Nothing Sharper

My daily commute, one way:

* (neat photo ops, R&R, quick dip in the river on a hot day, etc.)

If I ever care enough, I’d like to get some decibel measurements and add “average noise”, but that hardly seems worth it.  It’s nice to (be able to) stop for pictures, but it didn’t occur to me until my coworkers were discussing a billboard ad campaign that I hadn’t ridden by one in nigh on forever. If someone had told me bike commuting would also cut my advertising intake, I’d have started biking much more aggressively much longer ago.

The advantage to driving is that it’s quicker, but that’s about all. Since I’m commuting more by bike than car these days, I’m more aware that the entire driving experience is one of anxiety. Billboards race past, each trying to steal your attention. Brake lights flash on and off. Horns honk out of nowhere. The next light teases you.  You merge lanes with an eye on the guy who might merge into you. It’s one big distracting mess, and there should be no wonder there’s so much stress and road rage on today’s streets.

What is a car better at? Getting you from point A to point B quickly and more agitated.

I’ve been debating whether or not to post the following. On the one hand, it shows that cops will yield to a calm demeanor and strong knowledge of the vehicle code. On the other, it shows that they don’t always know the law they’re asked to enforce. Complicating the decision was the officer’s identity – it seems fair to praise an officer for coming around to reason, but it doesn’t seem fair to harangue an officer for not knowing a frequently misunderstood section of law. So, I’ve tried to make reasonable compromises without sacrificing accuracy.

—
At around 7:00 PM on February 15th, Morgan and I were riding up 16th Street on our way home from meditation, two-by-two in the rightmost lane, I on the left side of the lane, she on the right, edging the door zone. After crossing P Street, the car behind us honked its horn. Trying not to interrupt our conversation, I reached my hand behind me, flipped the bird, and continued on. The driver responded by turning on his car’s flashing lights and siren. I looked back, sighed, and Morgan and I dutifully pulled into the space between two parked cars in front of Uncle Vito’s Pizza and laid our bikes on the parkway. The police officer stopped his car on 16th, blocking the right lane and incidentally knocking against the driver’s side mirror on a parked BMW.

The officer asked for my license and then asked (rightfully so) to see that my bike had lights, and I flicked the switch to show him. Then he asked why I thought he pulled me over. I said I didn’t know. He said we weren’t riding in the bike lane. I responded with by pointing out that 16th Street has no bike lanes. The officer then said we weren’t riding single file.

Now, I talk a big game about confrontation, but I tend to understand that when it comes down to actual policy, that tends to get implemented at an individual level. It’s okay to think the Sacramento Police Department are a bunch of thick-headed ex-jocks high on their own authority (thankfully false) or that AT&T is Satan’s younger, eviler, less-competent brother (entirely true), but it’s not fair to the underpaid tech support person or the overstressed officer to hold them accountable for the failures of their employers, even when it would be really cathartic to do so.

So, when the officer said we weren’t riding single file, I didn’t lambaste him. I doubt it was his fault that the Sacramento Police Department didn’t properly train its officers as to the actual rules of the road, and bike law is one of those things that has only recently become important. Instead, I tried, as calmly as I could, to let him know just what the Vehicle Code says about bike riding on a street like 16th: that if it’s not practicable for a bicyclist to share a lane with a car, they don’t share the lane. “Single file” appears nowhere in the law.

I didn’t try to “pull rank” on him, either. As he and I talked, I thought about telling him that as a member of the Board of Directors of the Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates, as a Core member of the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen, and as the guy who helped restart Sacramento Critical Mass and helped it keep its nose too clean for the cops to bother with, I might be more than passingly familiar with section 21200 of the California Vehicle Code. But I didn’t think that would help; the officer needed to know that pulling over cyclists riding two abreast on some streets are doing nothing wrong, not that he’ll get nowhere pulling over a specific well-connected cyclist.

When it became clear that there was no traffic infraction we could be cited for, the officer changed his stance a bit, asking whether my flipping him off was appropriate. I responded that in context, it was appropriate, even if it wasn’t smart. In that sense, he had caught me. Yes, it exacerbates road rage. Yes, it gives cyclists a bad name. Yes, it might push someone “over the edge". But what could we do? We can’t safely ride 16th without “blocking” a lane from a driver’s perspective anyway, and nothing short of getting off of the road entirely would satisfy a driver with that mindset. Also: they’re my roads, too, and the CVC has my back.

After about ten minutes of this, The officer then walked behind his cruiser and held a cell phone conversation that sounded from his side like one you would have with your rebellious teenage daughter. He then came back, returned my license, and told us that he had better things to do than waste time writing me a citation. By this time, he seemed to understand what Morgan had been trying to point out when she wasn’t backing me on the legality of our lane placement and him on the stupidity of flipping off drivers: all of this started when he honked at me. My act of casual road aggression was a response to his.

