Bicycling

Seize the day – and the lane

Hank Garfield

Spring in Maine gets here so grudgingly that it’s a revelation when it finally arrives in full force. Leaves explode onto branches, birds and squirrels fight for food outside the window, and bicyclists once again spin down the streets in significant numbers.

This time of year, I frequently bicycle between downtown Bangor and Hamlin’s Marina in Hampden, where my sailboat spends the winter. There’s a lot to do on a boat in the spring to get it ready for the water. Since I don’t have the luxury of owning a car, and since the parsimonious Hampden town council canceled Saturday bus service, my bicycle often becomes a necessary mode of transport.

It’s a pleasant ride along the Penobscot River, but there is one particular point of peril: the intersection of Route 1A (Main Street) with Interstate 395, just south of the Cross Center. A broad bridge carries the interstate over the street. Swallowed by the bridge’s shadow, a bicyclist can be hard for a driver to see.

Many Maine drivers also seem to be unaware of the law that allows a bicyclist to occupy a full lane of traffic, or “seize the lane,” in popular parlance, at this type of intersection. I’ve been honked at here a handful of times already this spring, and yelled at once. But seizing the lane is not only the safest option for the bicyclist, it’s the logical and legal thing to do. If you’re in a car and you try to pass, and a cop sees you doing it, you can be ticketed.

As I pass the Cross Center heading south, the road widens into two lanes. The right lane curls onto Interstate 395; there’s an on-ramp for each direction on either side of the bridge. The left lane continues straight on toward Hampden. That’s where I’m going. I can’t be way over to the right, because I’d get cut off by the cars turning onto the freeway. And I can’t be on the right-hand side of the left lane, for fear of getting sandwiched between two cars trying to pass me on either side – a scary place to be. Cars have to give bicyclists a minimum berth of three feet, and there isn’t room on the road to do it safely on both sides.

Consequently, the proper place for a bicyclist to be in this situation is smack dab in the center of the left lane. And the proper thing for drivers in the left lane to do is to wait to pass until the bicyclist has cleared the intersection. Most of us will be polite and pull to the right once it is safe to do so.

“Polite is not always safe,” says Lauri Boxer-Macomber, an attorney with Kelly, Remmel & Zimmerman of Portland, and a member of the national Bike Law network of lawyers who are legal advocates for cyclists. “If a bicyclist tries to make it so that cars can squeeze by, the bicyclist could be making it more dangerous for everyone. Drivers sometimes see that as the bicyclist being rude. But aggressively seizing the lane is often the safest option.”

Yes, it requires drivers behind a bicyclist to slow down. But it doesn’t take long. It adds seconds, not minutes, to the drive – a small price for safety on our public roads.

The Late Automobile Age in which we now live has seen an upturn in bicycling among people of all ages. Don’t expect that trend to change anytime in the near future. As the ravages of our rampant car culture become more apparent, many Americans have rediscovered the use of bicycles for personal transportation. A bicycle is cheaper than a car, it’s better for your health, and over short distances it can actually save you time.

The proliferation of bicycles keeps the roads safer for everyone. It reduces the overall number of cars. But perhaps more importantly, bicycles calm traffic simply by their presence. Drivers are more aware of bicyclists when they see more people on bikes, and adjust their driving behavior accordingly. They slow down.

We could all stand to slow down a little. If you’re driving somewhere in a car this summer in this beautiful state we call home, seize the day. But let bicyclists seize the lane.

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Circular approach may help straighten out traffic in Orono

Hank Garfield

 

The University of Maine is getting a roundabout.

Construction has begun at the intersection of Route 2 and Rangeley Road, what I think of as the back entrance to the University. During the summer, when the bulk of the students are gone, roadwork will kick into high gear.

On May 14, Rangeley Road will be closed, forcing motorized traffic to and from the University to use College Avenue. The bus route between the University and Old Town will be disrupted. But the end result, said Community Connector compliance officer Jeremy Gray, will be a much safer intersection that’s friendlier to cars, buses and bicycles.

“The buses often have a hard time making that left turn out of the University,” Gray said. “When the roundabout is completed, it will be a lot easier for them to stay on schedule.”

The bus from Bangor leaves Pickering Square at 15 minutes past the hour on weekdays from 7:15 am to 5:15 pm. It passes through downtown Orono, crosses the Stillwater River, and bears left on College Avenue, arriving at the Memorial Union on campus at 45 minutes past the hour. The bus then exits campus via Rangeley Road, turns left on Route 2, and continues on to Old Town, before returning to the Union on the half-hour, and continuing on to Bangor. The round trip takes nearly two hours.

But during busy times of day, that left turn has been problematic. Feeding that intersection are a gas station and convenience store, a coffee shop, a bank, traffic between Orono and Old Town, and a sprawling student housing development. Buses have been hung out to dry there for ten minutes or more. The construction has only made it worse.

There will likely be delays this summer, none of them the fault of the bus or its driver. Instead of leaving campus via Rangeley Road (which will be closed), the bus will have to backtrack out to College Avenue, turn left, turn left again on Route 2, and then drive right through the construction site. Route 2 will remain open, but at times will be reduced to a single lane.

