The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: Ramming Speed!

So yesterday I'm riding through Manhattan, heading east across Bowery:

As I'm going through the intersection, a cop blips his siren, comes at me at me at full ramming speed and slams on his brakes with about an inch to spare.  (He might have actually hit me if I hadn't sort of twisted my body to avoid the bumper in an impressive display of on-the-bike yoga.)

Then he flipped me off (you can't see it in the video but I can assure you it happened), peeled out, and left me wondering what the fuck had just happened.

Only afterwards did I remember I was riding with the Fly6, and through the magic of seatpost-mounted technology here it is on video:



The best I can come up with was that the light had just turned yellow as I entered the intersection so maybe he was trying to teach me some kind of lesson, though even if I'd actually run a red light (which I hadn't), nearly ramming me and then speeding off seems just a tiny bit excessive.  Or, maybe he was in "hot pursuit" of a "suspect" and I just happened to get in the way.  He did turn on his siren shortly after peeling out again, though he only left it on for a few seconds, and from what I can tell he was only using it to run the red light up ahead at Chrystie Street.  (We've all seen how they do that.)

Isn't it funny how a cop can threaten your life and then say "fuck you," yet you still search for ways to blame yourself?

Anyway, so there you go.  Already, the Fly6 has proved its worth, if only for entertainment purposes.

By the way, apart from the cop, I had exactly zero (0) frustrating interactions with operators of motor vehicles, which is pretty astounding and nearly unheard of on a round-trip commute spanning three (3) boroughs.  I did, however, have to deal with these things:

I thought they were being blown out of the bike lane by a mighty crosswind, but it turned out they were just avoiding an obstacle:

As for me, I rode right through it:

Though only after first purchasing a dedicated gravel bike at Paragon right down the street, which I returned immediately after conquering the treacherous sector.

For the rest of the ride, I was riding Son of Scat:

Which rode wonderfully, as all Frankenbikes seem to do, and which I outfitted with Knog's finest lumens:

None of which I used, because I got home well before dark thanks to this whole "daylight savings" thing.

Incidentally, speaking of Frankenbikes, does yours have a solid-axle hub converted to a quick release and then converted back to a bolt-on with a hex key wheel skewer?  Because mine does:

I'm rolling on a 360-degree kludge, and that's how I like it.

And on the subject of frontal lights with large amounts of lumens, a number of commenters yesterday pointed out that they're rude, blinding, arrogant, and so forth.  This is a good point, and I certainly wouldn't even think of using that big one anyplace where there was significant bike traffic.  I would, however, use it someplace with no traffic and no streetlights, though I'd still angle it down, so as not to inadvertently sear any retinas, and to reveal obstacles such as this:

I do stand by using a front blinky of reasonable lumens in an urban setting though, both as a driver and a cyclist.  96% of drivers can barely parallel park, and your blinky could be the only thing keeping one of them from running you over in reverse because "they didn't see you."  As it is, they have a hard enough time not driving onto subway trains:

(Via Streetsblog.)

The southbound Q train had just left the Church Avenue station about 5 a.m. when the woman plowed through a fence near Albemarle Road and East 16th Street, creating a kind of ramp that allowed her to settle her front tires atop the train, according to an NYPD spokesman and a witness.

The woman who was behind the wheel walked away from the incident and still hasn't been found, the police spokesman said.

I'm sure it wasn't her fault.  Could happen to anybody.  She was probably blinded by a cyclist with too many lumens.

Either that, or she was possessed by the spirit of John Frankenheimer.

BSNYC No Friday Fun Quiz Instead Friday Trip Through Time!

