a special place in hell for bike thieves
“A Special Place in Hell for Bike Thieves”
Phillip Barron
published in Urban Velo, Issue 8 (download the whole issue or read it online)
A neighbor recently posted a note to the neighborhood listserv that his daughter’s bike was stolen. The bike was unlocked, leaning against another (adult) bike, which was locked. Both were on a semi-enclosed front porch; one could have determined that the kid’s bike was unlocked only if (s)he had seen someone park the bike without securing it, or (s)he walked up on the porch to find out. Either way, this is a pretty bold move for a community where, as my neighbor says, “our neighborhood doesn’t feel to me like the kind of place where…” he needs to lock his bike.
Don’t waste your breath (nor your keystrokes) calling him naive. Regardless how fashionable cynicism is these days, it’s worth lamenting that we live in a world where we can’t leave a bicycle in a front yard without it becoming a target
for thieves.
Nevertheless, bike thievery is a unique moral and criminal transgression. Theft of one’s bike has been known to rile the wrath of even the most otherwise placated pacific souls. Indeed many in the cycling community have noted that there must be a special place in hell for bike thieves.
To know whether there really is a place in hell reserved for bike thieves, you have to turn to Dante Alighieri. Dante is not just the only person who claims (with some authority) to have been to hell and back. He is also famous for relaying that there is a special place in hell for just about every sort of miscreant. And sure enough, according to Dante, between the grafters and the gamblers, there is a circle of the inferno reserved just for people who steal bicycles.
You might have noticed that Dante’s comments on bike thieves didn’t make it into the original edition of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s journal tells us that the omission resulted from his editor’s fascination with more complicated technologies: carts put before horses and what not. Disappointed that mention of his velophilia didn’t make it into his magnum opus, Dante later published the Canto concerning bike thieves independently under the title “Tractatus di Ciclisma.” A rare copy of the Tractatus recently resurfaced during an excavation in Florence.
In an effort to correct his editor’s mistake, we republish the text for the first time in seven hundred years.
Then my guide said to me, “Now it is time to quit the wood; see that you come behind me. The path I shall lead does not burn, and you would do well to follow close behind.”
Once our feet resumed their path, the tormented continued their ancient wail. My guide, the Poet, beseeched me to view the next pit with cautious eyes. I surmised that, like the ones before, this pit’s walls were steep so that climbing out is prohibited by design. In the center there rose a summit with strata of endless undulating paths encircling the conical mount.
The Poet advised that I look more closely at one of the layered paths. On it, a most peculiar sight did move before my eyes. What appeared to be a bicycle was actually a party of five fools bonded together for all eternity.
They formed themselves, two apiece, into the wheels of fleshy bicycles. Hands grasped ankles in a human wheel at the sight of which I might have laughed had not such exultations of pain carried through the air. The fifth and most rigid among them clasped the hands of the wheel-men, whose thrice wound palms and fingers formed axles. Together they rolled. Each wheelman’s spine was repeatedly subjected to the gnash and grind of the rocky path.
I asked my guide, Virgil, what these violators had done to be sentenced as both man and machine, dehumanized and beaten by the weight of their own movement.
My guide said merely that I have not yet looked closely enough. And as I returned my eyes to the tissue and sinew that tore at every revolution, I saw one of the bicycles become unsteady. Rolled away from its lane beside the mountain it did, and an explosion of noise filled the pit. A grand team of one-hundred and eighty horses sped from behind the unstable human bicycle to trample the five punished souls.
On the uneven path pocked with holes, the five wheelmen — although bloody and weak — quickly reassembled their velocipedic form and continued their roll within the narrow confines of their path.
My guide revealed to me subtle tortures which my eyes did not independently perceive. The cyclists’ — if that they can be called — path was one of many unending undulating surfaces, alternating between climb and descent. Both were designed expressly to insure that neither climb nor descent is of such length that a traveler might gather momentum. Instead, the wheelmen are frustrated by the sharp curve of the path in descents.
Whether the onslaught of horses gains mastery over the velocipeds depends upon their position within the path. If their machine of marrow strays away from the mountain to which their path is bound, the horses’ authority is summoned. With no appropriate markings delineating the bicycle’s space, the cyclical men have taken to riding so close as to grind their shoulders against the escarpment solely to prevent an equine trampling.
“Who then dear guide,” I pleaded, “are these sufferers who ride the shoulder of the path to avoid an explosion of horse power?”
And Virgil answered, “the contortions you see before you are the eternal humiliations of those who sought to misappropriate a bicycle from the world of its rider. They did so disrespect the joy and utility of the world’s greatest contrivance that they spend eternity in futile and dispiriting detour.”
short story in Urban Velo
I have a story in the eighth issue of Urban Velo, which is released for download tomorrow. As soon as it’s tomorrow, you can click the image to download the latest edition of bicycle culture on the skids.
