“Bike-u” journal chronicles local rider’s Trans-Am ride

by: Phillip Barron - August 25th, 2008   Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment

While out filming this weekend I ran into Judy Martell, who this summer completed her Trans-America bike adventure. From Oregon to Colorado, she rode her locally-built recumbent for 31 continuous days to complete the final stage of a journey she began seven years ago. I last mentioned Martell in these pages in an Outspokin’ Cyclist column from 2005. Martell chronicles her Lewis and Clark-ian ride over at crazyguyonabike with a haiku and photo for every day of the ride.

I cross the threshold
that lies between when and now
and I begin to ride.


photo and haiku: Judy Martell  Teton Range, Wyoming

Congrats Judy!

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Mountain biking helps Durham youth stay focused

by: Phillip Barron - June 12th, 2008   Filed under: columns 2008 2 Comments

WAKE COUNTY — “This is my first race, and I got third place,” says Edgar, a sixth-grader at Brogden Middle School in Durham. Out of breath, Edgar just raced a mountain bike through lakeside trails of Harris Lake County Park at the TORC Spring Skills Clinic

He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Andrea Hundredmark.

Hundredmark, a science teacher at Brogden Middle, launched this school year the Triangle’s first chapter of Trips for Kids. Trips for Kids, she says, is a program for disadvantaged youth. Whether you call it drop-out prevention or leadership development TFKT is a way for teachers and volunteers to identify kids who need a little something extra to see school in a positive light, then take them mountain biking.

According to the program’s national website, Trips for Kids is a non-profit that sponsors mountain bike outings and environmental education for kids who would not otherwise be exposed to such activities. With lessons aimed at personal responsibility, achievement and environmental awareness through fun, “the mountain bike is a conduit to a lot of positive interactions,” says Hundredmark.

Aaron, also a sixth-grade student at Brogden Middle, is originally from Chicago. He says he’s ridden bikes his whole life but had never mountain biked before Hundredmark asked him to join Trips for Kids. Aaron says mountain biking is “fun, exciting, and hard work, but the hard work pays off.”

How does it pay off? “Because you get to go mountain biking again,” he says.

Prior to the TORC sponsored race, John Miles and Brian Bergeler, members of Bull City Cycling, shared insider mountain bike racing tips with the Trips for Kids students. Miles and Bergeler also accompanied the students on a seven-mile warm-up ride that included the advanced loop at Harris Lake.

“It’s great to see these guys out here and to see how quickly they’re picking up the skills,” says Miles.

Aaron’s fellow student Ahkeem has been mountain biking a total of three times. In that short period of time, he’s learned good riding posture, how to change gears, how to use the brakes, how to control the bike and share the trail. “Before, I used to just ride around the block,” says Ahkeem, “but Ms. Hundredmark told me about this.”

TFKT joins a network of more than 30 chapters nationwide. With Mountain Bike Hall of Fame inductee Gary Fisher on Trips for Kids’ board of directors and such celebrities as actors Peter Coyote and Robin Williams and musicians Bonnie Rait and Huey Lewis raising awareness for the non-profit, the Durham-based chapter benefits from the national organization’s exposure and experience.

Individual chapters, however, are financially autonomous. This means that while riding mountain bikes is the focus of TFKT’s activities, learning how to sell and repair bikes is the key to the program’s sustainability.

TFKT plans to open a full service bicycle repair shop this summer. Grassroots Bikes will sell and repair bikes, with all proceeds going to support the TFKT mission. Students will volunteer this summer, learning the technical skills of bicycle repair and cycling etiquette. Hundredmark thinks of learning as something more than just what happens in traditional classroom settings and conceptualizes the shop as an ongoing educational experience. “Other successful TFK chapters across the country also have a similar set-up, where the bike shop doubles as an after school program for the TFK kids,” she says.

Steve Levine, owner of Cycling Spoken Here, is helping TFKT get off to a strong start. He recently donated a $2500 BMC Trail Fox to TFKT so that they could raffle off the a full-suspension mountain bike. “I have kids, and [kids] are the future of our sport,” says Levine. “For me, Trips for Kids is about giving anybody the opportunity to go back and enjoy the most simple thing, and that’s the bicycle.”

TFKT raised $3500 from raffle ticket sales.

“I hope I do learn how to build trails and fix bikes too,” says Aaron. Aaron grasps quickly that the essence of mountain biking is about more than fun; it is also about taking responsibility for your ride as well as the trails on which you ride.

