The ecological effects of roads, por Reed Noss

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The ecological effects of roads

By Reed Noss, PhD

graphic: road submerged and overgrown

Contents

Direct Effects
Roadkills
Road Aversion and other Behavioural Modifications
Fragmentation and Isolation of Populations
Impacts on Terrestrial Habitats
Impacts on Hydrology and Aquatic Habitats

Indirect Effects
Access
Cumulative Effects

What Can Be Done?
Mitigation
The Preferred Alternative

The following article previously appeared two years ago in "Killing Roads" under the name "Diamondback". It remains the definitive summary of the effects of roads on biological diversity. An extensive bibliography was prepared for the piece and is available from PAW NET (PAW NET, 117 Main St., Brattleboro, VT 05301, 802-257-4878) for $3.00. It is an indispensable tool for activists. [but see note at end]

Despite heightened recognition (by informed people) of the harmful effects of roads, road density continues to increase in the US and other countries. Federal, state, and local transportation departments devote huge budgets to construction and upgrading of roads. Multinational lending institutions, such as the World Bank, finance roads into pristine rainforest, which usher in a flood of settlers who destroy both the rainforest and the indigenous cultures. Public land-managing agencies build thousands of miles of roads each year to support their resource extraction activities, at a net cost to the taxpayer. The US Forest Service alone plans to build or reconstruct almost 600,000 miles of roads in the next 50 years. Most public agencies disregard the ecological impacts of roads, and attempt to justify timber roads as benefiting recreation and wildlife management. Even when a land manager recognises the desirability of closing roads, he or she usually contends that such closures would be unacceptable to the public.

This article will review some ecological effects of roads, with emphasis on impacts to wildlife (broadly defined). My concern is with all roads, from primitive logging roads to four-lane highways. Although the effects of different types of roads vary, virtually all are bad, and the net effect of all roads is nothing short of catastrophic. The technical literature that pertains to this topic is vast, and an entire book would be needed to summarise it adequately. Consider this only an introduction, or an "executive summary" of a massive tragedy.

Direct effects, such as flattened fauna, are easy to see. In contrast, many indirect effects of roads are cumulative and involve changes in community structure and ecological processes that are not well understood. Yet, these long-term effects signal a deterioration in ecosystems that far surpasses in importance the visual and olfactory insult to us of a bloated deer by the roadside.

Direct Effects

Roadkills

The above statement notwithstanding, roadkill can have a significant impact on wildlife populations. The Humane Society of the US and the Urban Wildlife Research Centre have arrived at a conservative figure of one million animals killed each day on highways in the United States. When I-75 was completed through a major deer wintering area in northern Michigan, deer road mortality increased by 500%. In Pennsylvania, 26,180 deer and 90 bears were killed by vehicles in 1985. These statistics do not account for animals that crawl off the road to die after being hit. Also, roadkill statistics are invariably biased toward mammals, against reptiles, amphibians, and probably birds, and do not include invertebrates at all (who wants to count the insects smashed on windshields and grills?).

Vehicles on high-speed highways pose the greatest threat to wildlife. Unpaved roads, particularly when "unimproved", are less dangerous. Roadkill usually increases with volume of traffic. In one Texas study, however, mortality was greatest on roads with intermediate volumes, presumably because higher-volume roads had wider rights-of-way that allowed better visibility for animals and drivers alike. Increases in traffic volume do result in more collisions on any given road, and in our profligate society more people means more cars on virtually every road.

Florida is a rapidly developing state with more than 1000 new human residents each day and over 50 million tourists annually. Primary and interstate highway mileage has increased by 4.6 miles per day for the last 50 years. Hence it is no surprise that roadkills are the leading known cause of death for all large mammals except White-tailed Deer.

Roadkills of Florida Black Bear, a subspecies listed as threatened by the state, have been rising sharply in recent years, from 2-3 per year in the 1970s to 44 in 1989. Many of the bears are killed on roads through public lands, in particular the Ocala National Forest. Seventeen Florida Panthers, one of the most endangered subspecies of mammals in the world, are known to have been killed on roads since 1972. Since 1981, 65% of documented Florida Panther deaths have been roadkills, and the population of only about twenty individuals is unlikely to be able to sustain this pressure. An average of 41 Key Deer, a species listed as Endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, were killed on roads yearly from 1980 through 1986, and 57 were killed in 1987. Roadkill is also the leading cause of mortality for the American Crocodile, also an Endangered species, in south Florida. The Florida Scrub Jay, a Threatened species, has been found to suffer considerable mortality from collision with vehicles, and researchers have concluded that these birds cannot maintain stable populations along roads with considerable high-speed traffic.

Snakes are particularly vulnerable to roadkill, as the warm asphalt attracts them; yet their carcasses are seldom tallied. Herpetologists have noted dramatic declines of snakes in Paynes Prairie State Preserve near Gainesville, Florida, which is crossed by two four-lane highways. This preserve was once legendary for its diversity and density of snakes, but no more. Similarly, a study of south Florida herpetofauna by Wilson and Porras attributed declines in many snakes to the increasing road traffic in that region.

Roadkill is a classic death-trap phenomenon. Animals are attracted to roads for a variety of reasons, often to their demise. Snakes and other ectotherms go there to bask, some birds use roadside gravel to aid their digestion of seeds, mammals go to eat de-icing salts, deer and other browsing herbivores are attracted to the dense vegetation of roadside edge, rodents proliferate in the artificial grasslands of road verges, and many large mammals find roads to be efficient travelways. Songbirds come to dustbathe on dirt roads, where they are vulnerable to vehicles as well as predators. Vultures, Crows, Coyotes, Raccoons, and other scavengers seek out roadkills, often to become roadkills themselves.

Road Aversion and other Behavioural Modifications

Not all animals are attracted to roads. Some have learned that roads bring unpleasant things, such as people with guns. Species that show road aversion exhibit decreasing densities toward roads. Various studies report that Turkey, White-tailed Deer, Mule Deer, Elk, Mountain Lions, Grizzly Bear, and Black Bear avoid roads. When these animals are disturbed by vehicles, they waste valuable energy in flight. Other studies show conflicting results, which usually can be explained by differences in road use. Certain bird species also have been found to avoid roads, or the forest edges associated with roads. In the Netherlands, researchers found some bird species to be displaced up to 2000 meters from busy highways.

The American Elk is one of the best-studied species with respect to road aversion. Elk avoidance of roads is clearly a learned response (they do not avoid natural edges), and is related to traffic volume and hunting pressure. In western Montana, Jack Lyon found that Elk avoid areas within 1/4 - 1/2 mile of roads, depending on traffic, road quality, and the density of cover near the road. According to work by Jack Thomas in Oregon, a road density of one mile per square mile of land results in a 25% reduction in habitat use by Elk; two miles of road per square mile can cut Elk habitat use by half. As road density increases to six miles of road per square mile, Elk and Mule Deer habitat use falls to zero. Elk in some areas have learned that roads are dangerous only in the hunting season, and do not show road aversion in other seasons. Other studies suggest that Elk avoid open roads, but not closed roads. Where hunting pressure is high however, even closed roads may be avoided because so many hunters walk them.

