Shek's Footprint

Having spent the last week bouncing around on my motorcycle in a 20 mph cross wind, I was super sensitive to every feature on the road that is not motorcycle friendly. The most important ones are cracks on the road between lanes and at a curve and the grooves cut on an interstate to facilitate rain water flow. I encounter these grooves on bridges across the St. Johns where the winds are especially choppy. My protest against Car Tax is more challenging than I thought.

Most roadway design engineers are not motorcyclists or bicyclists for that matter. These two groups usually get left out during planning. When a co-worker asked me how my commute has been lately, I decided to bring forth the issue of grooves cut on the road surface. I made a case that it is designed for four wheeled traffic and is potentially unsafe for motorcyclists. Tires get caught in the grooves which make the motorcycle follow the grooves till they get traction back. This happens back and forth and the motorcyclist is helpless in controlling the machine efficiently. Lighter motorcycles like mine feel it more than some heavier ones. An accident at interstate speeds with moving traffic can be fatal.

Motorcyclists are about 2% of registered vehicles. My coworkers made a point that roads are designed for the majority. They argued that it is my choice of lifestyle to ride a motorcycle and the engineers should not have to bend over backwards to accommodate my personal life choices. I am sure some of his comments were friendly banter but it made me think about concept of designing for majority. It effectively puts a price-tag on the value of a motorcyclist’s life. What is an acceptable price of anyone’s life?

What determines majority?

Is it just number of registered cars v/s motorcycles? The cars win hands down. I have designed a different method of scoring majority that is fairer and somewhat biased.

It has two factors:

Factor One > Occupants per 100 lbs

Factor Two > Gallons per 100 mile per occupant

Assumptions:

• Average motorcycle = Suzuki SV 650
• Average Car = Honda Civic
• One occupant per car
• One occupant per motorcycle
• Fuel efficiencies from company websites

Factor One – Occupants in a vehicle per 100 lbs. Single rider on a 650 cc street bike that weighs 500 lbs will have a score of 1/5. A single motorist, which is usually the case, in a Honda Civic weighing 3000 lbs will have a score of 1/30. Every Honda Civic on the road is equivalent to six motorcycles. Factor One result = 6.

Factor Two – Gallons per 100 mile per occupant. A 650 cc motorcycle gets around 55 mpg (city + hwy). Therefore, the single rider uses 1.81 gallons per 100 miles travelled. A 2010 Honda Civic gets 29 mpg (city + hwy). A single occupant uses 3.44 gallons every 100 miles driven. Therefore, a Civic user is 1.9 times the fuel footprint of a motorcycle. Factor Two result = 1.9

Factor One multiplied to Factor Two gives 11.37. Therefore, each motorcycle on the road gets multiplied by 11.37 to become a car equivalent. With motorcycles being 2% of registered vehicles, for every 98 cars on the road, there were 2 motorcycles. Now, for every 98 cars on the road, there are 2 X 11.37 = 22.75 motorcycles on the road. That is a share of 18% of traffic. Even though a minority, it is not negligible any more.

There are factors such as less wear on the road by motorcycles due to low weight thereby requiring less road maintenance that I have not considered. I have also not considered how motorcycles are unfavorable in adverse weather conditions since I ride all year and it has nothing to do with considering roadway design. Noise pollution on some larger cruisers and choppers is also not considered since plenty of cars have loud exhausts and a lot of them also blare loud music. Most motorcycles don’t come with sound systems.

I am a little biased on my two factor calculation but every road designer and transportation engineer is biased towards cars. I don’t feel guilty.

All of the above rant and pseudo-mathematics mostly try to convey that cars take a front seat in any planning. Cars are convenient, safe, protected from elements and quick. Motorcycles are not that convenient, safe with proper training, not protected from elements at all but are quick. Bicycles are neither of the three but probably the safest. Bicycles are convenient if one lives in a bicycle-centric city. Cars do cost the most amount of money to purchase and operate. They suck people deeper into dependence than a commuter motorcycle does. Yet, we promote it.

We are supposed to be the smarter of the mammals!

I just uncovered my whiteboard at work. It was tucked away under some folders in my drawer. I did not remember what was still written on it.

It is a small sized board that was light enough to be pinned to my cubicle wall. It was the statistics tracker for my car-light days.

Since I was sparsely driving my car, I decided to track what I was exactly doing.

