Florida Has A Three Feet Law, Too

Got this via e-mail from a buddy in Tallahassee:

yea, so, I officially have been the victim of aggravated assault. Went for a ride yesterday afternoon. Guy in a truck cuts me off (intentionally), so I squirted my water at him (his truck which was moving away from me by then, so there was no way any of it even wet his tailgate). About 5 minutes later, he pulls up beside me on a back road with his window down. We exchange many “words” for, literally, a couple of minutes. During the entire conversation, I keep riding and he keeps veering me off the road. I keep riding. He tells me he would run me over if he didn’t care about his truck, and that it’s illegal to ride a bike in the road. After all, he doesn’t “play football in the road”, and he has a right to “take a right”, and I’m endangering him by being on the road. He throws a handful of trash at me, which hits me. Then he swerves enough to smack my handlebars hard enough that I scraped my knee on the left drop and almost went down. I continue to ride. He tells me his “name” and that he wants to meet tomorrow. Many other words were exchanged, and he turns around and goes back the way he came from.

During the entire encounter, we did not pass another car, pedestrian, or cyclist. I went to the closest gas station and called the law. After a brief description of the occurence, I asked if I could ride home (as I was not badly hurt) and meet a deputy there instead of on the road. Got home, called again, they responded. Gave info to deputy. He took zero notes, told me I had no case. Tried to question me for not calling at the time of the occurence. I informed him that I had. I gave him the name that was given to me, and he said “I’ll write that down when I get back to my car.” THE END.

Grown man (mid to late 40’s), FSU football shirt, buzz cut, fat (go figure), white (go figure), green tundra pick-up (go figure).

Been there, though I’ve never bothered calling the cops. That’s the most aggravating part of the whole story. Ignorant rednecks will do as ignorant rednecks will do. An overweight middle-aged POS has to do something to make himself feel worthwhile. That’s expected. The indifference of law enforcement, though, is inexcusable. Based on my own experience and that of other cyclists, it’s also typical. They see the world as cars and when cars and bikes mix, the fault is always the bike’s.

The Fat Cyclist Gives Me An Idea About Flat Tires

Before I had a road bike, I ran pretty low pressure in my mountain bike tires. I bounced around less with the pressure at 35-40 psi than with it closer to the max of 60 psi; smoother rides were more comfortable, so that’s what I did.

Then I got a road bike. Soon I was no longer a mountain biker, but a roadie who also had a mountain bike. Consequently, I brought my roadie habits to the mountain bike. I used to ride the mtb with baggy shorts and jerseys. Now I were the tight stuff. I used to wear a camleback. Now it’s bottles. The ginormous, backpack sized, saddle bag has been replaced with a pouch barely big enough to hold a tube and a patch kit. I stopped driving to trails and just rode the bike to them.

All those changes were for the best. They make the ride simpler and more fun. One carry-over, though, might be the reason I have had three flats on my last two mtb rides: Super high tire pressure. Like I said, I used to run at about two thirds of the max psi. On the road bike, though, I’m running a rock hard 110-120 psi. Higher pressure means less surface contact which means more speed (and also longer tire life). That’s good for the road, and, so I used to think, it must also be good for the trail. Turns out, as the Fat Cyclist informed me, maybe not so much.

On the trail, whatever speed you gain with lower rolling resistance you are going to lose bouncing over things and losing traction in corners. That is, if you lower the pressure, the bigger tire area in contact with the trail might slow you a bit, but it also gives you more control  – and thus speed – over obstacles and through corners. Also, lower pressure helps avoid flats. I suppose it’s just like a balloon. Inflate one all the way and the slightest touch with a sharp object makes it explode. Inflate the balloon half way, though, and you can poke and prod it quite a bit before it bursts.

Ditto a bike tire when, for instance, it rolls over one of the infamous briars at the Stoner Trails. Those stupid things have flatted me three times in my last two rides. With that many flats, I would usually suspect a problem with my tires or my rims, like a piece of glass stuck in the tire. These have all been in different locations on the tubes. They’ve also been on both wheels. So I know the problem isn’t debris in my tire or defective rim tape. Still, the frequency of the punctures is too great to be just bad luck. And now, thanks to Fatty, I think I know what the problem is: Too much tire pressure.

Mountain Bike Season Is Here

Tonight I enjoyed the best mountain bike ride I’ve had since probably last April.

First, my bike worked. Sometime last spring I caught a stick or something between my rear wheel and my rear derailer. Result: Bent derailer hangar. What that means is that no amount of adjusting would aline the derailer with the rear cogset. With the two out of line, shifting was iffy at best. Sometimes the chain would respond correctly to shifts, sometime it wouldn’t go at all, sometimes it would rattle and then go about ten or fifteen seconds after I needed to change. Not having the skills to fix it myself and not wanting to spend the money to take it to the shop, I basically rode a single speed for the last five months. Eventually that got old, so I took it to the shop last week. Now it rides like new. Sweet.