Grizzly Bears also may be displaced by roads. In British Columbia, Grizzlies were found to avoid areas within 1/2 mile of roads. A study in the Cabinet Mountains of northwestern Montana determined that the mean distance of Grizzly radio-telemetry signals from open roads (2467 m) was significantly greater than the mean distance from closed roads (740 m). Other studies have found that Grizzlies avoid areas near roads, especially by day, even when preferred habitat and forage are located there. This is particularly alarming, because in Yellowstone National Park, which has the second largest Grizzly population in the lower 48, roads and developments are situated in the most productive Grizzly Bear habitat Natural movements of Grizzly Bears may also be deflected by roads, as Chuck Jonkel has documented in Montana. In other cases, however, Grizzlies may use roads as travelways, particularly when they find off-road travel difficult due to dense brush or logging slash. Grizzlies have also learned to exploit the hastened growth of forage plants near roads in spring. Similarly, the abundance of soft mast such as Pokeberry and Blackberry along road edges attracts Appalachian Black Bears in summer. Any advantages associated with roads for either bear species are outweighed by the increase in sometimes fatal (usually for the bear, unfortunately) encounters with humans.

Wild animals can become habituated to roads. Thirty years ago, for example, bears in Yellowstone, the Great Smokies, and other parks often sat along the roadsides and picnic areas waiting for handouts from tourists. When parks disallowed handouts and relocated habituated hears, the attraction subsided. In any area where animals are exposed to frequent human activity, habituation can be expected. This is not necessarily a desirable response, however. Although animals that are attracted to roads and vehicles do not waste energy reserves in flight response, some of them become aggressive toward people. Aggressive behaviour of habituated animals has been noted in bears, Mule Deer, Elk, Bighorn Sheep, Bison, and other species. Conflicts occur most often when humans approach animals closely in order to feed or photograph them. A few years ago in the Smoky Mountains, a bear reportedly chomped on a baby's face when a parent held it close for a kissing photo - the baby's cheek had been smeared with honey. Such encounters usually result in relocation or killing of the "problem" animals, though the real problem is human stupidity. Studies of Grizzly Bears in Montana and British Columbia have found that bears habituated to human activity especially moving vehicles, are more vulnerable to legal and illegal shooting.

Fragmentation and Isolation of Populations

Some species of animals simply refuse to cross barriers as wide as a road. For these species, a road effectively cuts the population in half. A network of roads fragments the population further. The remaining small populations are then vulnerable to all the problems associated with rarity: genetic deterioration from inbreeding and random drift in gene frequencies, environmental catastrophes, fluctuations in habitat conditions, and demographic stochasticity (i.e., chance variation in age and sex ratios). Thus, roads conrtribute to what many conservation biologists consider the major threat to biological diversity: habitat fragmentation. Such fragmentation may be especially ominous in the face of rapid climate change. If organisms are prevented from migrating to track shifting climatic conditions, and cannot adapt quickly enough because of limited genetic variation, then extinction is inevitable.
In one of the first studies on habitat isolation by roads, D.J. Oxley and co-workers in southeastern Ontario and Quebec found that small forest mammals such as the Eastern Chipmunk, Grey Squirrel, and White-footed Mouse rarely ventured onto road surfaces when the distance between forest margins (road clearance) exceeded 20 meters. The authors suggested that divided highways with a clearance of 90 meters or more maybe as effective barriers to the dispersal of small mammals as water bodies twice as wide. Earlier work in Africa had shown that tortoises, and young Ostrich, Wart hogs, and African Elephants, had difficulty crossing roads with steep embankments. In Germany, Mader found that several species of woodland carabid beetles and two species of forest-dwelling mice rarely or never crossed two-lane roads. Even a small, unpaved forest road closed to public traffic constituted a barrier. All of these animals were physically capable of crossing roads but appeared to be psychologically constrained from venturing into such openings. In Ontario, Merriam and co-workers found that narrow gravel roads were "quantitative barriers" to White-footed Mice in forest fragments; many fewer mice crossed roads than moved an equal distance in the forest alongside roads.

expect that the barrier effect of roads would be less severe in more open habitats, where the contrast between the road and adjoining habitat is less. Yet, a study by Garland and Bradley of the effects of a four-lane highway on rodents in the Mojave Desert found that rodents almost never crossed the road. Of eight species captured, marked, and recaptured, only an adult male Antelope Ground Squirrel crossed the entire highway. No roadkills were observed, suggesting that few rodents ever ventured onto the highway.

Animals far more mobile than rodents and beetles may hesitate to cross roads. In the Southern Appalachians, Brody and Pelton found that radlo-collared Black Bears almost never crossed an interstate highway. In general, the frequency at which bears crossed roads varied inversely with traffic volume. Bears appeared to react to increasing road densities by shifting their home ranges to areas of lower road density. The power of flight may not override the barrier effect of roads for some bird species. Many tropical forest birds are known to be averse to crossing water gaps no wider than a highway. Further research is needed to determine if these species react to road clearings as they do to water gaps.

Thus, populations of many animal species divided by a heavily travelled road may be just as isolated from one another as if they were separated by many miles of barren urban or agricultural land. Larry Harris and Peter Gallagher, writing in a recent Defenders of Wildlife publication on habitat corridors ("Preserving Communities & Corridors" available from Defenders, 1244 19th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036; $10 each), put the road fragmentation problem into proper perspective:

"Consider this triple jeopardy: At the same time that development reduces the total amount of habitat, squeezing remaining wildlife into smaller and more isolated patches, the high-speed traffic of larger and wider highways eliminates more and more of the remaining populations."
To the extent that various plant species depend on road-averse animals for dispersal, roads fragment plant populations as well.
Pollution

Pollution from roads begins with construction. An immediate impact is noise from construction equipment, and noise remains a problem along highways with heavy traffic. Animals respond to noise pollution by altering activity patterns, and with an increase in heart rate and production of stress hormones. Sometimes animals become habituated to increased noise levels, and apparently resume normal activity. But birds and other wildlife that communicate by auditory signals may be at a disadvantage near roads. Highway noise can also disrupt territory establishment and defence. A study by Andrew Barrass found that toads and tree frogs showed abnormal reproductive behaviour in response to highway noise.
Vehicles emit a variety of pollutants, including heavy metals, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, all of which may have serious cumulative effects. Combustion of gasoline containing tetraethyl lead, and wear of tires containing lead oxide, result in lead contamination of roadsides. Although unleaded gasoline now accounts for more than half of all gasoline used in the US, lead persists in soils and the food web for long periods. In Kansas, lead levels in roadside soils and vegetation in the early 1980s were two to three times greater than from near roads with similar traffic volumes in 1973 and 1974, when the use of unleaded gasoline was 42% lower.