• The first line says when I last filled up my gas tank. 14th august had been 26 days since I I updated the board last. I put my car up for sale (link)  in the beginning of October which shows when I stopped updating the board.
• The next line tracks the gallons used since the last fill up. In 26 days, I had driven 143 miles at the rate of 24.5 miles per gallon and used 5.8 gallons.
• I had ridden 923 miles since I started commuting by bike in the end of May 2008. A coworker added “Days ridden in Tropical Storm : 1″ since I rode to work and back on one of the first days of tropical storm Fay hitting us. Riding in strong winds and rain was challenging but I lived just two miles away. That was also the day I did not get honked or yelled at.
• I tracked days that I had not driven the car. This prompted me to question the times I did drive thereby thinking of alternatives. The xtracycle was purchased out of this statistic.
• My goal was to ride atleast 250 miles a month. Below that, I measured the miles I rode each month. Since I stopped tracking by the end of September, I never updated this board.

Keeping track of various numbers helped me make a sound decision about a drastic change in lifestyle. The anxiety I felt was minimal. It was also a good motivator to keep riding. I did not openly track the money I was saving in car payments and insurance. Those were constant expenses.

Discovering this white board brought me back good memories. Those were very passionate days and played a strong role in making me what I am today. It is because of those days, and that whiteboard that I joined forces with Matt at Bikejax and executed a successful bike valet. We are expanding it this weekend due to higher numbers of commuters to the Arts Market.

I am buying a motorcycle. It has been my life long goals to own one and I am finally doing it. I enjoy living car free. I enjoy not heavily depending on oil for transportation. I also enjoy not having any insurance expense.

I have chosen to move to another part of town 13 miles away. A bicycle friendly and socially active part of town. I therefore need a motorcycle to commute to and from work. I would have done it on a bicycle but I have a dog to take care of and it is not fair to leave her in a room for 12+ hours while I am away.

My goals are to keep my expense at a minimum, gasoline usage low and not much insurance to pay. I have been looking at commuter motorcycles for a while. These are the options I am considering:

My route includes 12 miles of Interstate 95 and State Road 202 where the average speed of travel is 65 mph.

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A cyclist who knocked down an 84-year-old pedestrian who later died has been jailed for seven months and banned from driving for a year.

Darren Hall, 20, rode down a hill in Weymouth too fast he then went up on to the pavement on a blind bend to avoid a red traffic light, Dorchester Crown Court heard. Hall hit Ronald Turner in August last year. He died 13 days later.

Hall, of Weymouth, pleaded guilty to the 19th Century offence of wanton and furious driving causing bodily harm.

Posted via email from shek’s posterous

About 500 yards down the 800 yard long two lane section of Deerwood Park Blvd, 1 min and 15 seconds into it, a black sub compact that was patiently following me started to honk. The other lane was fairly busy, there was no room to pass. The traffic light was red, therefore, even if I was not on the road, they would have no where to go.

When I was stopped for the first time, the passenger, male, leaned out of the window and asked me fairly politely with a hint of frustration to stay on the side of the road. I turned around and explained that the lane is less than fourteen feet wide making it unsafe for me to stay on the side. To this, the passenger asked me why I don’t wear a helmet! This was a rhetorical question on the passenger’s behalf because he quickly returned to his usual perch and rolled the windows up as I was saying, “It is not the law”.

The inherent problem with the motorist’s abrasive culture against bicyclists is that few take time to research the law and its inherent flaws. I wish they would like to stop for a conversation and let me explain that I don’t wear a helmet not only because it is not the law. I would start by the epic video of Jens Voigt crashing at high speeds during Stage 16 of the 2009 Tour de France, wearing a helmet but sustaining injuries on his face, not a scratch on his helmet. Further, I would talk about the two crashes during last month’s Women’s ride where the first one walked off without head injuries while the second one had a swollen ankle and no head injuries.

Thereafter, I would point to this study http://bhsi.org/walkerstudy.htm where a cyclist gets extra room and consideration when not wearing a helmet. Though this study was done in the UK, it holds true for USA because the cycling culture and its popularity are similar in both countries. Moreover, I have personally experienced the change in attitude of the motorists in terms of passing clearance once I ditched my helmet.

What I do is bicycling for transportation. Most times I ride under 12 miles per hour. At that speed a fall will mostly result from being hit by a 3000 pound or heavier vehicle, at which point a helmet is vastly insufficient.

From Ken Keifer’s research on this matter,

bicycle head injuries constitute only about from 1.02% to 1.54% of the US total serious head injuries and from .56% to .87% of the head injury deaths. The largest group of head injuries, by the way, are among motorists. Therefore, bicycling is not dangerous, nor is it a leading cause of head injury.

The passenger in the car had already made up his mind that I was illegally blocking his path. After our brief conversation, he had assumed that I am a hypocrite who is spinning his own tales of safety. I find that inference bigotry because he isn’t the one on the same road as rush hour motorists pedaling along. It is foolish to pass judgment on an activity that you are not participating in and therefore can not comprehend.