You may have seen this article that's been making the rounds, about how we've been brainwashed over the past century or so to accept the massive death tolls inflicted upon us by motor vehicles:

It's a depressing read, yet a fascinating one, and the stuff about how the auto industry basically invented the concept of "jaywalking" to steal the streets from us is especially eye-opening:

Not to mention incredibly effective, since here we are in 2014 "Vision Zero" New York City and it's still your fault if you get run over by a car:

This, by the way, is a warning cheekily disguised as a summons, and the NYPD should really avoid any attempt at "humor," especially when death is involved, and especially especially when they can't wright too good:

So now we can add "hearby" to the official NYPD style manual, right alongside "helment:"

And using "pedestrian" as the plural of "pedestrian:"

Really, I think the only solution at this point is to take back the act of "jaywalking" from the Automotive Industrial Complex.  We are, after all, Homo sapiens sapiens (the primate so nice they had to name us twice), a proud beast distinguished by--among other things--our ability to walk upright on two legs.

Hey, walking upright is a big deal.  We don't do it just to look cute, either, like meerkats or dogs begging for scraps.  No, walking upright is who we are, and we should be able to do it wherever the hell we damn well please--and that goes beyond the streets, too.  You know when you're walking and you see some tourists setting up for a picture?  Do wait for them to finish so you don't spoil the photo-op?  I don't!  No, I walk right through and "photobomb" that shit, because these boots were made for walking (and for riding, since they're SPD compatible).  Oh, and what's that, cyclocross race marshall?  You want me to use the course crossing?  Portage this, Fancy Shants!  I'll stroll right through that course tape like a racewalker crossing the finish line:

("Hey!  I'm walkin' here!")

And as for PAs on film sets who ask me to wait while they finish shooting their scene, I have a simple response for them, and it's as follows:

"Oh, actually I'm in this scene.  I'd show you my SAG card but I need two hands to carry this Grande Venti Trenta Pork Frappuccino.  If you want to see it though go feel free to rummage around, I keep it in my pants flush up against my unwashed scranus.  Wow is it ever hot today!"

Sorry to be so graphic, but I like to really drive the message home for these people.

Anyway, as far as how to take back our evolutionarily-given right to walk o'er hill and dale, the first thing we need to do is find a new word for "jaywalking."  It should be something proud and important-sounding, like "priority traversing:"

Though then you run the risk of the whole movement being taken over by "vehicular pedestrians:"

(Vehicular pedestrian "taking the lane.")

I also think we should produce a series of PSAs highlighting just how important our right to erect bipedalism is.  Think about it: over the course of our evolution we actually gave up the ability to easily fellate/perform cunnilingus on ourselves (though some of us do retain the vestigial ability), so walking upright must have been really fucking important to our survival.  Those are some serious stakes!  So I'm thinking a bunch of ads like this might do the trick:

If you do have the gift of auto-fellatio though, at least wait until you get to the other side of the street to engage in it.  Otherwise you're liable to run over like the pigeon who can't lift the bagel he's found.

Really though, when you consider the consequences of what the Auto-Industrial Complex has done to us it's kind of disturbing.  Consider a city block:

There are like 70,000 people per square mile in Manhattan, so how many people live on a block like this?  Thousands?  I don't know, but it's a lot--more than live in your whole shitty town.  Now consider the fact that all of these people are only legally allowed to leave their block at four (4) designated access points:

BUT only if the little light says they can:

Kind of absurd, isn't it?  It almost seems like martial law.

Of course, bear in mind I'm as guilty as anybody, since unlike David Byrne I own a car--dents, roof rack, AM/FM stereo with CD player and all:

("You're right, I don't own a car.  But if it did it would have a Dolby tape deck with a broken auto-reverse and a Duran Duran "cassingle" permanently lodged in it.")

By the way, ironically, whenever Talking Heads come on the radio I turn it up a little, open the window (the one that still works), and relish the feeling of the wind running through what remains of my hair--because if nothing else, the man made some good driving tunes.

Still, if I'm going to drive around cranking the Byrne I should at least understand what I'm taking part in, and the whole "Murder Machines" thing happens to tie neatly into my latest obsession, which is old photos of New York.  I couldn't care less about bike porn, but show me some good New York City history porn and I'll go weak in the knees and start trying to auto-fellate.  It is pornography too, because there is nothing more tantalizingly out-of-reach than the past.  Anyway, check out this old photo of a subway station from 1908:

Horses!  Trolley tracks!  Ferris wheel!