Many studies have documented increasing levels of lead in plants with proximity to roads, and with increases in traffic volume. Plant roots take up lead from the soil, and leaves take it up from contaminated air or from particulate matter on the leaf surface. This lead moves up the food chain, with sometimes severe toxic effects on animals, including reproductive impairment, renal abnormalities, and increased mortality rates. Food chain effects can switch between aquatic and terrestrial pathways. Lead concentrations in tadpoles living near highways can be high enough to cause physiological and reproductive impairment in birds and mammals that prey on tadpoles. Less is known about the effects of other heavy metals, such as zinc, cadmium, and nickel. Motor oil and tires contain zinc and cadmium; motor oil and gasoline contain nickel. These metals, like lead, have been found to increase with proximity to roads, and with increasing traffic volume and decreasing soil depth. Earthworms have been found to accumulate all these metals, in concentrations high enough to kill earthworm-eating animals. These roadside contaminants can be carried far from roads by wind and water. lead contamination has been noted up to 100 miles from the nearest metropolitan area.

The maintenance of roads and roadsides also introduces a variety of pollutants into roadside ecosystems. Americans like their roads free of ice and dust, and their roadsides free of weeds. The effects of herbicides on wildlife and ecosystems have been poorly studied, but anyone who has witnessed the destruction of wild flowers and other plants along roadsides (even through parks) for the sake of tidiness has cause to complain.

Highway de-icing programs are notorious sources of saline pollution. In the early 1970s, it was estimated that 9-10 million tons of sodium chloride, 11 million tons of abrasives, and 30,000 tons of calcium chloride were used in the US each year for highway de-icing. As noted above, many animals are attracted to this salt and end up as roadkills or at least get a dose of the salt's toxic additives, including cyanide compounds. Drainage of salt-laden water from roads into aquatic ecosystems may stimulate growth of blue-green algae; the chloride concentration of major water bodies near urban areas has been found to increase by as much as 500%. Furthermore, sodium and calcium ion exchange with mercury releases toxic mercury into these Systems. The cyanide ions from rust-inhibiting additives are extremely toxic to fish.

In many rural areas, waste oil from crankcases is sprayed onto unpaved roads for dust control. A 1974 study estimated that some 100 million gallons of waste oil are sprayed on dirt roads in the US each year. Only about 1% of this oil remains in the top inch of a road surface. Much of it reaches water bodies, where it coats the surface, limiting oxygen exchange and sunlight penetration and having toxic effects on aquatic organisms.

Impacts on Terrestrial Habitats

The impacts of roads on terrestrial ecosystems include direct habitat loss; facilitated invasion of weeds, pests, and pathogens, many of which are exotic (alien); and a variety of edge effects. Roads themselves essentially preempt wildlife habitat. A 1974 report by the Council on Environmental Quality estimated that one mile of interstate highway consumes up to 48 acres of habitat. Logging roads result in the clearing of about 50 acres for each square mile of commercial forest (i.e., 10 acres are deforested for every mile of road, and each square mile of forest averages 5 miles of road). Road construction also kills animals and plants directly, and may limit long-term site productivity of roadsides by exposing low nutrient subsoils, reducing soil water holding capacity, and compacting surface materials. It also makes slopes more vulnerable to landslides and erosion, which in turn remove additional terrestrial wildlife habitat and degrade aquatic habitats.
Some species thrive on roadsides, but most of these are weedy species. In the Great Basin, rabbit brush is usually more abundant and vigorous along hard-surfaced roads than anywhere else, because it takes advantage of the runoff water channelled to the shoulders, Although certainly attractive, the common rabbit brush species are in no danger of decline, as they invade disturbed areas such as abandoned farmsteads and fence rows, and are considered an indicator of overgrazing. In the Mojave Desert, Creosote Bush is another abundant species that opportunistically exploits the increased moisture levels along roadsides.

Many of the weedy plants that dominate and disperse along roadsides are exotics. In some cases, these species spread from roadsides into adjacent native communities. In much of the west, Spotted Knapweed has become a serious agricultural pest. This Eurasian weed invades native communities from roadsides, as does the noxious Tansy Ragwort. In Florida, a state plagued by exotic plants, one of the biggest offenders is Brazilian Pepper. This tall, fast-growing shrub readily colonises roadside habitats. When soil in adjacent native habitats is disturbed by off-road vehicles, Brazilian Pepper invades. Invasion by Brazilian Pepper and other roadside exotics is becoming a serious problem in the Atlantic coastal scrubs of south Florida, communities endemic to Florida and containing many rare species. Another invasive exotic, Melaleuca, is expanding from roadsides and dominating south Florida wetlands. In southwest Oregon and northwest California, an apparently introduced root-rot fungus is spreading from logging roads and eliminating populations of the endemic Port Orford Cedar.

Opportunistic animal species also may benefit from roads. Grassland rodents, for example, sometimes extend their ranges by dispersing along highway verges. In 1941, L.M. Huey documented a range extension of pocket gophers along a new road in the arid Southwest. Meadow voles have been found to colonise new areas by dispersing along the grassy rights-of-way (ROWs) of interstate highways. Roads also facilitate dispersal of prairie dogs. In 1983, Adams and Geis reported that more species of rodents may be found in highway ROWs than in adjacent habitats, though several species avoid ROW habitat. Birds associated with grassland or edge habitat, such as the European Starling, Brewer's and Red-winged Blackbirds, Brown-headed Cowbird, Indigo Bunting, White-throated Sparrow, Song Sparrow, and Killdeer, all have been found to increase in abundance near roads. Cliff and Barn Swallows, Starlings, House Sparrows, and Rock Doves (the latter three are exotic species in North America) often nest and roost in highway bridges. Many species of birds and mammals feed on roadkill carrion.

Some people claim that increases in grassland, edge, and other opportunistic species near roads constitute a benefit of roads. But increased density near roads may not be favourable for the animals involved, if the road exposes them to higher mortality from heavy metal poisoning or collision with vehicles. In this sense, a road can be an "ecological trap" and a "mortality sink" for animal populations. Furthermore, the species that may benefit from roads are primarily those that tolerate or even thrive on human disturbance of natural landscapes, and therefore do not need attention from conservationists (except occasional control). Many of these weedy species are exotic, and have detrimental effects on native species.

Edge effects, once considered favourable for wildlife because many game species (e.g., White-tailed Deer, Eastern Cottontail, Northern Bobwhite) are edge-adapted, are now seen as one of the most harmful consequences of habitat fragmentation. Especially when it cuts through an intact forest, a road introduces a long swath of edge habitat. Forest edge is not a line, but rather a zone of influence that varies in width depending on what is measured. Changes in microclimate, increased blowdowns, and other impacts on vegetation may extend 2-3 tree-heights into a closed-canopy forest. Shade-intolerant plants, many of them exotic weeds, colonise the edge and gradually invade openings in the forest interior. Dan Janzen found weedy plant species invading treefall gaps in a Costa Rican forest up to 5 kilometers from the forest edge. Changes in vegetation structure and composition from edge effects can be more persistent than effects of clearcutting, from which at least some forest types will eventually recover, if left alone.