Second, my favorite local trails – the Stoner woods system – are in the best shape since the tornadoes last spring. After those things blew through the area, most of the trails were blocked entirely or at least covered in debris. Not long afterwards, the weather heated up and then we had all kinds of rain in July. With the trails a sloppy steamy mess, no one rides them. With no riders, no one wants to fix them, either. Thankfully, with the return of fall, the truly dedicated have cleared out many of the trails. South of the Shreveport Barksdale Bridge parts of the trails are still under water, north of the bridge, though, everything is perfect. No debris, nice tacky surface, a few new trails that make for some sweet loops: It is fun, fun, fun.

Finally, the weather. Evening rides at Stoner are always nice, the sun sets behind you making the river beautiful. We don’t have many scenic views around here, but this is one of them. More than the blue sky and vibrant late evening colors, it was the temperature that made the ride. Low seventies at the start with no humidity. For months, the idea of “cold” or “cool” or even “comfortable” has been completely inconceivable. I mean, during the summer you know at some point you will again wear long sleeves. But that’s it, you just know it, like some academic fact you accept as true even if you don’t understand it. On the way home tonight, though, I almost felt like I could be wearing long sleeves.

All in all, the perfect way to spend an evening after work.

Why I Stick With The Road Bike In The Summer

I’d rather have a close encounter with a truck than to ride face first into this:

Course, if you ride with someone else and make them ride first, all’s clear. But you still have the horseflies. And poison ivy. And mosquitos.

Cycling Gets You High, Too

Interesting:

Writing in the medical journal Behavioural Neuroscience, the researchers found that a desire to get off the sofa and shed a few pounds can quickly become as compulsive as Class A narcotics. So mild exercise like jogging can develop into a serious triathlon or marathon habit. “Although exercise is good for your health, extreme exercise may be physically addictive,” they warned. . . .

The cocktail of drugs the body produces include the pain-relievers endorphins and dopamine (also produced during orgasm), the anti-depressant serotonin and the “fight or flight” hormone adrenalin, which increases strength and concentration. It’s quite a cocktail.

I’m nowhere near the extreme level of some of the folks mentioned in the article. You won’t see me running 150 miles across the Sahara or anywhere else. When asked by other cyclists with kids, though, how I manage to get in so many miles I give the same answer my wife does when she’s asked how she can let me be gone on my bike for four hours every weekend morning: I turn into a real ass if I don’t get my rides in.

Seriously. After a few days without hard core exercise – either a tough ride or run – I’m depressed, lethargic, and short tempered. On the other hand, I am happiest for the few hours immediately after each ride. So, the choice is either all day Saturday with grumpy Dad, or three quarters of the day with happy Dad. We’ve all made our choices.

Is that an addiction? Probably. But if I’m going to be an addict, it beats the alternatives. Sometimes literally. I stayed up drinking until midnight Friday. Then I got out of bed at 5:30 and road 70 miles, putting the hurt on everyone I rode with. Only half joking, I said the reason I got up and road is that I’d be an alcoholic if I’d skipped the ride and slept in. In other words, if I’d stayed home, I would have suffered all day with a hangover, feeling guilty and moaning about how I would never drink again, by riding, though, I cleared my head and my conscience. Why not drink if I can still go hammer the next morning?

“Three feet is a guideline”

That’s what Sgt. Markus Smith, head of the Louisiana Sheriff’s association, says of the new law requiring motorists to give cyclists three feet of clearance. Even worse is his example of what would violate the “guideline”:

“The law is ultimately for the safety of a bicyclist. If somebody is passing dangerously close, almost brushing the elbow of the rider, yes, he will be stopped.”

Nice. Apparently “give the rider at least three feet” means “just don’t knock them into the ditch.” Sorry, but three feet is three feet. When the issue is speeding, Sgt. Smith says it’s “cut and dry. Either they are or they aren’t.” Ditto three feet. Either the driver left three feet between him and the bike or he didn’t.

I appreciate that it might be tough to judge whether a car was within three feet. But whatever the cops use to gauge the distance, it has to be something other than contact. Otherwise, why have the three feet law at all?

The Cyclist’s View

When drivers see bikes, they might see several things. Perhaps they see a fellow traveler who has the same right to the road they do. Maybe they see nothing more than guys wearing goofy looking outfits. Or perhaps it’s an annoying delay in traffic. The view could be of arrogant fools who hog the road while showing no respect for the law or their own safety. What drivers never will see when they look at cyclists, though, is a threat to the driver’s safety.