Here's a photo from that same subway station a decade or so later:

Note the cars have replaced the horses.  Also, there's a bike, probably purchased via "Craigory's List:"

Here's street level, same station.  They're jaywalking!

Did you notice the guy waiting for the Tweed Ride to roll out?

Anyway, same station again, and after a few more decades the cars get bigger and start blocking the trolleys:

And here's where we are today:

(Photo via here.)

Well over a hundred years later and the trolleys are gone (replaced with buses) and the subway station is as indispensable as ever, but see how it's been streeetched the fuck out to make way for the cars?

(Then.)

(Now.)

That kind of depressed me at first, but now I find it kind of comical.  They just said, "Fuck it, let's stretch it!"  Oh, there's the tweed rider's great-grandson:

Funny how there's always that one token cyclist there.  I like to think it's this guy in a time-traveling "Twelve Monkeys"-type scenario:

Most importantly though, "What the fuck happened to the Ferris wheel?"

We may never know.

Anyway, the retro-grouch in my longs for the tweedy bucolic horsey days I never experienced, but the pragmatist reminds the retro-grouch that, while I was a lot less likely to have been hit by a car back then, I almost certainly would have gotten polio.  (Also, rotting horses were a major problem back in the 19th century, so there's that.)  It's the great Shell Game of Mortality I suppose--first we figure out how to save your life, then we invent a new way to take it.  

In the meantime, I'll take comfort in the fact that, in the last 100-plus years, the two constants in New York City have been subways and bicycles, which just so happen to be by far the best ways to get around this town.

I'm back, just in time for Wednesday!

...and I'm back.

So where was I?

Right.

So last Saturday was a beautiful (for March) day, and so we loaded up our Smugness Fleet and set out on the Hudson River Greenway, which is a greenway that runs along the Hudson River, which is a river:

It was, as you can imagine, a typical first-nice-day-of-the-year shitshow out there.  Wobbly riders on tri bikes, club dorks with race wheels on their backs headed to the Grant's Tomb Criterium, spackled-on skunk stripes the width of fat bike tires on everybody because all the snow was finally melting but nobody in New York has ever heard of "fenders"...  As usual though, the real stand-outs were those in the Gran Fondo New York jerseys, and through it all one of these riders--who still had the number on his bike from last year's event, which was in May, for fuck's sake, so he's been proudly sporting the thing for nearly a year now--is riding straight down the middle, shouting "On your left!" to anything and everything within earshot.  You know, like there's this guy, there's the entire rest of the world, and he's on the left of it.  He's the leftmost point of the world.  He's so on your left that he's transcended ordinary Fredliness and gone right to Trotskyism.

Seriously, I don't know how anybody survives the Gran Fondo New York, it's gotta be death by a thousand "On your lefts:"

By the way, that's a dialogue bubble, not an On-Your-Left-Fred-Eating Space Creature, though in retrospect I like the idea of an On-Your-Left-Fred-Eating Space Creature better.  

The worst person out there by far though was the guy riding a brakeless fixie--which I didn't even think people did anymore--who was coming straight at me on the wrong side of the bike path while using his phone.  This wasn't the surreptitious "Hold the phone down low and take an occasional glance" thing, either.  This was full-on, hands-off-the-bars, sitting-bolt-upright, phone-in-the-face texting--basically like this, except instead of thumbing his nipple with one hand he had both hands on the phone:

(I'm paying my graphics people $1,000 per image, is that too much?)

Actually, it's possible he wasn't texting, and perhaps he was taking a "selfie," but either way he can go fuck himselfie.