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Many Americans are unfamiliar with roundabouts. Maine has twenty-two of them. Two are in Bangor. One is in Blue Hill, my old hometown, at the top of Tenney Hill, where four routes intersect. It was the site of several terrible crashes. I used to go flying down that hill on my bicycle, without a helmet. Those days are long gone. I’m thankful I survived them.

The Maine Department of Transportation targeted the Rangeley Road intersection for a roundabout because it saw a higher-than-expected number of crashes. During a recent two-year period, there were 24 reported crashes. Most, according to the student newspaper Maine Campus, were either rear-end or T-bone collisions.

The roundabout should make things better for bicyclists, too, once drivers learn to yield the lane to them on the approach. Roundabouts are designed to slow things down. They differ from rotaries, which are larger, and are approached at an oblique angle. Roundabouts have a smaller radius and are entered at right angles. In both cases, vehicles already in the circle have the right of way.

For a bicyclist, the proper way to approach a roundabout is to “control the lane” so that an impatient driver cannot pass you on either side. Using hand signals, make sure that drivers know where you’re going. The point of a roundabout is traffic calming. Instead of trying to beat a yellow light, drivers will have to slow down, temporarily, to the speed of a bicycle. At a dangerous crossroads this is a good thing.

The project should be finished in time for the start of classes in the fall. We’ll see what happens when the students return en masse. Roundabouts take some getting used to. In some places, the number of crashes went up after a roundabout replaced a traffic light. But only initially, and the crashes were far less severe.

I hope the roundabout helps the buses run on time. I hope it makes bicycling safer on that stretch of road. I hope it encourages drivers to slow down and drive more cautiously.

But the intersection was a problem because too many people used it to drive short distances they could easily cover by bus or bicycle. Too many people own too many cars. That’s the challenge of the Late Automobile Age, and this is a roundabout way of addressing it.

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Opening Day for Baseball and Bicycling

Hank Garfield

Opening Day is upon us, and my friend and colleague Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski, who wrote an annual baseball column for several small California newspapers in the 1980s and 90s, is once again picking the Red Sox to win the World Series come October. A man ahead of his time, Moondog has been right three times so far this century, and I have no reason not to get back on the bandwagon this year.

More importantly, the sun has crossed the celestial equator, the clocks have sprung forward, and my bicycle awaits its spring tune-up in anticipation of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race.

On the first warm day after the time change, I donned my cross-country skis for what may have been the season’s final outing on the trails behind the University of Maine. Hatless, I skied a long loop over packed snow melting into mini-rivers in the low spots. Later, as I sipped a beer in a local watering hole, one of my students came in with a baseball and two gloves, looking for someone to play catch. Both gloves were right-handed, unfortunately, and though it was warm enough to ride the bicycle home, it wasn’t ready. But: skiing, baseball, and bicycling in the same day strikes me as the essence of spring in Maine.

In my last post, I wrote that walking, bicycling, driving, and flying embody separate orders of magnitude, in terms of speed and perception. As orders of magnitude rise linearly, the difference between them escalates exponentially. Driving is four times faster than bicycling, but sixteen times faster than walking. Driving is also much more regulated, as it should be. Most of us are licensed to drive a car. You can apply for a pilot’s license, but I imagine that the process is an order of magnitude more difficult.

This concept also applies to baseball. Anyone can play in Little League, but by high school the competition gets a bit more serious. The curve steepens through semi-pro leagues, college ball, and the minors. At the major-league level there are fewer than a thousand jobs for the best ballplayers in the world. As Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four: “The biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.”

The jump between bicycling and driving a car is just as dramatic. Bicycling is closer to walking than it is to driving. No one blamed Stephen King for the accident that nearly killed him. He was walking along the side of a road reading a book, minding his own business, completely within his rights. Nobody said that King should have been paying more attention. Yet the victim is often blamed when a driver, distracted or otherwise, runs down a bicyclist.

As a bicyclist, it is my responsibility not to run down pedestrians. They are an order of magnitude slower and more vulnerable. I’m subject to more rules than they are, but to far fewer rules than the driver of an automobile. Again, this is as it should be.

The letter of the law says I’m supposed to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light. Nobody rides a bike that way, but the “Idaho stop” (allowing a bicyclist to yield, rather than stop) is illegal in most states. Yet some people want to go even further, requiring bicyclists to get licensed and pay excise tax, as if bicyclists were a danger to drivers, and not the reverse.

Since cars are an order of magnitude more powerful than bicycles, it stands to reason that the onus for safety falls primarily on the driver of the car. This does not give bicyclists carte blanche to ride any way that want to, but it does mean, for example, that drivers need to respect the three-foot rule and a bicyclist’s right to control a lane of traffic when necessary. Bicyclists aren’t absent of responsibility. It’s a good idea to wear bright-colored clothing, and it’s the law to use proper lighting at night.

But I balk at the suggestion that bicyclists be licensed and taxed, and so should the parents of every ten-year-old who wants to ride to the ice cream stand on a warm summer evening.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: it takes seconds, not minutes, out of a driver’s day to slow down for a bicyclist or a group of bicyclists, to wait for a safe place to pass. Given the order-of-magnitude inequalities involved, thinking up new rules for bicyclists is like invoking the infield fly rule in a picnic softball game. It misses the point.

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