Harrumph!

We people could used more RAM.  In common public activities — for this post, think walking, cycling and driving — there are a ton of data to analyze every second. Yet the human norm is to limit the input, to be overly selective in using our brains.

A fatal example occurred in Boston when an 84-year-old walked out into traffic on Friday. A cyclist knocked  him to the curb, where he hit his head. He died two days later in the hospital.

Like competing Greek choruses,  we immediately heard:

• The large subset of bicyclists are all monsters! String ‘im up.
• A very quiet repeating chant of make the roads safe for cars, walkers and pedalers.
• A small subset of grumblers about crazy pedestrians.

I have a stake in all the races here, being a multi-modal guy (add the subway or T as we call it here). Moreover, I have been hit by car drivers four times. The first, at age 6, was my fault; I ran across the street in front of a car with a green light. The second and extremely serious, at 19, was when another of the six students in my Greek class (yes, a third of the class was involved) wasn’t paying attention and flung me up and through his VW’s windshield. Twice as an adult cyclist in Boston,  I was hit by drivers who simply did not pay attention to the road and plowed into me when I had the right of way and was looking.

Yesterday’s fatality, Henry Haley, was elderly and according to the Globe not too healthy. Yet that was an unnecessary death and he might have had another decade or more of enjoyment and participation coming. The cyclist, identified by the Herald as 22-year-old Julian Paul Cavarlez-Flores of Randolph (probably a 15 to 18 mile bike ride), apparently had no chance to stop when Haley stepped into traffic against the light and not in a crosswalk.

The cyclist’s being legally in the right doesn’t bring Haley back any more than it will keep Cavarlez-Flores from forever replaying the panic and impotence at the appearance and impact. By the bye, he remained, tried to help and cooperated with police. Witnesses said it was Haley’s doing.

Here, I’m huge on multi-modal transportation. Search the cycling posts on this spot and at Marry in Massachusetts to find posts on Boston’s cycling defects and advances, on the Moving Together and Rail-Volution conferences, and on efforts to make ped/car/bike transit safe and inviting for all. Some of the ideas we are finally copying from Europe (think NYC’s separated walker and cyclist lanes) will make big leaps in that direction, but they will be a long time coming.

Let’s leave aside the wild-eyed get-off-my-road attitude of overly aggressive and overly entitled drivers. Think instead of the attention factor. Through what appears to be a combination of dull wits, low process capacity or perhaps just laziness, most us don’t make the effort to keep others on the road safe.

Try any American beltway or interstate to see this in action. A long and wide cascade of red tail lights, often with spots of squealing brakes and tires, occurs regularly. That’s no act of God. Instead, most of us drive right in front of our cars’ hoods. Were we looking a little farther and wider, we could see this truck cutting of that car, a sudden slowing a few hundred yards away, a state-police car off in the right shoulder, or drivers blocked up behind some slowpoke in the far left lane.

Ideally, there’d be no tailgating and no mass surprises…if drivers took in the horizon and looked up from their hoods. Yet, doing that requires brain power, of the type nearly all of us can perform if we choose. There are many ocular messages and a few aural ones involved. We can’t be twisting the CD player dial or reaching for a map or watching the GPS display. We actually have to pay attention and use our processing power all the time.

Cyclists should do that too and in self-preservation, most are better at it than drivers. The potentially fatal hazards — almost entirely from inattentive or hostile drivers or from pedestrians — are constant in the city.

Consider tinted windows, which I consider hazardous both to the driver and to those around the car. Drivers lose some visibility in any darkened condition. Far worse is the elimination of field of vision for those beside or behind in the constant turning or lane changing conditions. Many of those tints are just too deep for safety and an annoyance to fellow drivers.

For a cyclist, tinted windows can be super-dangerous. On streets, even those with painted bike lanes, there is a constant risk from gormless drivers suddenly flinging doors open into traffic. If they knock a cyclist into traffic or if the pedaler hits the door, it means serious injury and even death. Dooring is a far greater cause of death and injury to cyclists than collisions between bikes and pedestrians.

The self-defensive solution is for cyclists to process constantly. It is not the option most drivers consider in their metal cages. Every parked car may contain a driver or passenger about to throw the door open without looking (violation of state law, by the bye). That processing does not mean cyclists can take their eye off the road ahead or to either side. Instead of slowing to pass as legally required, many drivers blow the horn as though that suddenly will make the bicycle disappear.

As I go by various transit methods, I am pretty sure that city cycling has a similar effect as hard crosswords. Both (particularly cryptics in the latter group) make the brain process more information, keeping it sharp. Ideally, everyone would regularly be a driver, walker and cyclist too. Dealing with the spatial realities of each could give us both insight and empathy to the others.

Pity that Mr. Haley died from the collision. Yet, this is such a rare event that it got and likely will continue to get media coverage locally. In contrast, cyclists injured by drivers are not news and those killed by a car or truck driver tend to hit the neighborhood weekly only.

It’s too glib to note that the common-sense prevention is to watch where we walk, rdrive or bike, as well as obey those pesky laws and regulations about traffic lights, crosswalks and turns. Instead, some of us are compelled to extreme caution by the abandon of others. I think of River Street in Hyde Park from Cleary to Logan Squares. On this always busy road, pedestrians of all ages, with and without their children, stride suddenly between parked cars and traffic, with no attention to the nearby crosswalks. As a dad who drilled it into my three sons never to assume drivers are looking out for you, I remain astonished that parents would risk their kids’ lives constantly. I bike and drive that stretch cautiously.

Our behavior in many cities and most the nation being what it is, we end up adjusting the mechanics to cope as best possible. That’s why we have sidewalks and here a few inconvenient bike paths and increasing mileage of bike lanes. We have to protect people from each other far more than civility and reason would otherwise demand.

I don’t know that we’ll ever get to the fully separated and pretty safe car/ped/bike lanes here. Yet that is more likely to happen than that other solutions — hard traffic enforcement. If word got around that Boston’s blue boys charged drivers with running red lights, cutting off or j-hooking cyclists, threatening pedestrians in crosswalk chicken and such,  we’d see a very different transit environment.

Forget that.

Instead, the crowds have competing calls of blame for bad walkers and bad pedalers. The real problems are streets not yet set up for multi-modal transit and drivers creating a wild-west-style roadway. Here’s betting that we patch the signs, paint the lanes and separate travel areas long before we force drivers to behave.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, drivers, Boston, pedestrian, Henry Haley, bike lanes