Here’s a life-enhancing/saving tip: You’re entitled to nothing.

Drivers: Watch the fuck out. You are operating a machine capable of killing just about anybody, keep pthat in mind.

Cyclists: Watch the fuck out. Pad yourself up as much as you like you are still vulnerable. Quit riding around without a care in the world as though everyone will be looking out for you. Be the better person.

Pedestrians: That goes triple for you.

The world owes us nothing, let’s all just do our damndest to keep ourselves nice and alive.

Thanks.

Look, 35 percent of people bike to work in Copenhagen. In Seattle it’s something like 2 percent. Surely there are a few numbers in between that Seattle can strive for. Just because CPH’s circumstances are different (and they are, in even more ways than you pointed out) doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from it. Both Berlin and Paris are huge, it’s worth pointing out, and both have great bike infrastructure. No, they didn’t do it exactly the same as CPH, nor could they. But they took Denmark’s example and applied it to their own context. Even London, for Christ’s sake, is investing in bike infrastructure to an unprecedented degree, and that city has even bigger challenges than Seattle (tiny streets, insane density, huge size).

I’m from Seattle, by the way, and have been living here in Denmark for three years. It’s frustrating to see how little effort it would take on the city’s part to make a huge difference in emissions, health and quality of life, and how there are always naysayers pointing out why it will never work. Why not *try*, man, geez.

You don’t get sprawl until you get a good 5 miles from downtown. Exactly one thing creates sprawl: cars.

It’s amazing to me that anyone thinks for a moment that Americans - much less those in cities - want the same anything….or should be expected to.

Seattle is not Copenhagen - better we recognize that sooner than later. It is not the fault of bicyclists that our urban form is sprawled (blame old streetcars as well as cars). Our trips on bikes are longer, the amount of time we can budget to transportation is finite. If my commute were 2km long instead of 20, I might (MIGHT) be persuaded to travel at the Danish 12kph pace. Unfortunately, that is neither reasonable or practical.

Both the Danes and the Dutch have a couple of things going in their favor for their cycle track systems - mainly, the cities are small, and they are most certainly FLAT. Neither situation exists here.

In my perfect world, we start removing motorized traffic from streets and reclaim that with wider, better connected on-street facilities that don’t threaten pedestrians (and this is a huge issue in both Denmark and the Netherlands)and gets me from A to B at a more reasonable clip. Yes to more density to shorten trips for those who choose that lifestyle, but don’t penalize those who live in rural Fremont (for in beloved Copenhagen, Fremont would be a rural suburb) by making cycling clumsy and inconvenient.

Let’s design for OUR city, not someone else’s.

‘Bikes are annoying!’ is actually a great argument for building bike lanes and giving bikers more assistance, not less. A biker will never cut you off in traffic or be in front of you at a stop light if he has his own ‘road’ next to yours.

It’s amazing that no one in American cities seems to understand that everyone, deep down, wants the same thing.

It’s still interesting, even if too short. You can see it here:
http://blip.tv/file/1191401
This is the start of the lecture, and it’s less about bikes/ walking than about cities in general. The gist: decide what kind of city you want first, and then the rest has to follow.

Lane-splitting is stupid and dangerous, and I say that as a full-time motorcycle rider who might conceivably “benefit” from making it legal in WA. The only place in the US it’s legal is California, and that’s only because the CHP uses antiquated air-cooled Harley Davidsons which overheat if they sit in traffic. Drivers already have trouble seeing motorcycles in places where they might reasonably be expected. Going out of the lane or doing some other thing which is unexpected makes motorcycles nearly invisible to drivers. People see what they expect to see.