The Brown-headed Cowbird, originally abundant in the Great Plains but now throughout most of North America because of forest fragmentation, is known to penetrate forests at least 200 meters from edge. The cowbird is a brood parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species and can significantly reduce the reproductive success of its hosts. Forest birds, most of which did not evolve with the cowbird and are not well adapted to its parasitism, may show serious declines in areas where cowbirds have become common. In addition, many opportunistic nest predators, such as jays, crows, Raccoons, and Opossums, are common in roadside environments (partially because of supplemental food in the form of carrion) and often concentrate their predatory activities near edges. Increases in nest predation from these opportunists can extend up to 600 meters from an edge) as shown by David Wilcove using artificial nest experiments.

A narrow logging road with no maintained verge would not be expected to generate substantial edge effects, particularly if surrounded by a tall forest canopy. In this sense, the road would not differ much from hiking trail (even trails create some edge effects, however, such as invasion of weedy plants caused by pant-legs dispersal). As forest roads are "improved," road clearance increases and allows more penetration of sunlight and wind. Edge species are then attracted to these openings. Two-lane roads with maintained rights-of-way and all interstate highways are lined by edge habitat. A forest criss-crossed by improved roads may be largely edge habitat, and its value for conservation of native flora and fauna diminished accordingly.

Impacts on Hydrology and Aquatic Habitats

Road construction alters the hydrology of watersheds through changes in water quantity and quality, stream channel morphology, and ground water levels. Paved roads increase the amount of impervious surface in a watershed, resulting in substantial increases in peak runoff and storm discharges. That usually means flooding downstream. Reduced evapo-transpiration within road rights-of-way may also result in increased runoff and streamflows. However, increases in streamflows in forested watersheds are not usually significant unless 15% or more of the forest cover is removed by road construction and associated activities such as logging. When a road bed is raised above the surrounding land surface, as is normally the case, it will act as a dam and alter surface sheet flow patterns, restricting the amount of water reaching downstream areas. Mike Duever and co-workers found this to be a significant problem in the Big Cypress Everglades ecosystem of South Florida. Ditches dug for road drainage often drain adjacent wetlands as well. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, in 1962, estimated that 99,292 acres of wetlands in western Minnesota had been drained as a result of highway construction. This drainage occurred at a rate of 2.33, 2.62, and 4.10 acres of wetland per mile of road for state and federal, county, and township highways, respectively.
Roads concentrate surface water flows, which in turn increases erosion. Megahan and Kidd, in 1972, found that erosion from logging roads in Idaho was 220 times greater than erosion from undisturbed sites. Logging roads used by more than 16 trucks per day may produce 130 times more sediment than do roads used only by passenger cars. Incision of a slope by roadcuts in mountainous areas may intercept subsurface flow zones, converting subsurface flow to surface flow and increasing streamflow rates. Water tables are almost always lowered in the vicinity of a road.

Where a road crosses a stream, engineers usually divert, channelise, or otherwise alter the stream. Culverts and bridges alter flow patterns and can restrict a passage of fish. Channelization removes natural diverse substrate materials, increases sediment loads, creates a shifting bed load inimical to bottom-dwelling organisms, simplifies current patterns, lowers the stream channel and drains adjacent wetlands, reduces the stability of banks, and exacerbates downstream flooding.

The impacts of roads on fish and fisheries have long concerned biologists. Increased erosion of terrestrial surfaces almost inevitably results in increased sedimentation of streams and other water bodies. Even the best designed roads produce sediment, and unpaved roads continue to produce sediment for as long as they remain unvegetated. A divided highway requiring exposure of 10 to 35 acres per mile during construction produces as much as 3000 tons of sediment per mile. In a study of the Scott Run Basin in Virginia, Guy and Ferguson found that highway construction contributed 85% of the sediment within the basin. The yield was 10 times that normally expected from cultivated land, 200 times that from grasslands, and 2000 times that from forest land. Studies in northwestern California show that about 40% of total sediment is derived from roads and 60% from logged areas. Much of the sedimentation associated with roads occurs during mass movements (i.e., landslides) rather than chronic surface erosion. Roads dramatically increase the frequency of landslides and debris flows. Studies in Oregon have found that roads trigger up to 130 times more debris torrents than intact forest.

Increased sediment loads in streams have been implicated in fish declines in many areas. A 1959 study on a Montana stream, reported by Leedy in 1975, found a 94% reduction in numbers and weight in large game fish due to sedimentation from roads. Salmonids are especially vulnerable to sedimentation because they lay their eggs in gravel and small rubble with water flow sufficient to maintain oxygen supply. Fine sediments may cement spawning gravels, impeding the construction of redds. Increases in fine sediments also reduce the availability of oxygen to eggs and increase embryo mortality. Stowell and co-workers reported that deposition of 25% fine sediments in spawning rubble or gravel reduces fry emergence by 50%. Sedimentation also has negative effects on the invertebrate food supply of many fish. Furthermore, destruction of riparian vegetation by road construction results in higher water temperatures, which reduces dissolved oxygen concentrations and increases fish oxygen demands (a "double whammy"). If the fishing public was adequately informed of the negative effects of roads on fisheries, perhaps all but the laziest would demand that most roads on public lands be closed and revegetated!

Indirect Effects

Access

The most insidious of all effects of roads is the access they provide to humans and their tools of destruction. Let's face it, the vast majority of humans do not know how to behave in natural environments. Fearful of experiencing Nature on its own terms, they bring along their chainsaws, ATVs, guns, dogs and ghetto blasters. They harrass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit. The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas to these cretins, the safer and healthier these areas will be. Those humans who respect the land are willing to walk long distances. If this is an "elitist" attitude, so be it; the health of the land demands restrictions on human access and behaviour.
Many animal species decline with increasing road density precisely because roads bring humans with guns. For many large mammals, road aversion is not related to any intrinsic qualities of the road, but rather to their learned association of roads with danger. In other Cases, mammals may continue to use roads because they provide convenient travelways or food supply, but are unable to maintain populations where road densities are high because of the mortality they suffer from legal or illegal hunting, or roadkill.

An historical study by Richard Thiel in northern Wisconsin, supplemented by modern radio-telemetry, showed that road density was the best predictor of Grey Wolf habitat suitability. As road density increased in the study area, the Wolf population declined. Wolves failed to survive when road densities exceeded .93 mile per square mile (.58 km per square km). Similar studies in Michigan and Ontario by Jensen and co-workers, and in Minnesota by Mech and co-workers, found a virtually identical threshold level for the occurrence of Wolves. Roads themselves do not deter Wolves. In fact, Wolves often use roads for easy travel or to prey on the edge-adapted White-tailed Deer. But roads provide access to people who shoot, snare, trap, or otherwise harass wolves. David Mech found that over half of all known Wolf mortality was caused by humans, despite the "protection" of the Endangered Species Act.

Many other large mammal species have been found to decline with increasing road access. The Florida Panther once ranged throughout the Southeast, from South Carolina through southern Tennessee into Arkansas, Louisiana and extreme eastern Texas. It is now restricted to south Florida, an area of poor deer and Panther habitat, but the last large roadless area available in its range. Problems associated with roads - roadkill, development, and illegal shooting - are now driving it to extinction. A population viability analysis has determined an 85% probability of extinction in 25 years, and a mean time to extinction of 20 years. Proposed management interventions still yield 75% to 99% probabilities of extinction within 100 years.

