Bike You!

The City of Pittsburgh appointed a bicycle czar the other day, whose job it is to make the city a bit more cyclist-friendly. In principle, this seems non-controversial.

Bram Reichbaum posted a reaction that was skeptical of doing much to help scofflaw bicyclists -- which in his experience, means all bicyclists. The comments at The Burgh Report are incendiary, on both sides.

Chad Hermann piled on, proposing that bicyclists be licensed before they are allowed on paved roads. He gives away his post by teeing up the "silliness, of moral relativism and ethical obfuscation, from the (for lack of a better term) pro-biking commenters."

Can't we all just get along?

The claim that "bicyclists break the rules that the rest of us have to obey" is a red herring. I have no idea whether "all" or "most" bicyclists obey Pennsylvania traffic laws. Many certainly don't. But be careful which "rules of the road" are invoked in this argument: the anti-cyclist commenter's rules, or PA rules. It turns out that bicyclists have to obey some, but not all, Pennsylvania traffic laws. Cyclists can ride in public streets, and they don't have to keep up minimum speeds, for example. Here's an explanation from PennDOT. Where the rubber starts to meet the so-called road: The "cyclists are a menace" crowd should ask the same question of itself: How many drivers are religious about following PA traffic laws? I didn't think so. But that conclusion doesn't end the conversation.

The argument that cyclists don't follow the rules (and the argument that they do) isn't very strong. How about the safety-related "cars were here first" argument? The streets were made for driving; drivers pay for them; drivers have to pass competency tests and be licensed to use them, and so on. This doesn't get us much farther. Were the streets made for driving? As Bram indirectly captures in his note about "ancient streets," many of our streets were made (if not necessarily paved) initially for other things, and most of them weren't made for the kinds of driving and kinds of motor vehicles that we see on them today. Claims from priority, in other words, are weak, because the facts are pretty complicated. Do we break down priority on a street by street basis? What about streets that were bricks, then paved with asphalt? And so on. Moreoever, driver licensing was initiated decades ago as a revenue-collection measure, not as a safety measure. Competency tests only came later. So, license bicyclists if you must, but don't require that they take safety exams. Tax them. Tax the kids, too, since lots and lots of kids ride bikes!

That's neither here nor there in the end, and I don't really want to tax kids. If bicycle safety really impinges on driver safety, and if we're serious about safety on the roads, then we should ask what makes merely driving in Pittsburgh so dangerous. The answer: other drivers, also trying to drive. Many pro-safety, anti-bicyclist arguments are undermined because they're far broader than they need to be. Consider this:

My life as a Pittsburgh driver would be far less stressful and less dangerous if those other drivers would just get off the road. They're in my way. They go too slow. When they aren't going too slow, they go too fast. They dart in and out of my field of vision. They break traffic laws all the time. They cut me off. They run red lights and stop signs. They do this crazy thing called a "Pittsburgh left": they turn left unexpectedly when I'm trying to go straight through an intersection. When all is said and done, it's all I can do to keep one hand on my cell phone and another hand on my Big Gulp, and still steer the car with my knees.

[Chad considers a version of this argument. He agrees that the "drivers are unsafe law-breakers, too" defense of cyclists is factually correct, but he denies that it's a defense. That's fair enough. He jumps incorrectly, however, to the conclusion that cyclists are in the wrong as a result, essentially putting the burden of proof on them when it's by no means clear that the burden rests on either side.]

Both the law and common sense dictate that both communities are entitled to use the road. The cyclist/driver issue is a cooperation problem, not an advocacy problem.

As a least one commenter at The Burgh -- Agent Ska, I think -- captures the real source of conflict here: Pittsburgh drivers are scared of bicyclists. To engage in a generalization that is simultaneously radical and entirely ordinary: Pittsburghers are scared of the unfamiliar. People on two wheels in Pittsburgh are strangers in this strange motorized land. Because Pittsburgh has lots of hills and few shoulders, historically there haven't been many cyclists out in traffic throughout the region. That much is clear. But those numbers are growing.

The "fear" argument offers a pair of hypotheses:

First, people who learn to drive here and who have driven here most of their lives don't, as a rule, learn to look for bicyclists. Relatedly, people who bring driving experience from regions with more cyclists get out of the habit of looking for bicycles, simply because there aren't very many of them here.

Second, people who are adopting bicycles as their preferred forms of urban transportation in Pittsburgh similarly fall into one of two groups: There is a group that learned to cycle in a city -- not Pittsburgh -- where vehicle/cycle relations are comparatively harmonious, and who therefore expect that drivers in Pittsburgh will be as comparatively respectful as they are back "home." And there is a group that is mostly native to Pittsburgh, and that no more understands how to cycle respectfully with traffic in an urban environment than Pittsburgh drivers understand how to get along with cyclists.

Take those out for a drive, or a ride, depending on your taste. What's the data?