So there he is, coming right at me, and I call out "Hey!," or "Achtung!," or "Hey, Dickcheese, get your head outta your urethra!" or something, I don't remember exactly, and finally he looks up, realized he's on the wrong fucking side of the bike path, and swerves out of my way.  And what does he say as he passes me?

"Thanks."

Thanks.  Not "Sorry," but "Thanks," like I just passed him the fucking ketchup.  In a way it was just like that doofus who made me pump up his tire for him on New Year's Day, in that he was operating under this assumption that there's such a thing as a "cycling community" that exists entirely to facilitate his cycling enjoyment.  It's like we all exist in order to be this guy's goddamn eyes for him while he's choosing the right Instagram filter for his stupid greenway fixie adventure.  "Thanks?"  Seriously?  You think I warned you for your sake?  I don't give a shit if you ride right into the Hudson River.  No, I just didn't want you to hit me.  In fact, if I hadn't had a human child on the back of my bike I wouldn't have warned him at all.  Instead, I'd have dismounted and ghost-ridden the Big Dummy right into him like a big green smugness torpedo.  Do you really think 200lbs of fixie and rider are going to make a dent in that tank?  Because I sure don't.

Anyway, other than that it was a great day of family-style bicycle cycling, and then later I got sick and threw up saag paneer.  ("Saag paneer" is an Indian dish, and not a trendy brand of Danish pannier.)

In other news, a number of readers have informed me that we won't be seeing too many more rail trails, since a Supreme Court Justice thinks they might result in bicycles running through people's houses:

Justice Stephen Breyer, who has had three bicycling accidents since 1993 — the last of which in April resulted in a shoulder replacement — envisioned a future in which landowners could be besieged by bikers.

"I certainly think bicycle paths are a good idea," he said, but "for all I know, there is some right-of-way that goes through people's houses, you know, and all of a sudden they are going to be living in their house, and suddenly a bicycle will run through it."

I ride on a converted rail trail regularly and I have yet to see a bicyclist go crashing through somebody's home.  Even if texting fixie guy were to veer off the path, fly off the embankment, and slam into somebody's Cape Cod, I can't imagine he'd do much more than dent the rain gutter.  Granted, the current fat bike craze could make bicycles more destructive to homes, but then again the big balloony tires would probably spare the house from damage altogether.  The point is, we don't know until we conduct extensive crash testing, so if you own a fat bike go outside and ride it at full speed into your neighbor's house immediately.

One thing's for sure though, and it's that if anybody could ride a bike through someone's house, it's this Breyer guy:

The 74-year-old justice fell while riding his bike along Washington's National Mall on Friday afternoon, NPR's Nina Totenberg tells our Newscast unit.

This makes the third time Breyer has sustained a major injury while riding his bicycle. In May 2011, the justice broke his collarbone riding near his home in Cambridge, Mass. In 1993, Boston.com reports, he suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs when a car hit him in Boston's Harvard Square.

He's like the Cadel Evans of the Supreme Court.

The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: Commuting by Bicycle on Wednesday

Firstly, Happy Ass Wednesday!

Secondly, yesterday I mentioned the Knog contest:

Subsequently, I realized it's totally rigged.  See, the idea is you're supposed to submit a picture of your favorite place to ride, and surely they know that in this part of the world we're having the worst winter in decades, which means that more likely than not your favorite place to ride is currently colder than a witch's vulvanus and totally inaccessible beneath fourteen feet of snow.  So clearly it's biased towards Antipodeans and other people in warm climes who understand the metrical system.

Thirdly, a Tweeterer informs me that New York City is a pretty dangerous place to ride a bike:

@bikesnobnyc RT @mmoyr: Deaths/10000cyclists/year ​Copenh 0.3 Amsdam 0.4 Van'ver 0.9 Toronto 1.3 Ptlnd 1.9 Mntréal 2 Paris 8 Lndon 11 NYC 38
— Brian Weber (@weberupp) March 5, 2014

In other words, we win!  Still got it, baby!  Brooklyn may have gone all soft and artisanal, and gentrification may have robbed us of our character, but at least we're still number one when it comes to getting run over.