Recently, Seminole Chief James Billie shot a Panther with a shotgun from his pickup truck in the Big Cypress Swamp, ate it, and claimed this murder was a native religious ritual. Billie eventually won his case, not on religious grounds, but because taxonomists could not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the skull found in Billie's possession was that of a Florida Panther, Felis concolor subspecies coryi (the various subspecies of Cougar differ little from one another in morphology).

Biologists agree that the only hope for the Panther is reestablishment of populations elsewhere within its historic range. But is there anywhere with low enough road density to be safe? The best opportunity seems to be the 1.2 million acres in and around Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia and Osceola National Forest in north Florida, recently connected by purchase of Pinhook Swamp and its transfer to the Forest Service. Experimenters testing the feasibility of Panther reintroduction in this area released 5 neutered and radio-collared Texas Cougars, a subspecies closely related to F.c. coryi, into this habitat. Within a month, one cat died of unknown causes. Two more cats were killed by hunts soon thereafter. The final two cats discovered livestock (a goat pasture and an exotic game reserve), and were removed from the wild. This setback in the Panther reintroduction program demonstrates that even one of the wildest areas in the Southeast is still far too human-accessible for Panthers to survive. Except for the wettest part of the Okefenokee Swamp, the poorest Panther habitat, the area is riddled with roads and swarming with gun-toting "Crackers" and their hounds.

Other large mammals that suffer from road access include Cougars (western version of Fc.) and Grizzly Bears. A radio-telemetry study in Arizona and Utah, by Van Dyke and co-workers, found that Cougars avoided roads (especially paved and improved dirt roads) whenever possible, and established home ranges in areas with the lowest road densities. In southeastern British Columbia, McLellan and Mace found that a disproportionate amount of Grizzly Bear mortality occurred near roads. Of 11 known deaths, 7 bears were definitely shot and another 3 were probably shot from roads. Dood and co-workers found that 32% of all hunting mortality and 48% of all non-hunting mortality of Grizzlies in Montana occurred within one mile of a road. Knick and Kasworm recently found that illegal shooting was the primary cause of death for Grizzlies in the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak ecosystems, and concluded that the ability of regions to maintain viable populations of Grizzly Bears is related to road density and human access.

Road access imperils Black Bears, too. In the Southern Appalachians, Mike Pelton has estimated that bears cannot maintain viable populations when road density exceeds .8 miles of road per square mile. Later studies found that the situation is more complicated, and is related to traffic volume and other road use factors. The primary effect of roads on bears in the Southern Appalachians is to expose them to increased hunting. Hunting with the aid of trained hounds is the major source of mortality for bears in this region, including within National Parks and other sanctuaries, and is encouraged by the trade in bear gall bladders to the Oriental market.

The problem of road access and overhunting is often attributed to inadequacies of human ethics and law enforcement, rather than to any effect of the roads themselves. But as Richard Thiel pointed out, in discussing the Grey Wolf in northern Wisconsin, "Ultimately, the survival of wolves will depend on a change in human attitudes. Until then road densities are important in determining whether an area can sustain a viable population of wolves." We may have to wait a long time before attitudes toward Nature improve, but roads can be closed today.

Other consequences of road access include over collecting of rare plants (e.g., cacti, orchids, and ginseng) and animals (e.g., snakes for the pet trade), the removal of snags near roadsides by firewood cutters, and increased frequency of fire ignitions. Removal of snags eliminates habitat for the many cavity-nesting and roosting birds and mammals. In the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and Washington, for example, 39 bird and 23 mammal species use snags for nesting or shelter. Woodpeckers are among the cavity-nesting birds known to be critically important in dampening forest insect outbreak. Thus, snag removal along roadsides is an anthropogenic edge effect that may have far-reaching effects on entire ecosystems.

Humans are suspected to cause at least 90% of wildfires in the US, over half of which begin along roads. In 1941, Shaw and co-workers reported 78% of all anthropogenic fires occurred within 265 feet of a road. In New Jersey, the origins of 75% of all forest fires were traced to roadsides. Although fire is a natural process with beneficial effects on many ecosystems, natural fires and anthropogenic fires differ in many ways. One important difference is frequency; anthropogenic fires may occur more frequently than the natural fire return interval for a given ecosystem type. Another important difference is seasonality. In Florida, for example, most anthropogenic fires occur in winter, whereas natural lightning fires occur in late spring and summer. Research in longleaf Pine-Wiregrass communities, which under natural conditions experience low-intensity ground fires at 2 to 5 year intervals, has determined that summer fires promote higher herbaceous plant diversity and flowering. Winter fires caused by humans tend to promote monotonous, shrub-dominated (eg. saw palmetto) communities. It is a curious contradiction that the US forest service often justifies high road densities as necessary to provide fire control, when in fact most fires begin along roads.

Of the disturbances promoted by road access, perhaps the most devastating is development. Highways introduce pressures for commercial development of nearby land. Highway interchanges inevitably become nodes of ugly commercialism. Arterial streets encourage commercial strip development, and new rural and suburban roads bring in commercial, industrial, and residential development. Internationally funded road-building in Third World countries introduces hordes of immigrants, who quickly cut and burn the native forest. In Brazilian Amazonia, Philip Fearnside reported that road development funded by the World Bank facilitates the entry of settlers whose land claims (established by clearing the forest) justify building more roads. Thus, roads and deforestation interact in a positive feedback relationship. Roads bring settlement and development, which in turn call for more roads.

Cumulative Effects

So far, this article has discussed effects of roads mostly in isolation from one another. Indeed, almost all research on road problems has looked at one factor at a time, be it lead pollution, roadkill, edge effects, or access. In real ecosystems, however, these factors interact in complex ways, with long-term effects at several levels of biological organisation.
To illustrate the complexity of possible impacts, consider this scenario: A network of roads is built into prime Grey Wolf habitat in northern hardwoods forest. Hunters flock into the area, depressing the Wolf population. Some Wolves are killed by vehicles. Eventually, the Wolf becomes extinct in this region. In the absence of Wolf predation, and with the abundance of brushy roadside edge habitat, the White-tailed Deer population explodes. Fires started by humans along roadsides create even more deer habitat. Hunters and vehicles take some deer, but they cannot keep up. The burgeoning deer population overbrowses the forest eliminating regeneration of favoured Eastern Hemlock, Arbor Vitae, Canada Yew, and a number of rare herbaceous plants. As a result, the floristic composition and vegetation structure of the forest gradually change. With reduced understory density due to heavy browsing, many warblers and other forest songbirds undergo serious declines. With Wolves gone, opportunistic medium-sized mammals ("mesopredators") such as Opossums and Raccoons increase in abundance and feed on the eggs and nestlings of songbirds, many of which nest on or near the ground, further depressing their numbers. Brown-headed Cowbirds parasitise these beleaguered songbirds within 200 meters or so of road edges. Cutting of snags for firewood along the roadsides decimates cavity-nesting bird populations. Populations of insect pests now cycle with greater amplitude, resulting in massive defoliation. The roads also bring in developers, who create new residential complexes, and still more roads. Roadside pollutants from increased traffic levels poison the food chain. The original forest ecosystem has been irretrievably destroyed.