If kids are the future of mountain biking, Trips for Kids is doing its part to ensure that mountain biking’s future is bright.


From left to right: Steve Levine, Aaron, Marcee Vanore, Ben, Sam, Ahkeem, Andrea Hundredmark, Edgar, Margaret Feilds, Curtis, Tristan Fuierer, Terence O’Neill, Stewart Bryan

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Women’s liberation through bicycling

by: Phillip Barron - March 6th, 2008   Filed under: columns 2008 1 Comment

For many, the nineties were a time of political advancement and financial success. The economy was doing well, failed policies from previous administrations were being turned back, manufacturing was on the increase, and progress was the buzz-word in board rooms and parlors.

This national excitement had something, more than a little, to do with the fact that the 1890s were also the height of the bicycle boom in the United States. In 1897 alone, approximately three hundred manufacturers in the US sold more two million bicycles, doubling production from the previous year.

The bicycle had been invented only thirty years earlier, and the constant stream of improvements to its design was a celebrated sign of progress. The bicycle’s adoption by women of the era made the bicycle literally and metaphorically a vehicle of social change.

In the 1930s, local newspaper columnist Wyatt T. Dixon wrote a few articles reflecting on bicycles’ popularity in 1887. B.L. Duke and Company’s furniture store rented high wheelers (the kind of bikes with a front wheel nearly as tall as the rider and much smaller rear wheel) for ten cents an hour. If you could afford it, renting bicycles and learning to ride the wobbly contraptions was a popular form of entertainment in 1887. Watching the cyclists fall off the bikes was equally entertaining for the crowd that formed every weekend.

Cycling, as Dixon reports it, was a man’s activity.

Between 1887 and 1890, the number of cyclists in the US doubled. “The vast majority of new purchasers, many of whom were women, favored the new ‘safety bicycle,’” says David Herlihy in Bicycle: The History. The safety bicycle resembles what we now think of as a bicycle: two wheels of equal size with a chain-driven rear axle and lever-operated brakes. Its invention and mass production propelled cycling’s popularity.

In a photograph dating to roughly 1895, young Durhamite Mamie Dowd poses proudly with an Overman Victoria bicycle. The Victoria, Overman’s drop frame woman’s model, was a fixed gear safety bicycle outfitted with solid rubber tires. According to The Smithsonian Institution, “the drop frame bicycle was developed so that women could ride while wearing a long skirt. It’s adoption greatly increased the popularity of the bicycle, and helped make cycling a popular sport for women, as well as, a means of transportation.”

Peter Zheutlin echoes the point in his biography of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world; “a woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation.”

No wonder then that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony said that bicycling had done more than anything else to emancipate women.

Dowd claimed to be the first woman in Durham to own a bicycle, though the authenticity of her claim is challenged by another photograph. In the second, two men and a woman pose in front of the Durham Electric Lighting Company in 1890. The two men stand in suits and top hats, while the woman wears a Victorian dress and hat. Notably, she is sitting astride a bicycle. The photo itself is a celebration of two major innovations of the time: the bicycle as well as Durham’s first electricity provider.

We know from accounts that conservatives of the time saw the bicycle as a symbol of unwelcome social change. While it was a celebrated technological innovation and an admirable source of amusement for men (and even boys), the bicycle’s role in women’s liberation kept it mired in controversy.

In his 1901 memoir, traditionalist James Battle Avirett reminisces antebellum values and derides the bicycle for ruining “the grace of woman’s attractive movement.” His comments parallel a June 6, 1895 article in Statesville’s daily, The Landmark, which notes that while “the number of women who ride bicycles is growing with great rapidity… even in the best and prettiest of costumes, no woman looks dignified while riding a bicycle.”

For conservatives, what was unwelcome about women cycling had as much to do with the resulting changes in women’s clothing as it had to do with these so-called ‘new women’ traveling on their own.

Zheutlin explains that “cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and the large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers.”

In short, when it came to women, “cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms,” says Zheutlin.

Durham embraced the progress perhaps more easily than other cities its size. Women were working in tobacco factories as early as the 1880s, and local historian Jean Anderson notes that in 1896 “continuing efforts toward independence” led Durham women to create their own literary and social clubs, splintering away from male-dominated groups.

A third photograph from the era, this one also from 1895, shows a young boy and girl straddling bicycles in the driveway of the Morehead House on Duke Street.

Despite its high cost, the bicycle’s popularity transcended class. “Hundreds of thousands in the United States,” says Youth’s Companion magazine in the summer of 1896, “saved ‘every spare penny’ to buy a wheel,” and to the detriment of other businesses. As these photographs of turn of the century Durham show, bicycle fever transcended age and race as well.