Please Don’t Involve Fellow Passengers In Schemes To Extort Disability Funds
I posted a hastily written short story at Helium.com to test their platform. Read it here if you are curious, or download a pdf here.
Gallery’s open…
After last night’s Critical Mass, we invited folks back to check out the show.
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Stop by Bull City Arts Collaborative any Friday from 12 — 2pm or by appointment to see it in person. Call Dave Wofford, 949-4847, to set up a time.
OR, stop by on Friday, March 21st, 6 — 9pm for a Third Friday/Culture Crawl reception.
For those of you so unlucky as not to live in Durham, I’ve made a website. Check it out here…
Bull City Bicycles — art show
March 7 - 28, 2008, Bull City Bicycles gathers historic and contemporary photography of bicycles in Durham, NC. A celebration of the aesthetic simplicity, utility, and joy of bicycles, this show documents Durham’s sense of place from two wheels.
Sources of photography include The Herald Sun, The Durham County Library, The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, The Smithsonian Institution, the North Carolina State Archives, as well as my own photographs.
Visit http://nicomachus.net/bcac/ or http://www.bullcityarts.org/ for more details, or download the press release.
Why I am not a Democrat (or a Republican)
Phillip Barron
This piece ran as an op-ed in Sunday, November 25 Herald Sun
I spent the weekend before the election in Washington, D.C. being reminded of the passion for critique on which our country was founded. Standing in the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial, it’s dizzying to read “I have sworn… eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” I was a little disappointed when the first political campaign sign to catch my eye back in Durham read “Stith: Right-Wing Republican. Don’t Be Fooled.”
While the sign amused me — principally because I grew up in a place where self-identifying as a right-wing Republican is more likely the campaign than the anti-campaign — it bothered me the more I thought about it. The sign served only to distract voters from campaign issues by calling Stith a name — “Republican” is a bad word in Durham, haven’t you heard?
The last two hundred years of U.S. history are filled with progress — in technology, quality of life, and cross-cultural communication for starters. But in politics, all too often we’ve regressed from our philosophical beginnings and opted for name-calling.
Democrats might defend themselves in two ways. First, they might say Stith’s campaign was devoid of issues. He offered criticism with no solutions; he ran a campaign of distraction from the start. Granted, it’s tough to debate someone who isn’t clear where he stands. But we might begin by pointing out that a campaign strategy occluding both his party affiliation and recent position in a conservative think tank gives us a good reason to think he mistrusts transparency in government.
Or, they may offer a more childish defense: “he started it.” True, Stith launched a campaign of distraction early in the election, specifically trying to drum up fear of Durham’s growing immigrant community. The politics of fear is the worst sort of politics of distraction because it wants not only to disguise the real issues, but wants to displace them with visceral emotions and prejudice. While emotions and prejudice are natural parts of human psychology, we believe in a democracy that they must be tempered by reason.
And many of Durham’s politically active citizens, bloggers and even a write-in candidate called Stith out. They managed to do it in a much more nuanced way than the Democrats, focusing on how Durham’s immigrant population is full of people who… well, as the locally produced film Los Sueños de Angelica (Angelica’s Dreams) shows, full of people who share the same hopes and dreams as anyone else in the U.S.
So why did the Democrats, then, just result to name-calling? Did they not have enough faith in Durham’s citizenry to see through Stith’s deceit? Is the idea that critical thinking matters to politics mere shibboleth in the YouTube age?
I wish I could have tested my belief that campaign tactics designed to scare people into voting for you don’t work on an intelligent citizenry. A growing immigrant population — documented or undocumented — in Durham is a wonderful thing. A diversity of backgrounds, languages, and points of view makes a culturally rich place like Durham thrive. But it is hard to say whether we saw through Stith’s fear-mongering, or simply were ourselves scared of voting for a “Right-Wing Republican.”
The politics of fear and distraction play to the lowest common denominator; they play to the worst in us. Wouldn’t we rather cultivate a political climate where leaders speak to the best in us?
Part of the solution involves breaking the hegemony of the two party system. Political campaigns can stoop to the lowest levels as long as 1) nothing much separates Republicans from Democrats and 2) there are only two political parties racing through the streets to City Hall (or to the Capitol, or to the White House).
But imagine an election where Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Greens, and others formed temporary coalitions, voting blocs, and other strategic partnerships. With more political parties in the mix, we would be less likely to see the traffic jams and catastrophic collisions we see when there are only two political vehicles racing down Main St. Traffic naturally calms when a critical mass of buses, bicycles, trucks, and cars all share the road — elections, too, could be exercises in cooperation rather than competition.
It is still true that civil society is built on civil dialogue, right?