Not so the other way around. Consider a typical weekend of a typical rider in a typical town.

Saturday morning we had no run ins with cars, but everyone talked about an incident from earlier in the week. While finishing up one of the normal mid-week rides, a group heard the sound of a horn behind them. Several times. That was followed by the explosive sound of very loud exhaust as the vehicle sped up next to them. Window down, the driver cursed and screamed at the group. He then drove all of half a mile down the road before turning into a local gas station.

The group continued on their ride, but just a few miles later, the same truck pulls the same routine. This time several of the riders told him to pull over. He decided to do just that, cutting off the group on his way to the shoulder and slamming on his breaks immediately in front of them. The lead rider could not stop in time and hit the back of the truck so hard that his bike endoed into the tailgate, tacoing his rear tire.

No serious injuries, thankfully. The truck left the scene, post haste. Someone got a partial plate number. No word on whether the cops have found the guy.

Today we had an event free ride until the final ten miles. Just as the route re-enters town, there’s a spot where some people like to sprint. It’s fun, but it usually splits the group in two. That happened today. As the front group rolled down Grimmett Drive (an industrial area which becomes a ghost town on weekends), a large pickup nearly brushed the arm of one of the riders in the second group. Thinking charitably, the rider figured the guy just didn’t know the size of his own truck, or wasn’t paying attention. But the truck then moved back towards the middle of the road and when he reached the front group he swung into them, again nearly hitting several with his rear view mirrors. Then he rapidly accelerated down the road.

That wasn’t it, though. The rear group continued pedaling down Grimmett, doing around 20 mph. As they approached a side street – which had a stop sign – an 18 wheeler pulled up to Grimmett, looked right at the group and rolled through the stop directly into their path, forcing all of them to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid hitting the truck.

There’s a lot to say about all of this. Lots of questions to ask, especially about how people can possibly be such irrational assholes. I could tell a hundred more stories just like these. So could anyone who does any amount of riding. But all I want to say is that there is no equivalent way a biker can treat a car driver. We may be any number of things to you, but we are never the routine threat to your life that you are to ours.

Extra Legal Protection For Cyclists

Missed this Monday:

Jindal also signed House Bill 725 by Rep. Michael Jackson, I-Baton Rouge, creating the “Colin Goodier Protection Act,” a law named after a New Orleans native and Baton Rouge physician who was killed while riding his bicycle on River Road in Iberville Parish.

Jackson’s bill requires a driver to leave “a safe distance … of not less than 3 feet” while passing a bicyclist, a distance that must be maintained until the vehicle is safely past the bike.

Violations can be punished by a maximum $250 fine. Jackson’s bill, which also becomes effective Aug. 15, makes it a violation for anyone in a vehicle to “harass, taunt or maliciously throw objects at or in the direction of any person riding on a bicycle.” Violators could be sent to jail for up to 30 days or fined a minimum of $200.

Like I said when this was in the legislature, I do not like the idea of penalizing people for simply “taunting” cyclists. I also don’t think any cop will ever enforce this law. A more realistic hope was for education. On that count, the law has this to say:

Jackson’s bill requires the Office of Motor Vehicles to place a summary of the new law in driving manuals, directs the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission to launch a public awareness campaign of the new law, and directs the Department of Transportation and Development to place signs in areas frequented by cyclists to make drivers aware “of the need to share the road” with bicycles.

Those are all great ideas. Some people intentionally bother cyclists. Not many, though. Most problems with cars result from inattention or ignorance among drivers. A lot of folks honestly believe we ought to ride on the sidewalk, which is illegal and also more dangerous than riding in the street. Maybe this can eliminate some of the ignorance.

Or not. I just read some of the seventy plus comments to that story. This state is full of assholes.

Cyclists Who Don’t Like To Ride Their Bikes?

I’m a cyclist who doesn’t like to drive his car. Nine of ten rides I do, I do from my house. In fact, of all the rides I’ve done this year, I can think of three for which I put my bike in my rack and drove to the ride, and two of those were mountain bike rides. Apparently, though, my attitude is a very minority position.

There’s several of us who have this same idea about riding. Every weekend we meet together at the UpTown shopping center and either ride south to meet everyone else at the main starting area, or we head north of town to do our own thing. Ditto Sundays. We always post these rides on the local club and racing forums. Yet we almost never have double digits.

For whatever reason – I think it was the chance to see all the sunflowers in bloom – we had an unusually high number today, twenty five at one point. The really odd part, though, was that most of these folks live within two miles of our normal weekend ride start at UpTown. I’ve seen all these folks on the group rides south of town, yet they never join our rides at UpTown. Rather than roll from their own driveways, they get in their cars and drive ten miles to unpack and start from Ellerbe Road Baptist Church or some other out of town starting point.