Although it is unclear whether Dowd was the first woman in Durham to have a bike, later in life she did become the first judge of Durham’s Juvenile Court. Whether her bicycling days had anything to do with her later successful social reforms is up to you.

The photographs mentioned in this column are part of Bull City Bicycles, a month-long exhibit of bicycle related photography on display at Bull City Arts Collaborative, 401 Foster Street. Visit http://www.bullcityarts.org/ for more details.

This column is part of a ongoing research project into the history of Durham’s cycling community. If you have anything to share (photographs, memoirs, family lore, or personal stories) about cycling in Durham, I would love to hear from you.

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: World needs your old bicycles

by: Phillip Barron - February 7th, 2008   Filed under: columns 2008 1 Comment

Mark in Cape Coast, GhanaIn Ghana, the availability of a reliable bicycle turns a 2 hour walk to school into a 25 minute ride.

In Guatemala, it means that someone who previously could not carry their wares to a market now has a way.

In Namibia, where specially equipped bicycles become pedal-powered ambulances, it can be the difference between life and death.

“Bikes empower people to change their lives,” says Merywen Wigley. As an HIV/AIDS professional working in international health, Wigley has witnessed personally the difference two wheels can make.

An avid cyclist before ever stepping foot in Africa, she was moved by seeing healthcare workers traversing rural Zambia by bike to deliver medications and check on patients.

She learned that many communities in the developing world receive their bicycles as donations, salvaged castaways from countries like the United States. Since 2002, Wigley has volunteered with Bikes for the World.

According to their website, Bikes for the World’s central mission is to collect unwanted bicycles and related material in the United States and deliver it at low cost to community development programs assisting the poor in developing countries or in the Washington DC metropolitan area. As much as possible, Bikes for the World (BFW) uses the donated bicycles to help set-up self-sustaining bicycle repair operations which can make enough money to pay the shipping costs for subsequent container shipments of donated bicycles. Since 1995, BFW shipped more than 30,000 bikes overseas. Wigley and other Durham residents are starting a new Triangle chapter.

On Saturday, March 29th, local BFW volunteers will see how many bicycles they can pack into a 24-foot UHaul. They hope to get at least 200.

To do that, they need your help.

That Saturday is a Triangle-wide collection drive. In a parking lot in Research Triangle Park, volunteers will be receiving your donations, making a few mechanical adjustments to each bike for more compact shipping, and loading the bikes onto a truck bound for Washington, DC. From there, BFW will load the cycles into a shipping container bound for either Africa or Latin America.

Road bikes, mountain bikes, kids’ bikes, or adult bikes all make great donations. BFW asks that you please donate whole bikes rather than parts and frames. But a bike with flat tires, broken cables, or a rusty chain is fine. “As long as everything on the bike turns, we can use it,” Dan Gatti explains.

“We also ask for a $10 donation with each bike to offset the cost of shipping.” It costs $20 to get a bike from the collection point to the community in the developing world. “Bikes for the World pays half, and we ask the folks who donate a bike to pay the other half,” Magill says.

“Besides,” says Marcus Rogers, “anyone who has ever boxed and shipped their own bike knows that $10 is a deal.”

Jack Warman, a member of the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, decided to get involved with BFW after hearing a recent BBC radio-documentary on the Bicycle Empowerment Network in Namibia. “Through groups like BFW,” says Warman, “you can take something that we, who are extraordinarily spoiled, would throw away and turn it into something that can change someone’s life.”

Emily Dings agrees. “Bikes have been a great avenue for me to find meaningful activities, and this seems like another one of those meaningful activities,” she says.

Meaningfulness also ruled the day in a recent test of creative mettle.

Software giant Google and bicycle component manufacturer Shimano teamed up to sponsor a contest challenging inventors to create the next radical shift in cycling technology. Innovate or Die, the contest’s name a harbinger of the high stakes on inventiveness in the age of global climate change, drew entries that range the spectrum from the next super-light frame material to the successor to the derailleur.

The winner, though, is simpler. It’s a bike that stores water and filters it while you pedal.

That such a unpretentious, utilitarian bike won this international contest of ingenuity serves as a reminder that bicycles are tools as much as they are toys. They are vehicles with a long history of liberation through simplicity.

