It’s Hard To Be Both A Cyclist And A Driver

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(This entry is over a year old; but somehow it got reposted to austinbloggers.org as a new entry today while I was adding the Shoal Creek Debacle category to my site – apologies; but I can’t seem to fix it).
While driving home this afternoon (switching to working at home part of the day until my wife’s C-section is healed up better), I had the top down and was enjoying a nice (but windy) day travelling east on FM 2222 towards Loop 360 from the office. I came up to the light at City Park Road and caught up to two recreational cyclists (decked out with fancy bikes, fancy clothes, and fancy helmets). The light turned red. I and they slowed down. I stopped. They did not.

As is often my wont, when I caught up to them I yelled out “red means stop, asshats!”. One of them flashed me a peace sign. Hooray! Peace on Earth trumps traffic law.

I’m one of the perhaps 2% of cyclists locally who stops for stop signs and red lights. That’s because of two reasons: 1. I’m both a cyclist and a driver, and 2. I sit on the Urban Transportation Commission and have to fight quite hard for cyclist facilities.

1. As a cyclist myself, I’m occasionally hassled by drivers on the road and more frequently harangued off the road because other cyclists break the law. This is irritating but rarely important enough to worry about.

2. As a commissioner, however, you have no idea how often I’ve heard “why should we build (bike lane / shoulder / loop detector / etc) for cyclists when they’ll just jump on and off the sidewalk and run red lights anyways?” – even from the (outgoing) chair of the commission. In fact, we even lost a facility vote once on the commission on those grounds. (It gets hard to fight battles for things like Shoal Creek bike lanes when the racing cyclists piss off all the neighbors so badly that even I’m tempted to smack them).

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I’m one of perhaps 2% of the cyclists that actually follow the law in this respect. The remaining 98% fall out roughly as follows:

Ignorant of traffic law – about one-third of the total – pretty much everybody around the University, and a lot of people who are clearly biking to work because they lost their license in a DWI conviction, or can’t afford a car. I don’t get angry at these people.

Self-righteous twits – another third of the total – mostly on the far left. The austin-bikes email list is full of people who defend running red lights by claiming that the environmental superiority of cycling justifies any transgression of mere traffic laws. If I point out that they make the job of reasonable cyclists quite difficult, they enter la-la land by claiming that motorists will hate all cyclists no matter what, so why bother being respectful and responsible. Additionally, this group quite often repeats the canard that motorists always run red lights too (what motorists do is often floor it on a yellow or the very start of a red light – this is often referred to as “running an orange” – while this is a serious threat, it’s far less serious than what cyclists do in completely ignoring red lights and stop signs altogether). Oh, and motorists do running stops at stop signs. Guilty. At least they slow down to a crawl first.

Finally, we have the recreational racers – the crowd that think that serious riders must wear certain clothes and drive to a ride start point (very high intersection with the Austin Cycling Association). These folks will tell you you’re going to remove yourself from the gene pool if you don’t wear a helmet, and then proceed to blow a stop light on a road with a 60 MPH speed limit (as in today’s example).

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it’s difficult being a utilitarian cyclist in Austin. Any questions?

m1ek

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