Speaking of getting run over, I'm still testing the Fly6 integrated tail light and camera, which is painstakingly designed to capture on video the moment of your death by rear-end collision so the police can ignore it and your demise can become a YouTube sensation.

However, I seem to have hit a bit of a snag.

See, when you plug the Fly6 into your computer, you get a bunch of files.  Those are the videos of your ride, which it breaks up into segments.  This time, though, despite the fact I underwent a baronial commuting "epic" of many miles, when I went to view the footage afterwards only the most recent video segment was there.  I'm not sure if this is because there's a problem with the Fly6, or if it's because I fucked something up when I deleted a bunch of old videos.  Once I've figured it out I'll let you know, but in the meantime I've lost some incredibly valuable bike lane-blocking footage:

(On one hand, they're blocking a bike lane.  On the other hand, they're installing cable, putting in a new plate glass window, and delivering refreshing Arizona iced tea, so at least shit is getting done.)

As well as my daring professional sporting stadium fly-by:

Where they're doing lots of crucial off-season maintenance:

(Rest assured that this hook-like thing will be good as new for you baseball fans this spring.)

I also forded a mighty river, though I did pause to enjoy the signage:

Fortunately no gong sounded, but if it had I would totally have left a draw:

(My draw that I made.)

This reminds me that someone actually won this drawing but I haven't sent it yet, and I plan to remedy that immediately, if not later.

Alas, like walking into an action movie 45 minutes in, my video begins just as I find myself locked in a baronial "Cat 6" struggle:

Actually, he only looks like he's going fast because he's in the drops, and seconds later he was passed by this guy:

Nobody was going to pass me though.  Launching a blistering attack, I dropped them and then began picking off food delivery guys slowly scanning buildings for addresses with handlebars dangling with deliciousness:

Finally, with one more match to burn, I unleashed a second attack, leaving them all stuck behind a left-turning Decor Corporate Services truck:

By the time the truck finished pushing its way through the crosswalk, no doubt endangering lives so that it could deliver leathery swivel chairs to office buildings, I had nearly a block on them and my victory was all but assured:

By the way, you know who's worse than Cat 6 blogger douchebags "puttin' on the Ritz" on 5th Avenue in stratospherically expensive Inspector Gadget jackets?  Stupid asshole luxury SUV car service drivers who do this:

Basically, they bully their way into the intersection as the light changes, forcing pedestrians with the right of way to walk through a "people funnel" so some douchebag can get to his office, where he will spin around in his leathery swivel chair while toggling between spreadsheets and porn:

Oddly though, your average schmuck is much more bothered by bike salmon:

I too find salmon irritating, but every so often you come across one who inexplicably gives off a good vibe, and this was one of them.  He greeted me in a friendly manner as we passed, and then the Fly6 revealed that he casually tossed some refuse into a proper trash receptacle:

I bet it went in, too:

Go in peace, Salmon, you are one of the good ones.

Yes, the truth is that there is a time and a place for bicycular lawbreaking, and like porn or the right pair of drugstore sunglasses, you just know it when you see it.  Consider Midtown Manhattan, where you must compete with an onslaught of yellow cabs and express buses:

If I can slip through a red light under these circumstances you're goddamn right I'm going to do it:

This affords me a few moments of breathing room, during which I can check the time, change lanes at will, and adjust my "downstairs parts" if necessary.

Hey, we all need to take advantage of those fleeting moments when the streets belong to us.  A blogger adjusts his "downstairs parts," a pigeon swoops down and grabs a half a bagel, and a pedestrian crosses unmolested by furniture trucks and SUVs:

Though when he gets to the other side he's tackled and arrested for jaywalking by the NYPD.

Anyway, once I got to my destination I locked my bike and once again did the old "sinus upskirt:"

I'd have put more locks on it, but I only had three:

Hopefully it's enough.