This op-ed originally ran in Op-EdNews.com and The Herald Sun.
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deliciousBike Lane point/counter-point
A few weeks ago, a local listserv debate over the Constitutionality of bike lanes devolved into a rather asinine comparison between vehicular separation and racial segregation. In an effort to raise the level of discussion over whether bike lanes are good for cyclists, local cyclist Steve Goodridge and I wrote point/counter-point Op-Eds for the Herald Sun. Enjoy.
Lanes do their job
Phillip Barron
Guest columnist, The Herald-Sun
Just two weeks ago, Main Street was one-way through downtown Durham. City officials closed the street Saturday and reopened it for traffic going in both directions. How do drivers know the difference?
City leaders ceremoniously proclaimed its transformation from the stage at Durham Rising, the party celebrating downtown’s rebirth. Several newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts have mentioned it. Maps of downtown Durham will be redrawn at some point. But many people will simply discover that Main Street is now a two-way street when they drive downtown and see the fresh yellow double line separating the lanes.
Lines on the road serve a purpose.
The yellow and white strips of reflective paint that city and state governments use on asphalt help to guide traffic. Drivers respond well to these guidelines, and that’s exactly why there are lanes to facilitate the safe flow of traffic. We live (and drive) in an era when competition for drivers’ attention revolves around anything but keeping the driver’s eyes on the road. Cell phones, iPods, DVD players, and even video games have found a home inside automobiles. Lanes assist drivers whose attention may be split between Gnarls Barkley on the radio, Mortal Kombat in the back seat, a dentist on the other end of the phone and traffic.
Bike lanes do the same thing for drivers and cyclists that other lanes do. They guide all vehicles into predictable places on the road so that each person can safely go where she or he needs to go. The Pedestrian and Bicycling Information Center at UNC-Chapel Hill defines bike lanes as “a portion of the roadway which has been designated by striping , signing and pavement marking for the preferential or exclusive use by bicyclists.”
By carving out a dedicated space on the road for bicycles, bike lanes remind drivers that they share the road with all different kinds of vehicles. As Nancy Gallman of Durham put it, “bike lanes create the expectation that bikes will be on the road, even if they aren’t there right now.” They train drivers to expect cyclists, and they welcome cyclists onto the road.
Bike lanes are critical for creating a bike-friendly community in one more way — they calm traffic. A typical outer lane is 14-feet wide. A 14-foot outer lane looks pretty wide, and traffic engineers know that drivers speed on wide roads. A 10-foot outer lane, however, looks a lot more narrow, and drivers naturally (if not subconsciously) drive more slowly. It simply requires more concentration to keep your car in your lane if your lane is narrow.
We can reduce outer-lane width to ten feet by using the remaining four feet for a bike lane. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials sets their minimum bike lane width at four feet. Those four feet have to be asphalt — the bike lane can’t push cyclists into the gutter. Nor would a well-designed bike lane be painted next to parked cars where cyclists would be forced to ride in the “door zone”.
Granted, there are many examples of poorly designed bike lanes, some of which make riding more dangerous for cyclists than it would be without a bike lane. Just look at Duke University’s Campus Drive bike lane for a local example. But poorly designed bike lanes are unsafe because they are poorly designed.
Further, cyclists are permitted full use of the road in North Carolina. If the bike lane is unsafe — because of gravel, pot holes, or any other reason — then cyclists are free to move out of it. Cyclists, like drivers, are expected to choose the safest means of travel.
Well-designed bike lanes foster safe riding; they do this best when bike lanes are part of a larger network of safe roads and greenways. Durham’s new bike plan is a master plan for how Durham can use bike lanes safely and effectively. When designing them, let’s make sure they go somewhere and they are safe, because cyclists are likely to use bike lanes when they connect to neighborhoods, workplaces, and recreation centers.
As a recent Herald-Sun editorial noted, Durham will see more cyclists hit the streets as gas prices continue to rise. The most important thing the city and county can do to foster Durham’s growing bike community is to adopt design standards that take cyclists into consideration when designing and maintaining all roads.
Phillip Barron is a member of the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, a citizens group advising local government how to make Durham more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. He can be reached at pbarron@gmail.com.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862926.cfm
Please hold the stripes
Steven Goodridge, Guest columnist
“Get in the &@$# bike lane!” yelled the driver of a pickup as I approached my left turn at the stop sign, my bike a few feet right of the centerline. It wasn’t the first time that a motorist had harassed me for riding outside of a bike lane since the city had striped them on the otherwise quiet residential streets near my home. But it was a clear indication of just how little some people understand about bicycle operation in traffic, and how striping separate pavement for bicycles can have an unfriendly effect on cyclists.