This scenario is fictitious, but every part of it has been documented somewhere. Because many of the animal species most sensitive to roads are large predators, we can expect a cascade of secondary extinctions when these species are eliminated or greatly reduced. Recent research confirms that top predators are often "keystone species", upon which the diversity of a large part of the community depends. When top predators are eliminated, such as through roadkill or because of increased access to hunters, opportunistic mesopredators increase in abundance, leading to declines of many songbirds and ground-dwelling reptiles and amphibians. In the tropics, predator removal can lead to an increased abundance of mammals that eat large-seeded plants, which in turn may result in changes in plant community composition and diversity (see John Terborgh's article, "The Big Things that Run the World", reprinted in Earth First!, 8-89).

Other keystone species may be similarly vulnerable to roads. The Gopher Tortoise of the southeastern US, for example, digs burrows up to 30 feet long and 15 feet deep. By a recent count, 362 species of commensal invertebrates and vertebrates have been found in its burrows, and many of them can live nowhere else. Yet, the slow-moving Gopher Tortoise is extremely vulnerable to roadkill on the busy highways of this high growth region. Roads also provide access to developers and poachers, the tortoise's biggest enemies. But the effects of roads on Gopher Tortoises can be more subtle. Good Gopher Tortoise habitat is longleaf Pine-Wiregrass, which requires frequent summer fires to maintain its open structure. Although, as discussed above, many fires are ignited along roadsides, the net effect of roads on this habitat has been to stop the spread of fires that once covered areas the size of several counties. Those roadside fires that do ignite are mostly winter burns, which are less effective in controlling shrub invasion. As shrubs, oaks, and other hardwoods overtake this ecosystem, they shade out the herbaceous plants upon which the herbivorous Gopher Tortoise depends.

The net, cumulative effect of roads is to diminish the native diversity of ecosystems everywhere. Habitats in many different places around the would are invaded by virtually the same set of cosmopolitan weeds. Regions gradually are homogenised - they lose their "character". Every place of similar climate begins to look the same and most ecosystems are incomplete and missing the apex of the food chain. The end result is an impoverishment of global biodiversity.

What Can Be Done?

Mitigation

The traditional response of public agencies to road - wildlife conflicts, in those rare instances when they do respond, is "mitigation," i.e., build the road but design it so as to minimise its impacts. For example, barren roadsides can be planted and stabilised by wire netting in order to reduce erosion, landslides, and sedimentation of streams. Stream culverts can be designed to minimise disruption of flow and bed morphology. New roads can be located, and existing roads relocated, outside of critical wildlife habitats (such as moist meadows, shrub fields, riparian zones, and other Grizzly Bear feeding areas). Speed bumps and warning signs can be installed to slow down motorists and reduce roadkill. Reflective mirrors along roadsides and hood-mounted ultrasonic whistles are devices intended to warn animals of approaching death-machines, but are still of unproven benefit.
Road rights-of-way can be managed to maximise their potential as native wildlife habitat and dispersal corridors. If wide swaths of old-growth longleaf Pines are maintained along highway ROWs in the Southeast for example, they may serve to connect isolated Red-cockaded Woodpecker populations. Such corridors were recommended by a committee of the American Ornithologists' Union. Some evdence suggests that Red-cockaded Woodpeckers may indeed disperse along such corridors, but not across long expanses of unsuitable habitat. The management of"roadside verges" for fauna and flora has a long history in Britain, as reviewed by J.M.Way in 1977.

Undoubtedly, mitigation measures, if implemented intelligently, can reduce the harmful effects of roads on wildlife. A 1982 report by Leedy and Adams, for the US Department of Transportation and Fish and Wildlife Service, summarises a variety of design and construction options to mitigate the effects of roads. For reducing roadkiIIs, a combination of fencing and underpasses has proven effective in many instances. Tunnels under roads were used as early as 1958 in the United Kingdom to reduce roadkill of badgers and have been used in several countries to reduce roadkill of amphibians (many frogs toads, and salamanders migrate to their breeding ponds on wet spring nights). Toad tunnels were constructed as early as 1969 in Switzerland, and have been built throughout much of the United Kingdom, West Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries under the auspices of the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society and Herpetofauna Consultants international. A private firm, ACO Polymer products Limited even specialises in the design and production of amphibian tunnel and fencing systems (see Defenders 10-89).

In Colorado, underpasses and deer-proof fencing were constructed on I-70, to channel movement of Mule Deer along a major migratory route, and have proved fairly successful. D.F. Reed and co-workers, however, found that many individual deer were reluctant to use a narrow underpass (3 meters wide and high, and 30 meters long), and recommended that underpasses be significantly wider. Biologists in various Western states are experimenting with one-way gates that keep most deer off the highway but allow deer that get into the highway ROW to escape. in southeastern Austialia, Mansergh and Scott constructed a funnel-shaped rocky corridor and two tunnels of .9 X 1.2 meters each beneath a road that bisected the breeding area of the rare Mountain Pygmy-possum (the only marsupial hibernator known). The design proved very successful in restoring natural movement and breeding behaviour of the Pygmy-possums. One of the more controversial applications of the underpass strategy has been in south Florida, for the sake of the Florida Panther. As noted above, roadkill is the leading known cause of death for this subspecies. Thus, when an extension of I-75 through the Everglades-Big Cypress Swamp was proposed, conservationists reacted with alarm. When assured by highway and wildlife officials that the new interstate would include fences and underpass for Panthers, making it much less dangerous than the infamous Panther-smashing Alligator Alley which it would replace many conservationists (including the Florida Audubon Society and the Sierra Club) came out in support of the new road.

How effective will these underpasses be in allowing for movement of Panthers and other wildlife? Eighty-four bridges are being constructed on the 49 miles of new I-75 in Collier county, 46 of them designed solely for wildlife movement. Each of these "wildlife crossings" consists of three 40-foot spans, for a total length of 120 feet with 8 feet of vertical clearance. Much of the 120 feet will be under water, however, at least in the wet season. There is no guarantee that these crossings will be functional for Panthers and other large mammals. Even Thomas Barry, the project manager for the Florida Department of Transportation, admits that the ideal solution would have been to build a viaduct (elevated highway) across the entire stretch, but that this solution was deemed too expensive. As advocated by Florida Earth First!, the "ideal solution" would be to close Alligator Alley and all other roads in the Everglades - Big Cypress bioregion, and to allow no new roads. The desirability of this solution became more evident when we learned that the new I-75 will include recreational access sites for ORVs, as recommended by the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission.

