Cars, Cars, Cars

It's hard not to become slightly anti-auto as a cyclist, even though I personally love driving, and have nothing but sympathy for drivers when I cycle. We share roads that weren't built to be shared, in many cases. It can be very trying and difficult on modern roads, at the speeds we force each other and ourselves to drive, to also slide by a cyclist when there isn't much shoulder, when terrain ahead obscures oncoming cars, and when you're on your cell phone (or doing any of the myriad other things -- shaving, reading, singing -- that drivers often do behind the wheel). But once I slip out of the driver's seat and into cycling gear, one problem with our reliance on autos become much clearer.

Sure, there are the usual gripes about consuming natural resource, creating pollution, and propagating the sedentary lifestyle. But my main complaint is that cars slow me down when I ride my bike!

Cars get in my way. I have seen my average speed drop 0.5 mph in just a couple hundred feet of slowly weaving my way through streams of traffic at a congested intersection. The home stretch on my commute is flat and fast on weekends, but clogged with cars on weekday evenings, and picking my way along the shoulder while avoiding cars that wander right, cars that turn right, and cars that let oncoming cars turn left, is pretty mind-boggling, and definitely steals speed.

Just the other day, I was driving my car into work, and passed a cyclist pedaling his recumbent along. He was doing a decent 16 mph, perhaps, and just cruising along. I thought I'd seen the last of him. Well, about 20 minutes later, after I'd been stuck at a major traffic bottleneck for a while, I was passed by Mr. Recumbent, who was still at his stately 16 mph, and happy as a lark. After he passed, he had to stop, as the cars coming from an intersecting side road had pushed their way across his path.

A local construction zone makes matters worse, as the cones and lane changes were engineered with perhaps a Hummer in mind, but not a cyclist attempting to co-exist with a phalanx of autos.

Of course, there are some moments of fun in the midst of this, especially in the spring and fall when windows are rolled down. Cruising by a car's passenger side at close range can elicit all sorts of surprised exclamations, from startled teenage passengers to mothers pointing out the cyclist to the kids in the back, buckled in their child seats. When stopped at about the same point, you can even have some nice conversations, and when wearing a well-known local jersey, you might even get a shout of encouragement (I think what they shouted amounted to encouragement . . .).

Cars aren't slow. We just have too many of them. The automobile passed well into the realm of the irrational long ago, and we are allowing them to squeeze the joy and fire out of many aspects of life. They make alternatives (cycling, running, walking, scootering) nearly impossible to consider at times. Let's find a better way.