As Warman muses, “bicycles can change the world.” Read More

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Durham man to pedal for peace across Israel

by: Phillip Barron - January 17th, 2008   Filed under: columns 2008, travel Add Comment

When Martin Luther King said that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice, he had in mind the idea that lasting, real peace is possible only when we actively take responsibility for it.

Marv Axelrod is tired of hearing promises of peace in the Middle East only to be later disappointed by the dissolution of dialogue. He’s tired of all the news coming out of Israel being about conflict.

Axelrod is not someone who complains about something he is not willing to help solve. “I want to do something rather than just sit around and wait for someone else to fix it,” says the seventy-two year old.

This May, he is planning to pedal a bicycle three hundred miles across the Negev Desert in Israel to promote peace. While he has never ridden a bike in desert conditions before, Axelrod is a busy man by anyone’s standards.

When he retired from the New York City board of education fourteen years ago, a friend told Axelrod that the key to growing older would be to remain active.

The high school English teacher moved to Durham and quickly got involved in his new community. In the time he’s lived here, Axelrod has taught ESL courses through Durham Tech and Duke’s Continuing Education program, has made presentations for the Durham Arts Council, he has taught English in Latin America, he performs for retirement homes with the Village Players, and writes articles for the Menorah, the monthly newspaper of the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation.

“I also do programs for the Carolina Health And Humor Association (HAHA),” says Axelrod. “It’s Jewish humor. It’s stand up comedy; but sometimes I get tired and sit down.”

axelrod.jpgFrank Ferrell of Ninth Street Bakery thinks he first met Axelrod the way he meets many people: when Axelrod came in to Ferrell’s shop as a customer. “We have a similar sense of humor,” says Ferrell, “and he’s raising money for a good cause.” Ferrell has pitched in to help Axelrod meet his fundraising goal of $3600.

Riding his bike this summer is a way to keep moving, too, to remind others that age is not a barrier to staying active, Axelrod says.

He’s been a cyclist since he got his first bike, his uncle’s heavy Schwinn with a horn on the handlebars, when he was Bar Mitzvahed at thirteen. As he grew older, he developed a taste for longer rides. After retiring in New York and moving to North Carolina, he completed both the MS150 and the Ride Across NC in the late 90s.

He’s no stranger to riding a bike in a foreign land — he and his wife have biked around Holland, Spain, and Nicaragua — but he’s never had to raise so much money nor felt so committed to the cause.

The 2008 Israel Ride is a fully supported benefit ride, raising money for the Arava Institute. Arava is an academic, environmental studies and leadership institute situated in the Negev Desert. The institute welcomes Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, and other Arab students and researchers to study regional environmental issues. “If peace is possible in the Middle East, then we have to work together,” says Axelrod. “If people can come together, survive in the desert, learn how to get the desert to bloom and desalinate water, then there can be peace.”

For more information

Israel Ride
http://www.israelride.org

Arava Institute
http://www.arava.org/

To support Axelrod, you can donate through the Israel Ride website (choose Sponsor a Rider and search Marv Axelrod’s name) or send a check payable to the Arava Institute to:

Marv Axelrod
116 Brook Lane
DURHAM, 27712

 
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Why I am not a Democrat (or a Republican)

by: Phillip Barron - November 25th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

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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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Cyclists don’t like concrete islands

by: Phillip Barron - November 8th, 2007   Filed under: columns 2007 4 Comments

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

Willetha Barnette, of Durham, rode her bike in traffic for the first time on October 4th. Encouraged by her friend Cynthia Ferebee to join the Critical Mass ride, a monthly group bike ride through the streets of Durham, Barnette said that she enjoyed the freedom to ride on the streets in safe numbers, but that she would not feel comfortable riding alone.

As the group made its way down Anderson St, Barnette said, “it’s uncomfortable. Drivers don’t seem to be used to sharing the road. They seem annoyed, frustrated that we (cyclists) aren’t going as fast as they are. That’s the way it feels to me.” Afterwards, she said it felt “dangerous” to ride down Anderson St., even with new traffic calming measures in place.

Barnette is referring to a series of concrete islands that the City of Durham installed along the hills and curves of Anderson St this summer. The islands were installed in an effort to slow speedy traffic. Anderson St is a wide street, but is lined with houses and parks. It connects Duke University’s west campus with the Lakewood community and Chapel Hill St and is a major traffic artery for daily commuters.

However, since the concrete islands, or “neckdowns” as they are often called, were installed they have raised the ire of many cyclists.

