus. Now this is the way to design and build a cycle-track.

View south on the new cycle track

Built on the west side of a one-way north street, this cycle track separates the southbound cyclists from the northbound motorists with a northbound lane of cyclists and a painted buffer.

The ribbon cutting for the new cycle-track on Monday April 23, 2012 was a real party with lots of dignitaries including Council member Chris Riley, the head of City of Austin Public Works Howard Lazarus, Bicycle Program Manager Annick Beaudet and, on hand all the way from Boulder CO to announce that Austin has been named one of only six Green Lane cities, the head of the Green Lanes project of BikesBelong, Project Director Martha Roskowski.

http://youtu.be/MMaAsMIsWTM

Speaker Martha Roskowski, members of the audience, Chris Riley, City Council Member; Howard Lazarus, Public Works, Tim Starry, Yellow Bike Project, Pam LeBlanc, reporter, Austin American Statesman.

The Green Lane Project is leading the effort to catalyze the installation of world-class bicycling facilities in the U.S. “We are seeing an explosion of interest in making bicycling stress-free on busy city streets, ” said Tim Blumenthal, Bikes Belong president. “The selected cities have ambitious goals and a vision for bicycling supported by their elected officials and communities. They are poised to get projects on the ground quickly and will serve as excellent examples for other interested cities,”

In addition to Austin, the Green Lane cities include Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco and Washington.

Intersection of Rio Grande and Martin Luther King

Martha Roskowski called this intersection a “work of art” as it brings cyclists across Martin Luther King into the cycle track where Rio Grande goes from two-way to one-way. The small blue light below the signal indicates that the signal has registered the presence of a cyclist and lets the cyclist know that the signal will be changing soon.

This cycle track is the beginning of making Rio Grande a bicycle friendly street from downtown Austin through the University of Texas campus. While this is the first (or second) cycle track in Austin, the public works department has been doing great things with simple changes.

Next Blog: Road Diets in Austin

As part of a regularly scheduled safety training program, the local bus company invited me to spend about 20 minutes, out of a 90 minute program, talking about how to drive safely around cyclists. I got the call because I am the Education Director for the Austin Cycling Association. I put together a quick PowerPoint presentation and got ready to talk seven times over two weeks to all the transit bus operators. CapMetro also has a rail system and special transport but this is the bus operators.

My approach is that the operators are professionals and are in control. They have a duty to serve their passengers and to be safe, which can put them in a situation where they have to make hard decisions. The cyclists have a right to the road by law so at some point, the bus operators must just take it easy and do the best they can.

After just three sessions some things are becoming clear.

• Cyclists are their own worst enemy (hence the name of the article)
• Some cyclists pass buses on the right when the bus is pulling over for a stop.

A couple of “staged” videos about the problems of coming up on the right side of a bus.

• Some cyclists pull around buses on the left and then stop to put a bike on the bike rack forcing the driver to suddenly apply the brakes…not good for the passengers.
• Some cyclists filter forward at lights and make the bus operator pass them again.
• Some cyclists don’t obey the law on: signaling turns and stops, stopping at stop signs and red lights,

I am hearing lots of other complaints and will compile them and distribute to the various lists I post on. 

Buses make cycling better in many ways. They take cars off the road, they allow cyclists to go part of the way by bus and the rest by bicycle and they allow us to build cities that don’t rely solely on the automobile for transportation.

When I finish these presentations I intend to sit down with the CapMetro safety team and investigate the options we have for working within the system to make a difference. Of course it would be good if we could do an advertising campaign about how cyclists can be safe around buses. I find it hard to believe that cyclists are passing on the right but maybe so…

On the other hand, on the way back from coffee, what a great way to start a day, biking to coffee along a flowing creek, we got on the road to see the contrast.

The road surface was a disaster, patched, bumpy and poorly marked. We took the lane in 45 mph traffic and were cool with that but the road surface reminded us that it’s not just about how we ride but also about how a city accommodates bicyclists. Remember, accommodations for cyclists include smooth pavement. They don’t have to be about bike lanes or cycle-tracks.

But to talk about the title of this post…on the way back as we bumped down the main lane, we saw a student going to school with his large stringed instrument in a case on his back and a cell phone caught between his ear and shoulder, going the wrong way…but he had both hands on the handlebars…and he was using his bicycle to go somewhere.

Cyclist ran a red light on a fixed gear bike.

I am torn between cheering and wailing.

Just as we demand justice for cyclists who are hit by motorists driving onto the shoulder I think we should demand justice when a cyclist makes an unsafe decision and someone else is hurt or killed.

On the other hand…is the felony charge of manslaughter the proper charge? What does it accomplish? Is putting this cyclist in jail for years going to make a difference when the next cyclist buys a fixed gear bike and rides it down a hill through a red light into a pedestrian crosswalk filled with people? The prosecutor says:

“I’m hoping this case serves to raise awareness that rules of the road apply to everyone,” Gascon [prosecutor] said in a news conference Thursday.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/17/cyclist-faces-manslaughter-charges-after-fatal-collision-in-san-francisco/#ixzz1y9wVNE3U

I would love to start a rational conversation here and will delete any comments that get away from civil discourse.

Just to keep it straight, we’re talking cycling advocacy here, and now I’ll do the dictionary definition.

ad·vo·ca·cy

n.

The act of pleading or arguing in favor of something, such as a cause, idea, or policy; active support.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

So it is activity (note the words act and active) in favor of something. Boy that’s broad!

A cause, idea or policy. So how do we define cycling advocacy in these terms?

One of the problems with defining cycling advocacy is that cycling is so ubiquitous. It is available to everyone and everyone does it a little differently. Trying to put cyclists in neat little boxes like mountain biker, commuter, racer, recreational or utility doesn’t work very well. Many cyclists do all of those things at some point during the month.

In the United States the cycling industry sells about $6 Billion each year. Yes, that is B as in Billion.

So what does that mean for cycling advocacy in Austin and the 11 counties of central Texas?

Maybe we should just define cycling advocacy as getting more people riding more often. No distinction about what kind of riding, what kind of bike or where.

That definition does a lot of things. It helps the local economy. It increases the health of our citizens. It reduces air pollution. It relieves congestion. It saves people money. What’s not to like…oh yeah, it’s dangerous to cycle…or is it?

Cycling is not inherently dangerous.

There are no accidents. Every cycling crash can be traced to an action or set of actions that could have been avoided. That says that behavioral change could significantly reduce the number of crashes.

So if cycling isn’t inherently dangerous and could help a whole plethora of issues then why don’t more people cycle?

There isn’t an easy answer to that question. There are lots of reasons and they all pile up to keep a majority of people from riding.

That is why the question of what is cycling advocacy is so difficult to define. But one thing is clear; it needs to be a comprehensive approach. Engineering cycle-tracks like the one on Rio Grande isn’t the only answer. Education of the cyclists and motorists isn’t the only answer. Enforcement of the laws equally for motorists and cyclists isn’t the only answer. Encouraging more people to ride through government policy isn’t the only answer. But a combination of all of these approaches can make a difference and we can’t start any sooner.