The honking began first as a series of peevish, staccato beeps, then finally a sustained, angry drone. The grandmotherly type at the wheel of the huge sedan right directly behind me was going ballistic. This little drama unfolded last spring at the intersection of Towerview and Science, where I was poised on my bike in the left turn lane, obeying the traffic signal, preparing to proceed first down then up the hill towards the School of Engineering and then make my way over to my office in Davison.
Gesticulating and raving, Grandmother finally had enough of the cyclist impeding her progress and proceeded to clear the intersection of my presence, using the front end of her car as a bulldozer, then darting past the oncoming traffic, turned left down Science.
I had quickly unclipped before I ended up under her wheels, and found myself somewhere in the crosswalk. I shook my head in amazement. Was the driver somehow not aware this was Bike to Work Week?
Well of course she wasn’t, nor was the majority of the sentient members of the campus at the time, I daresay.
To assign a period of phony, hollow observance to a particular cause célèbre has become a durable way of paying lip service and preaching to various choirs; to seem concerned and engaged, rather than to be. And so it goes with events like Bike to Work Week.
As a cyclist and daily bike commuter, I am struck by the disconnect between the exhortations to ride to work, and the significant risks and obstacles to doing so, at least for those who work at the Medical Center. My commute is fraught with hazards, heavy traffic, dangerous intersections, debris-strewn inner lanes and aggressive motorists. If my own experiences, the letters to the editors of local newspapers, the rants of radio personalities and a review of death and injury statistics are at all telling, the regional antipathy held towards cyclists is staggering.
The mindset is, yes bicyclists are legally entitled to their share of road, but I find these a stupid set of laws, therefore I am entitled to flout them. There is no safety in numbers either, as fellow cyclists on campus are just as apt to be clutching a latte in hand, iPod in place and either riding the wrong way or quelling the foot traffic on the sidewalk.
After surviving the trek through Durham, one’s arrival on campus is no guarantee of safety, as its streets are generally in poor repair (although there have been patchy, but major improvements of late), clogged with buses, delivery trucks and randomly intersected with the Brownian motion of meandering pedestrians.
I visited Portland, Oregon last year. I was a bit disappointed. The city was more afflicted with the peculiarly Northwestern variant of urban blight than I had expected, but Portland was nothing if not serious about bicycle commuting, and the bicycle is a legitimate means of transportation for a significant proportion of its citizens.
Riding a bike to work out there just seems to make sense and is supported by the city’s traffic engineering, with the wide spread installation of dedicated bike lanes and “bike boxes” at intersections. There is a robust advocacy for cycling to be found in the city’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance.
The end result of all this is a pervasion of bicycle commuting and the requisite financial and social commitment into Portland’s culture and infrastructure to a degree that I have not seen equaled in any other American city. A bellman at my hotel told me he had not been in an automobile in over ten years. I never got the impression that Portland’s bike commuters were affecting a pose or trying to make a statement (which I would argue is the least valid reason to ride one’s bike to work). For many out that way, there just seems to be no good reason not to.
So should the greater Duke community be urged to commute to work by bicycle? Not as circumstances dictate in the here and now. Too many of us have stories, from the scary close encounter to the near-death experience. As for myself, it is a combination of convenience, foolhardiness and a compulsive need to ride several thousand miles a year that keeps me commuting on my bike to work.
But save for a select and lucky few living in close proximity to the campus, the venture is far too dangerous, the thoroughfares too inhospitable. Durham is not Portland, it is not Boulder, Colorado, it is not even Carrboro. Most of the time, that is a good thing. But Durham’s central roads and traffic flow present very real impediments to safe biwwcycle travel, and too many motorists regard cyclists as potential hood and grill ornaments.
As campus and medical center construction increases, bringing about added congestion, I don’t see any of this improving. I hope one day the culture may change, and the institutions around these parts will finally get serious about alternate forms of transportation and implement the necessary funding and system-wide changes to get more commuters out of their automobiles. But until then, we’ll have to settle for Bike to Work Week.
I suppose that’s a start.
Dr. Thomas Sporn is an associate professor in the Department of Pathology. His column runs every other Friday.
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