The Preferred Alternative

In evaluating various mitigation options for road-wildlife problems, it must be remembered that each is a compromise, addresses only a subset of the multiple ecological impacts of roads, and is far less satisfactory than outright road closure and obliteration. The serious conservationist recognises that mitigation options should be applied only to roads already constructed, and which will be difficult to close in the near future (i.e., major highways). In such cases, construction of viaducts over important wildlife movement corridors (as documented by roadkills) and other critical natural areas should be vigorously pursued. Amphibian tunnels and other smaller underpasses also should be constructed where needed. But the bottom line is that no new roads should be built, and most existing roads - especially on public lands - should be closed and obliterated. This is the preferred alternative!
A priority system for determining which roads should be closed first is necessary to guide conservation actions toward the most deserving targets. The Grizzly Bear Compendium (Lefranc et al. 1987, pp.145-46) specifies which kinds of roads should be closed on public lands to protect Grizzlies: Access roads should be closed after harvesting and restocking, temporary roads and landings should be obliterated, collector roads and loop roads should be closed in most instances, local roads should be closed within one season after use, and seismic trails and roads should be closed after operations have ceased. Bear biologist Chuck Jonkel has long recommended an aggressive road closure program on public lands. Public education on the rationale for closures, and strong law enforcement, must accompany road closure programs if they are to be effective. The Grizzly bear Compendium recommends that road use restrictions, such as seasonal closures of roads in areas used only seasonally by bears, be placed on roads that cannot be permanently closed.

In a series of publications, I have recommended that large core areas of public lands be managed as roadless "wilderness recovery areas" (a concept attributable to Dave Foreman). Buffer zones surrounding these core areas would have limited access for recreation and other multiple-use" activities consistent with preservation of the core preserves. Buffer zones also would insulate the core areas from the intensive uses of the humanised landscape. These large preserve complexes would be connected by broad corridors of natural habitat to form a regional network.

As Keith Hammer has documented, however, road closures that appear on paper may not function as such on the ground. Keith found that 38% of the putative road closures on the Flathead National Forest in Montana would not bar passenger vehicles. The road miles behind the ineffective barriers represented 44% of the roads reported by the Forest Service as being closed to all motorised vehicles year-round. Gates, earthen berms, and other structures are not usually effective in restricting road use. This is especially true in more open-structured habitats, such as Longleaf Pine and Ponderosa Pine forests, where motorists can easily drive around barriers. It may be that the only effective road closures are those where the road is "ripped" and revegetated.

The Forest Service and other public agencies will claim that road closures, revegetation, and other restorative measures are too expensive to be implemented on a broad scale. But much of the approximately $400 million of taxpayers' money squandered annually by the Forest Service on below-cost timber sales goes to road-building. Road maintenance is also expensive. Virtually all of this money could be channelled into road closures and associated habitat restoration. This work would be labor-intensive, and providing income to the many laid off loggers, timber sale planners, and road engineers - for noble jobs, rather than jobs of destruction! likewise, the huge budgets of federal, state, and county highway departments could be directed to road closures and revegetation, as well as viaducts and underpasses to minimise roadkill on roads kept open.

We cannot expect our public agencies to shift to a more enlightened roads policy without a fight. A lot of people make a lot of money designing and building roads, and exploiting the resources to which roads lead. Nor can we expect the slothful, ignorant populace to give up what they see as the benefits of roads (fast transportation, easy access to recreational areas, scenery without a sweat, etc) for the sake of bears and toads. Education of the public, the politicians, and our fellow environmentalists about the multiple and far-reaching impacts of roads is critical. As Aldo Leopold noted, "recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind" The greatest near-term need is direct action in defence of existing roadless areas, and to close roads where they are causing the most problems for native biodiversity.

Dr. Noss is a member of the Board of Governors of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is also the science editor of Wild Earth and advisor to PAW NET and the Wildlands Project. Nothing is worse for sensitive wildlife than a road. Over the last few decades, studies in a variety of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems have demonstrated that many of the most pervasive threats to biological diversity - habitat destruction and fragmentation, edge effects, exotic species invasions, pollution, and overhunting - are aggravated by roads. Roads have been implicated as mortality sinks for animals ranging from snake to wolves, as displacement factors affecting animal distribution and movement patterns, as population fragmenting factors, as sources of sediments that clog streams and destroy fisheries, as sources of deleterious edge effects, and as access corridors that encourage development, logging and poaching of rare plants and animals. Road-building in National Forests and other public lands threatens the existence of de facto wilderness and species that depend on wilderness.

update 2002: Unable to find the original biblio--the address and phone number don't work. There is a revised and updated version at Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads along with a huge amount of reference material.

The Importance of the Car to the Modern Economy
The Ecological Effects of Roads
Oil and the Future
Away with all cars
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Away with all cars

by Mr Social Control photo street riot
A sincere and zealous protestation against the over-abundance of motorised carriages together with some suggestions towards the elimination of this disgorge in the form of an open letter to all motorists.


Dear Motorists

The Absurdity of it All

There are these large pieces of metal hurtling around at high speed in residential areas. They are such a menace to life & limb that every journey made by any other means is chiefly spent dodging these monstrous objects. They are the single biggest cause of atmospheric pollution and global warming. They are the largest market for the warmongering oil industry. Their noise is the noise of the city. These cars are so central to the organisation of this society, especially the organisation of work, that an illusion has to be maintained that nobody sees anything wrong with the ever increasing number of cars.

Protecting ourselves from them has become our responsibility as pedestrians. It is not you who are supposed to stop, look and listen. Road safety is the very first thing that children are taught. We are all supposed to identify our own interests with that of the economy, that is to say, economic growth. One of the main indicators of a growing economy is rising car sales. Newsreaders announce a slump in the sales of cars with the same sober tone of voice used for unemployment statistics or terrorists attacks. Adverts, the Media, the very design of our cities, all assert that what is convenient for you the driver is convenient for everyone. This is part of a broader assumption that we all live in car sized family units and all want to get where we are going as quickly as possible.

In fact many people do see something wrong with this situation. But most of them are not drivers. Those people who lack the widespread privilege of a car generally lack the rarer privilege of a voice that may be heard. Most of us just mutter darkly about the subject on the top of busses and wave our arms impotently at zebra crossings. But some go further...

Your Journeys, our Bodies

"Where the MX-5 excels is in its ability to involve the driver in its every action, so that you very quickly feel you are just one of a wealth of moving parts, all in total harmony. Take the gear change, the way it snaps around its close gate is a revelation."
- Autocar & Motor
In 1991 a conference of British crime writers was asked "how would you kill someone?". Many ingenious means were proposed, some of which might make excellent mysteries: push them out the porthole, stab them with an icicle. Curiously, the commonest and most practical method suggested was to run them over with a car. Not only is the criminal already in the getaway vehicle when the crime is committed, but even if caught the punishment is likely to be footling. The alarming leniency shown towards murderous motorists is perhaps related to the dissonance between the declared purpose of penal justice and its practical results. To judge by these results, the chief function of legal punishments is not to deter crime but to create, consolidate and train an active criminal class. The spectre of such a subculture makes the rest of society more like a prison in its turn. We become fearful of leaving our cells and begin to regard our warders as protectors rather than oppressors. For criminality to be effectively terrifying it needs the figure of the rapist, the mugger, the burglar, the inexplicable outsider who strikes in the darkness, not the drunken sales rep driving home from the office party. Where fear of the outsider promotes conformity, fear of the sales rep promotes rebellion. So hit-and-run drivers do not get the publicity of serial killers. Their victims are just as dead.