The sentiment of a string of emails to the durhambikeandped listserv in July is, “why did the City put concrete barriers in the bike lane?” While Anderson St doesn’t have designated bike lanes, there are stripes marking the outer limit of the lane which are several feet from the curb and narrow the lanes of traffic significantly. Many cyclists interpret the wide space of pavement between that white line and the curb as a bike lane, feeling that riding in that space and out of the flow of automobile traffic is the safest place to ride.

But mix in artificially placed concrete islands every few hundred feet, and Anderson St. now feels like an obstacle course. When approaching one of the islands, cyclists have the choice of either entering the lane of traffic or navigating a 2 ft wide gap between the island and the curb.

Lawrence Trost, in a letter to the Herald Sun editor dated July 25th, said “the problem with the neck-downs is that because of overhanging tree branches, uneven pavement and debris between the barrier and the curb, a cyclist can’t safely ride on the inside of the barrier. Instead, they force a cyclist to weave unpredictably from the shoulder to the center of the lane each time they pass a barrier.”

Riding predictably and in the lane of traffic is the safest way for cyclists to ride on city streets, but Anderson Street’s “steep hills will prevent most cyclists from taking the lane the entire length of Anderson for fear of being rear-ended,” says Trost.

From a driver’s perspective, the islands are equally confusing. Alexis Richardson, a teacher at Hillside High School, encountered the islands for the first time at night.

“I was taken completely by surprise when I turned on to Anderson Street and I saw some obstruction in the road to my right,” Richardson said. “I squinted and it registered that there was something there, but I had no idea what it was.” When she later learned they were designed to be traffic calming devices, Richardson “was appalled because they seem downright dangerous. I have perfect vision, and I could hardly tell what they were.”

Dale McKeel, Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator, says that “a contractor will be planting landscaping in the neckdown islands this fall” to improve their visibility. He also noted that a consultant will be evaluating the neckdowns, after which the City will decide whether the remove them or how to improve their compatibility with bicyclists.

Feel free to share your thoughts on the concrete islands or other cyclist-unfriendly traffic calming measures with Dale McKeel in the City’s Transportation office at dale.mckeel@durhamnc.gov or 560-4366.

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Hybrid car pitch a step backwards

by: Phillip Barron - October 4th, 2007   Filed under: columns 2007 Add Comment

bliss_article.jpgPhillip Barron
The Herald Sun

September 14th marked the 108 yr anniversary of first pedestrian death at the hands of an automobile in the United States. On September 13th, 1899, Henry Bliss stepped from a streetcar on Central Park West, in New York, and was struck by a taxicab. He died of his injuries the next morning. The event was reported on the front page of the New York Times.

In 2005 alone, 39,000 automobile crashes in the United States accounted for 43,000 deaths.

Given the anniversary of Bliss’ death, it’s appropriate to think of September as an automobile awareness month, culminating in International Car Free Day. September 22nd is the day that cyclists, transit access activists, and municipalities the world over celebrate a moment of independence from the automobile.

But with the local Smart Commute Challenge moving to the spring (it will return in April 2008) and neither Durham nor Chapel Hill hosting any Car Free Day celebrations, September 22nd came and went much like any other day in the Triangle. The Triangle Transit Authority’s Fare Free Day, on Friday Sept 21st, was the closest thing going.

Many places around the world celebrate their car free days more enthusiastically. This year, Montreal closed off sections of its historic district to private automobiles on Friday, September 21st. Last spring, Mexico City’s Marcelo Ebrard launched a series of weekend efforts to encourage bicycle usage. By closing off selected city streets, the mayor creates ciclovias, or bike paths, on Sundays. Ebrard arguably borrowed the idea from Bogotá, Colombia where approximately 75 miles of its city streets are closed to motor vehicle traffic every Sunday. These car-free programs allow cyclists to gain confidence on the road before relying on their bikes as transportation.

Every day is an automobile awareness day in some parts of London. Since February 2003, London has levied tolls on drivers who take their automobiles into the core of the city. Congestion taxation, as the practice is called, aims to reduce private automobile traffic in dense urban areas by charging drivers fees, then reinvesting the profits in public transportation. Since 2003, congestion in London is down 30%. Michael Bloomberg has openly endorsed a similar tax program for relieving congestion in New York City.

But this September, we took another step backward in the US, another step tpward furthering our dependence on the automobile. A post on Google’s official GoogleBlog put out the word that the software giant is soliciting proposals from entrepreneurs who think they can design the next generation of electric hybrid automobiles.