There’s plenty of reasons for this. Could be they can’t stand our little group and don’t want to ride with us. But they did today, and they all talk to us when we see them on the other rides. It could also be inertia, but that doesn’t explain the decision to drive-to-ride in the first place. The stated reason, when you ask why they don’t ever ride from home is usually “I don’t like to ride through town.”

To each his own, but I wish more riders would rethink that reasoning.

The big fear behind it is traffic. And if you road out of town on Line Avenue at eight in the morning it might be valid. If you know the town and the back roads, though, the traffic is, if anything, better than what you’ll find out in the country. We can ride right through the middle of town at seven on weekday mornings side by side talking the whole way, with hardly a car passing us. You just have to know the routes.

There’s also a little fear of some of the “areas” a ride from town might cross. We do not ride through any bad areas, but even if we did I have no fear of ghetto riding. I’ve explain why not here, but essentially it’s because I’ve done it enough to feel safe anywhere and also because even if my chances of getting shot go up, my chances of getting hit by a latte drinking, text sending, make-up fixing SUV driver go down.

The last objection is too many miles, or too much time and energy in the wrong places. In other words, the thinking goes, why spend time riding through town when you could spend it riding in the “nice” areas. My first response is that driving to the start normally does not save a lot of time. For me, and by extension anyone else in southeast Shreveport, to get to the typical ride start at ERBC on time you have to load up and leave your house a half hour before the start. Know when I have to leave if I ride? Forty minutes prior to the start.

My second response brings me to the title of the post: I thought time on the bike was the whole point. Given the choice between time on the bike in a supposedly less nice place to ride or time in a car, I know what decision I’m making. It’s a corollary of the bad-day-fishing-beats-a-good-day-at-work principle. Even if the trip through town is nothing but something to endure on the way to the real ride, I’d still rather do that than spend that time in the car.

I don’t think that time is wasted, either. For one, most of the routes through town go through interesting areas. The scenery is not bad. The roads are generally in good shape. It’s a nice warm up before the ride and then a nice cool down afterwards. You get extra miles. Most importantly, it’s a great time to b.s. with other riders. Once you hit the open roads, everyone is too concerned with going fast to do much talking. Meandering through town, though? Perfect time to talk about whatever. So I don’t think the time riding to the ride is wasted time. I just wish more people would figure that out.

My First Helmet-Less Ride

Not my first ever; the helmet industry did not exist during my childhood cycling days and when I started riding again as an adult, it took awhile before I decided to buy a helmet. I also never wear a helmet when I’m pulling the kids in the trailer or similarly cruising around town. Until yesterday, though, I’d never ridden my roadie without my helmet.

I didn’t do it on purpose. I went to bed Friday night excited about the ride on Saturday morning. Maybe I had bad dreams or didn’t sleep well, but when I woke up the excitement had disappeared. I debated staying in bed, didn’t, then sort of sleepwalked through my pre-ride routines. Eventually I hopped on the bike and headed for the ride start. When I arrived, one of my buddies asked if I was celebrating the recent repeal of mandatory helmet laws. Huh? I  thought, before realizing what he meant and putting my hand on my head to confirm the absence of a helmet. In my lethargic start, I’d forgotten to put my helmet on.

Now I had a few options. I could sprint for the house, grab my helmet and then fly downtown to meet the group on the way out of town. Or, one of the other guys had an extra I could borrow. Not wanting to ride that hard or make the group wait on me, I rejected option one. Option two would have also required a detour, and I hate borrowing stuff, so I said no to that, too. That left option three: No helmet.

I’m lucky it was even an option. There’s some folks around here so uptight they would have refused to ride with me unless I wore a helmet. This group, though, did as I’d have done and said “it’s your head.” And it is. And yesterday, I decided to risk it.

Not that I think it’s really that much of a risk. I know helmets prevent head injuries. I have no plans to stop wearing one. Still, with nearly twenty thousand miles on my road bike, you know how many times I’ve crashed? None. I wasn’t too worried  about it.

Anyway, after all the debate, the ride was anti-climactic. I think it was cooler without the helmet, but I was home before the serious heat started, so I don’t know for sure. It was definitely nice having one less piece of equipment; one less hassle. I could wipe sweat from my face much easier than with the helmet in the way. Had less dripping in my eyes, too. As for the cliched “wind in the hair?” I dunno. Maybe because modern helmets have a lot of vents, but I didn’t notice a significant difference. One thing the wind did do, though, was mess my hair even worse than the helmet does. I had this big wave thing in the front of my head that would not lay down until half way through my shower after the ride.

All in all, not something I’d consciously do  again, but glad I did it just once.