This goes back to psychological experiments on attention. There’s the classic experiment where subjects watch a short film and are asked to count how many times a ball is passed around. Half of them are so intent on watching the ball that they utterly fail to see the man in the gorilla suit dance into the picture halfway through, even though he’s clearly visible on screen. Drivers do the same thing. They’re concentrating on the primary dangers on the road (other cars) and looking for them in the expected places. The human brain is not wired to process complex visual information fast enough to approach this problem any other way. So, if I ride my motorcycle (shaped differently from expected hazards) along the centerline in traffic (going faster and in a different place than slow moving vehicles all in lanes), many drivers completely and utterly fail to see me even if they are looking right at me and I’m wearing my bright yellow gear. That doesn’t make them inattentive. It makes them human.

Then there’s also the matter of reaction times. Everybody takes a couple of seconds to react to hazards, decide what to do about them, and then act. Even race car drivers need time to perceive, judge, and react. A car moving at 35 mph / 50 fps, will travel at least 80 feet before its driver can react to a bicyclist darting into his lane or suddenly deciding that he/she is going to act like a two-wheeled pedestrian instead of a road vehicle or a motorcycle riding the line because he/she couldn’t be bothered to wait his/her turn in traffic. That’s 80 feet before the driver even starts to react.

Bicyclists face the same problems as motorcyclists. The big difference between us is that most motorcyclists now tend to accept that that’s just the reality of being on a small two-wheeled vehicle in the middle of big four-wheeled traffic and take steps to not become roadkill. Bicyclists, on the other hand, tend to keep the pedestrian mentality of entitlement while taking on all the risk of being slow and precarious in traffic, expecting drivers to see them and accommodate them even when the bicyclists are doing things that are extremely risky and make them effectively invisible. If you ride a bicycle or motorcycle on public roads and won’t follow the rules of the road, the consequences are on you. Not only that, but you have to be far more careful than a car driver to use the same road. That’s not fair, but that’s how it is. The only way out of that is to either not ride, be extremely careful and follow the rules, or only ride in places where cars don’t go.

Motorcyclists tend to be outspoken about this for a few reasons:

1) we’ve got a lot of experience with the hazards of sharing the road with cars (many of the issues you’re talking about for bicycles were also big problems for motorcycles until there was a concerted effort to improve motorcycle safety back in the 1980s…bicyclists could learn a lot from that effort if they ever bothered to study it)

2) safety training for motorcycle licensing is mandatory in most states (as opposed to bicyclists, who rarely have training on how to ride safely or well, and don’t have to demonstrate that they’re capable of understanding and abiding by the rules of the road before setting out into traffic…bicycle safety would improve a LOT if safety training was mandatory for anyone riding one on a roadway)

3) the consequences of an accident are typically even worse for a motorcycle rider than a bicycle rider (the threshold for major injury is about 50 feet per second, or around 35 mph…most motorcycles go faster than that, while only some bicycles do…having said that, however, a car moving at 25mph hitting a bike moving at 10mph puts you into the major injury category)

None of which is meant to imply that motorcyclists are superior to bicyclists, but rather that we’ve been struggling with many of the same issues for a longer period of time, against much stiffer opposition (motorcyclists were treated as quasi-criminals for a large part of the 20th century), and have typically had more at stake. Over time, motorcyclists worked out a way to address the problem through:

1) educating drivers
2) becoming safer riders
3) reforming traffic laws

If bicyclists really want to deal with the danger posed to them by riding in traffic, they need to learn from what motorcyclists did to deal with the same problems, not scream for special treatment and exemption from all the rules that exist to try and keep us all from killing each other.

You’re welcome on the lecture, BTW. Based on what you wrote, it was pretty clear you needed some clarification on these issues before the attitude you were expounding on gets you or someone else killed. I enjoy this blog immensely and would be disappointed if you got yourself run over because you were trying to prove a point about how bicyclists need to be confrontational with motorists in order to gain respect on the road.

What is your opinion on motorcycles splitting lanes? I believe motorcycles should be allowed to do it. That is, motorcycles should have their own set of rules because they are different from cars, just like bikes should.

And thanks so much for the lecture on safety. One thing I’ve noticed about bicycle discussions in an online forum like this is that the motorcyclists who comment tend to be more self-righteous than anyone.