In the end, I thanked him for listening to us, and we all agreed that it was dumb to flip off drivers, especially if I don’t know how close they are to the metaphorical edge. I asked Sergeant Chapman his name, we shook hands, and then Morgan and I rode home without further incident.

—

Incidentally, in retelling this story, the most shocking element seems to be that I flipped off a cop. I can say that I didn’t know that it was an officer when I flipped him off, but even so, giving an officer the middle finger is considered Constitutionally protected speech. Had Sgt. Chapman cited me, I could quite easily have walked in an ACLU office and put another $50,000 crater in the city of Sacramento’s budget, especially here in the Ninth Circuit, where decisions like this are precedent.

Dead leaves and grass clippings are getting a fair amount of attention these days.  The recent city charter commission was initially charged with reviewing the city’s yard waste protocols, along with minor issues like term limits, the mayor/council balance of power, and the budget process.  The commission’s work was scaled back, but yard waste fights on; the Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates (SABA) is pushing for a citywide change in how this particular brand of garbage is collected.

After a city charter measure adopted in 1977, the city cannot require use of containers for yard waste collection, and so residents can merely dump their yard waste in the streets for disposal.  This hasn’t really been too much a problem – every two weeks or so, the city simply sends a normal truck out along with a special vehicle that has a ground-scraping claw at the front.  A few years back, the city decided to roll out a voluntary containerized yard waste program which has been doing pretty well, and we’re currently in this middle position with some containerized collection, some street collection.

Compared to containerized collection, where every lawn clipping, pruned branch, or dead leaf goes in a dedicated container like so many aluminum cans or kitchen waste, loose-in-the-street yard waste collection has a few minor problems.  Uncollected leaves and yard clippings  pile up in gutters and cause big flooding problems during storms, especially those first few storms in October and November.  They’re also a bicycling hazard, as many of these piles in the central city are dropped smack in the bike lane.   While state law makes it illegal to obstruct a bike lane and city code holds that yard waste shouldn’t be dumped in a bike lane, neither rule is enforced.  As a result, SABA joined a coalition that strongly lobbies for containerized waste citywide to confront the problem of gardeners and yard owners clogging the bike lanes and is strident about pushing for containers across Sacramento.  This position hasn’t exactly won SABA many friends.

The little day-to-day things are usually what get people the most riled up, and they’re really what Machiavelli warned against messing around with in The Prince.  The more you talk about impacting some yardowner’s sacred right to leave his prunings in the street, the more people will resist, no matter how reasonable and beneficial your idea is.  Containerized yard waste collection has a lot going for it, and it should be able to stand on its own merits.  According to a city staff report, the benefits are myriad:

• 24% lower waste collection bills
• Weekly year-round collection (alongside weekly recycling and garbage collection)
• Reduced greenhouse gas emissions (the city uses one vehicle for container, two vehicles for loose-in-the-street)
• Better-looking streets and neighborhoods
• Better storm drainage
• Fewer leaf piles blockading bike lanes
• Fewer mosquitos (from fewer puddles of standing water and debris they breed in)

Containerized waste is nothing but win. What’s getting SABA in trouble, though, is that it’s an organization that is already known for trying to carve out concessions for a minority (bicyclists) from the established status quo (roads choked with automobiles), and it’s now lobbying hard for something that is not related to its mission (containerized green waste) that will also buck the status quo.  In other words, those same asshole bicyclists that have already convinced the city to cut city streets from three lanes to two just to add some bike lanes are now also trying to make sure that you have to keep an extra container in your backyard, rather than letting you just dump yard waste in the street like you’ve always (since 1977) done.

Of course, the whole bike lane hazard thing is partially SABA’s fault, too.  Had Sacramento no bike lanes, all of these hazardous leaf piles would likely have been left in the parking lane, not in a normal vehicle lane, so they wouldn’t be able to trip up any rider.  My own experience says that drivers will grudgingly give cyclists a few feet in a painted bike lane, and woe to the cyclist that strays outside them, but that increased exposure to bicyclists riding as vehicles (taking a lane on J Street, for example) leads to more road-sharing and fewer hurt feelings all around.

This is a good reminder about the law of unintended consequences.  I recently postulated on the SABA mailing list that maybe as a group we’ve been too successful at minor policy goals like increased bike lanes to pursue more ambitious goals.  I’m willing to bet that 9 out of 10 cyclists would rather see four or five midtown streets converted to bicycle-only routes (often called bike boulevards) than see a bike lane painted on every street in the grid.  For better or for worse, we’re on track to accomplish the latter, even though it means earning the acceptance of drivers and leads to unintended hazards like uncollected leaf piles in bike lanes.