Literally billions of miles of bicycling by experienced cyclists and countless studies of crash data have shown that, as noted cycling educator John Forester has written, “cyclists fare best when they act, and are treated, as drivers of vehicles.” This is why cyclists are classified as drivers by the traffic laws in all 50 states. If you, the cyclist, want to get to your destination efficiently and in one piece, the best approach is to follow the basic rules of the road for drivers. Among these rules are destination positioning at intersections (making left turns from near the center of the road, right turns from right edge of the road, straight travel in between), speed positioning between intersections (faster traffic overtakes on the left, slower traffic operates to the right), and looking back and yielding to nearby traffic before changing lane position. With a little practice, these rules and related defensive driving skills make it possible to travel by bike virtually anywhere, safely and efficiently.
The trouble with marking part of the roadway surface as “bikes-only” is that this type of separation often conflicts with the best positioning of vehicle traffic under the rules of the road. If the motorist is turning right, he should approach the intersection from a position as far to the right as practicable. If the cyclist is passing slower traffic, he should do so on the left, not on the right. Curbside bike lanes encourage both parties to use the wrong positions, too often leading to tragic consequences like the December collision between a right-turning dump truck and a cyclist in a bike lane at Duke University. For their own safety, cyclists must often leave the bike lane and take a position farther left in order align themselves with their destination and improve their visibility to other drivers at intersections and driveways, where over 95 percent of urban car-bike collisions occur due to turning and crossing movements. Cyclists who drive defensively must also leave bike lanes that are striped where parked cars’ doors can extend, or that have accumulated hazardous debris. (Bike lanes are notorious for collecting debris because motor traffic then no longer blows it off that portion of the roadway.)
“OK,” some might say, “so maybe the stripes cause some problems. But don’t they protect cyclists from cars and trucks between intersections?” Surprisingly, no. I’ve tried for years to uncover a documented safety benefit for cyclists. Only about 4 to 5 percent of car-bike collisions involve overtaking traffic, and there is no evidence that these collisions are made less likely by a stripe. According to police reports, most of these overtaking-type collisions involve roads that are too narrow to add bike lane stripes, where drivers overtook too closely to cyclists who were hugging the edge of a narrow lane. (In narrow lanes, traveling near the center of the lane reduces close passing by prompting overtaking drivers to slow down or to “unstuck” from the lane and move left.) These collisions are practically nonexistent where the lanes are wider — 14 feet to 16 feet or more is recommended — making it easy for motor vehicle operators to pass cyclists safely. Meanwhile, striping the edges of streets often increases motor traffic speeds by better delineating the clear roadway — a phenomenon some traffic engineers call the “gun-barrel effect.”
Bike lane striping is the only traffic control device that cyclists must routinely disregard for their own safety. Instead of reducing dangerous passing or harassment — which rarely occur if the roadway is wide enough — separation of traffic by vehicle type confuses the public about proper driving and where cyclists belong. Cyclists benefit most if the public understands that every street — including those not wide enough for bike lanes — is a legitimate bicycle facility. We don’t need to separate drivers by class to share the road more effectively. We need wider pavement for passing, and better public understanding of cyclists’ rights and responsibilities as drivers.
Steven Goodridge is an avid bike commuter and a League of American Bicyclists certified cycling instructor.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862928.cfm.
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I have a short story in the April issue of The Raleigh Hatchet. If you’re not already a reader, pick up a copy at Bean Traders or Francesca’s on Ninth St. It’s a great local rag.
I wrote an earlier version of the story for The Urban Hiker, which was one of the best collections of local writing. When I moved to Durham, this magazine helped me quickly get a sense of my community. The Urban Hiker stopped publication in December 2004; I don’t think it went under because of my submission, but I guess you never know.
Industries of Cruelty
Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state’s council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina’s method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA’s employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it’s not clear whether the State’s death penalty will be.
 Photo courtesy of the Socialist Party of North Carolina |
For a state that condones such agricultural practices as crating pigs during breeding, forced insemination of dairy cattle to keep them lactating and debeaking chickens to bring charges of cruelty against PETA rings hollow. Nonetheless, the case focused unusual attention on an organization that sees itself as the champion of animal rights. While democratic governments ought to be the champions of their citizens’ right, the charges against the State of North Carolina aren’t flavored with the same twist of irony. Perhaps that’s because the State government has demonstrated its investment in cruelty, to both animals and people.
The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we’re special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.
The stratification of species with which we’re so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.
Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals — locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.
Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.
Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.
We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.
Some say it’s time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.
The change has to begin somewhere. It’s exciting to see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won’t do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there’s something objectionable about the way we imprison people.
As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.
This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title “Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals.”
Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System
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Phillip Barron
Originally published in the Radical Philosophy Review, Volume Three, Number One (2000) (pp. 89-96)
Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system’s primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.
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