Bicycling as a sport
Americans are obsessed with sports. Football, basketball, hockey, baseball. Sports like golf and tennis are followed. Even track & field are somewhat followed. But what do all these sports have in common? They all take place in a stadium or park or arena. What sports don’t usually occur in stadiums? Bicycling and running.
“Get off the road”
“Get on the sidewaLK”
If you are a bicyclist, these shouts from passing cars and trucks are commonplace.
Bicycling and running sports, especially the events such as Boston Marathon or Tour de France and their kin take place on the roads which are blocked off by law enforcement as the event occurs. This creates some inconvenience for car drivers on the days those events occur after which it is traffic-business as usual.
I have been a cyclist for most of my life and a runner the last twenty years. Training for running events means running in an urban environment (or the gym track in the winter). But even during training on a run, runners stop at intersections, usually run on the sidewalk, and thus pose no obvious inconvenience to car drivers.
Cycling, on the other hand, is a ROAD sport. There is no Tour de France, no one day classics like Paris-Roubaix, or the now defunct Tour of California without riding on the road not just during the event, but in training.
Most bike riders won’t be professionals riding the Tour. But the USA has plenty of amateur enthusiasts that ride gravel road and mountain biking as well as paved road criteriums. Numerous fondos take place every year in the USA. Fondos take place on paved roads. (A fondo isn’t a race, though some riders participate as if it was).
When I first got into the sport of mountain biking in 1999, I was average and mediocre. I wasn’t as in shape or fast as many competitors. In 2007, I got a new road bike and started participating in the team road training rides which were 30–40 miles and paced at 18–22mph. My fitness and ability to compete in all kinds of cycling events increased dramatically.
And it isn’t just training. Just the sheer joy of riding miles upon miles on the road, the sights and sounds being absorbed. You can pedal mechanically along while your mind can mull over the events of the day. It’s exersize and therapy.
Drivers in the USA are in a state of entitlement! How did this shift of mentality occur considering it was bicyclists who advocated for paved roads? Bicyclists led the charge for improved roads and then were subordinated to automobiles.[1] That in part was due to automobile interest groups who also penalized pedestrians.
“In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”[2]
As if May 2022, cyclists are once again being struck and killed by car and truck drivers.[3] In Michigan in 2021, 21 cyclists were killed when struck by motor vehicles. The Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) released a report on Wednesday, May 26, 2021, stating bicycle deaths increased to 38 in 2020, an 81% increase from three consecutive years of 21 deaths.[4]
What is needed is not so much infrastructure changes such as bike lanes and permissable deviations from traffic laws, but instead more education and acclimating of drivers to the presence of bikes on the roads.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/american-drivers-thank-bicyclists-180960399/
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
[4] https://wwmt.com/news/local/michigan-sees-jump-in-traffic-and-bicycle-deaths