The fact that Google wants a hand in designing electric automobiles is not so surprising,considering that Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley start-up company. Tesla Motors makes an all-electric Roadster, a $98,000 two-seater that outpaces Ferraris on the drag strip. But perhaps it is because Google is known for outside the box thinking that their request for proposals strikes me as a step in the wrong direction.

Entrepreneurs who answer Google’s challenge are likely to produce exactly what it asks for — new designs for electric hybrid automobiles. The continued focus on the automobile is a limitation on creative thinking. A shift from the era of the Ford Mustang and Porsche Cayenne to an era of electric Ford Mustangs and Porsche Cayenne’s is not the radical shift in our transportation design that this country needs.

Teslas and Google cars may not run on gasoline (though, as hybrids the Google cars probably will), and weaning ourselves off petroleum products will surely reduce greenhouse gases. But keeping transit focused on the free-wheeling automobile will do nothing to address the 40,000 deaths per year that result from automobile crashes.

After all, the taxicab that killed Henry Bliss was electric.

————–

highwaycrash.png

A crash on a Durham highway in 1948 killed a pedestrian
Image courtesy of the Herald Sun

 
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The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Don’t fret, downtown getting bike racks

by: Phillip Barron - September 6th, 2007   Filed under: columns 2007 Add Comment

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

Durham Rising brought a lot of people downtown on Saturday — 12,000 by some estimates. A surprising (yes, even to me) number of those folks were cyclists. So, if you walked around downtown at all that day, you surely had to step around some of their bikes. There wasn’t a lamp-post, street sign, or sapling that didn’t have a bike chained to it. Outside Bull McCabe’s, the new Irish pub replacing Jo and Joe’s, signs and lamp-posts secured two and three bikes a piece.

Where were the bike racks?

I left downtown that day feeling disgusted, and no, it wasn’t from gorging on Locopops.

The city of Durham spent more than sixteen million dollars on its Downtown Improvements project as the civic investment in re-energizing downtown. They developed a new central plaza, realigned streets, and marked pedestrian crossings with stamped brick designs. But no bike racks? I was incredulous.

Turns out, bike racks were on their way. They just weren’t installed yet.

Hopefully, you’ve been back downtown since June. As of the end of August, one city program installed bike racks downtown, and one will continue to install them throughout Durham.

First, the streetscape project did include bike racks; they simply couldn’t be installed by the Durham Rising event. Ed Venable of the City says that bike racks were installed in eight locations in July. See them outside the Professional Center, the Empowerment Center, and the CCB Plaza among other spots inside the loop.

bike_rack.jpg
Second, the CityRacks program secured funding from the state and federal governments to install bike racks all over Durham. Under a Congestion Mitigation for Air Quality (CMAQ — often pronounced see-mack) Improvement Program, Durham will be installing bike racks all over the city. CityRacks, as the CMAQ funded program is called, will install “inverted U” bicycle racks on city-owned property. Look for them to start popping up this fall.

There’s a common story told on many college campuses (whether myth or fact doesn’t matter) about how it was decided where sidewalks should go. It usually goes something like this. Suppose you want to lay out a campus, and you want to put in sidewalks only where the students will use them. The best way is to wait a few years to see what pathways the students wear into the lawn, and put the sidewalks there, because those are the pathways students use to get from building to building. Otherwise you’ll have sidewalks, and then you’ll have pathways across the lawn where the students actually walk.

The CityRacks program takes a similar strategy with bike racks. By letting citizens (cyclists) request where racks should go, the City ends up installing racks where they will be used.

Dale McKeel, the city’s new Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation planner, says that the first bike racks were installed downtown in August at locations selected more than a year ago. Before the 2007 year is out, a total of sixty seven racks will be installed at parks, commercial districts, museums, universities, and libraries. For those of us cyclists, that means we will no longer have to lock a bike to a No-Parking sign outside Brightleaf or Ninth St.

Piedmont Parks, Inc. of Greensboro won the $48,000 contract to install the racks, and the upside-down U design was chosen by the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, who says this style bike rack is the most secure.

In 2008, the City Racks program will focus on installing bike racks at public schools throughout Durham. And in 2009, the public will again be invited to request bike racks at locations around Durham.

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Jim Reingruber, using Google Maps, has started a website noting all of Durham’s bike racks — at least, all the ones he can find. Check it out at http://www.durhambikeracks.com/

For the full list of all planned bike rack locations, see the pdf available at http://www.durhamnc.gov/departments/works/bikerack_form.cfm

 
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Bike Lane point/counter-point

by: Phillip Barron - July 8th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

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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