In fact the laxity of punitive measures against deadly drivers is just one of a skein of double standards used to belittle the dangers of traffic. Politicians will dismiss a rise in crime figures as "mostly traffic offences", whilst becoming quite apoplectic about car theft and joyriding. Police complain that they wanted to catch villains but have "ended up on traffic duty". A single death in a rail-crash is headline news, meriting a public enquiry and the resignation of transport ministers, whilst the most horrific of motorway pileups is hardly worth a mention in the press.

In India the cow is supposedly a sacred animal to which motorists must give way. Nowhere in the world is the human being similarly sacred. The fact we cannot cross the road if you are coming is so obvious, so banal, that it scarcely seems questionable. Yet surely this was not always the case, there was a time when we had the right of way. So how did this happen? Imagine a world where you always had to stop for us. What would it be like? And would you spend $20,000 on a car under such circumstances? Perhaps this is the key to the mystery. Perhaps we should not ask: how does society tolerate the annual slaughter of 5000 people a year in Britain, of a million people globally? Perhaps we should ask: how would a society of motorists tolerate anything else? To us, this slaughter is one of the car's many drawbacks. To you, it is one of its many advantages. It is the risk of driving that makes it exciting for you. You consider your car a form of liberty because the only liberty you can imagine is the liberty to kill and maim others. Your life is planned and ritualised in its every detail. Your pension plan, your mortgage and your sexlife are finalised decades in advance. Is it any wonder you hunger for the thrill of reckless driving? Is driving not the only piece of work you do without a supervisor watching over your shoulder? Is it not the only thing you ever do, on your own terms, for your self? Is it even the only time of any sort that you get to yourself?

Could this be why you are so aggressive when you drive? Is it as much a bored kind of desperation as an arrogant kind of machismo? A man's car says a lot about him. But as you edge your way through a traffic jam at less than walking pace, you have only the potential to reach the dangerous, erotic speed promised in the advert. If this is true, then you have been sold a pup. You have been sold danger without excitement. You have the liberty to go anywhere you like, as long as there is a multistory at the other end. You have been sold a mere representation of freedom, an individuality that is just like everyone else's, that is just enough to allow you to tolerate your intolerable daily life. We do not weep for you or the time you have spent working to pay for your car and its petrol. We weep for ourselves because drunk or sober you are mutilating and killing us.

The Transformation of the City

".... the efforts of all established powers to increase the means of maintaining order in the streets finally culminates in the suppression of the street."
- Guy Debord. society of the Spectacle: 172. 1967
"Urban transportation has to do not only with moving people and goods into, out of and through the city but also with spatial organisation of all human activities within it."
- John W.Dyckman. Transportation in Cities. Scientific American September 1965
In the former Vicar Lane Bus Station in Leeds there is a notice which says: "National Car parks would like to apologise to bus passengers for any inconvenience caused by the demolition of this bus station and its conversion into a car park." That's OK lads, don't mention it. Simply in terms of passenger numbers, replacing a bus station with parking space for 20 cars is hardly efficient. And there is more to cities than efficiency. Vicar lane Bus Station was no pleasure-dome but it did at least provide a meeting place with shelter and seats. A car park in contrast is dead space, empty and functional. It is there only to allow work to happen somewhere else. Many other examples could prove the same point- that even if cars could exist without being traffic, for instance if they could jaunt through hyperspace from A to B without occupying any of the points in between, then they would still be a considerable nuisance in terms of their occupation of urban space. They are far larger than the single human being they often carry. They are privately owned and therefore stand idle much time (which makes the short life-span of their planned obsolescence all the more laughable). They take you to work, to the shops, to the cinema and home again, so that each car through parking occupies an area larger than most people's homes.

In any case, cars do not exist independently of traffic, they occupy far more space as moving traffic than as parked objects. They are such a poor mode of transport that they cannot go anywhere without special surfaces called 'roads' to drive on, without workshops to mend them, petrol stations to refuel them, without insurance offices, bridges, and of course hospitals. Car occupied land takes up shocking proportions of most cities: 23% of London, 29% of Tokyo, 44% of Los Angeles.

This would be a dreadful state of affairs in itself but it is exacerbated by the nature of the urban space that traffic has stolen. If we consider a threefold division of non-car space into:
* Private space Eg. Houses, Gardens
* Public spaces e.g. parks, squares etc.
* Corporate space, that owned by private firms or rendered inaccessible to public use by the state e.g. police stations, DSS offices, workplaces, shops and colleges;
then several tendencies can be seen within the changing economy of space. Firstly when gender power is mediated by space, it usually happens within these categories, not between them. Although sexual harassment on the street is able to cross the boundary between car space and public space. Secondly, a gradual conquest of public space by corporate space is in progress. The replacement of city squares by corporately owned shopping centres is an example of this. Thirdly while private space is obviously unaffected by the conquest of public areas it is far from being equitably distributed between its various users. Lastly car space is in a continuous state of expansion with public space as its chief victim.

These developments obviously do not provide the greatest freedom of movement for everyone. More finely guarded tiers of accessibility ranging from genuinely private (not just family) space through overlapping levels of community specific and use specific space to large expanses of genuinely public (not just traffic dominated) space, would provide far greater freedom of movement and so of activity. Though this could not happen unless everybody had at least the spatial control over their own bodies. Current spatial economies dictate activity by channelling movement along narrow corridors, which link highly controlled environments such as the toy superstore, the workplace and the family home. The prospect that a city could be something more than a convenient set of roads linking controlled spaces seems very distant today, at a time when even the most imposing buildings have an air of monetary expedience about them. But even in Victorian England, hardly a utopian society, public space was an automatic consideration of any architectural project.

Roads determine not only the relative proportions of each type of space but also their distribution. As more people have cars, or rather as more money is spent by motorists, the more places become out of reach to people who do not have cars, witness the exodus of shops from high streets to ring-roads. Ironically the machine that is sold on its ability to bequeath freedom of movement and its ability to cover distances actually creates as much distance as it traverses. So the two dominant tendencies in the spatial distribution of urban activities, namely traffic imperialism and urban zoning, are entirely due to the dominance of the motor vehicle over transportation as a whole. The car is replacing things you want to do with things you have to do, whilst simultaneously moving the things you have to do further away from each other. This impoverishes your already debased life, as you must spend longer and longer hours in front of the wheel. It also impoverishes our lives, as more facilities move out of our reach, our movements are channelled along ever narrower predetermined paths, we have more and more roads to cross and they are ever busier and more dangerous.

The final irony is that you can gain no satisfaction from all the space that is being so generously turned over to your use. you do not actually use the space that you pass through even though you prevent us from using it, all you do is try to mitigate it by passing through it as quickly as possible. As far as you are concerned you are never really in it at all, you just watch it go by, a boring television programme projected onto your windscreen. And the more space there is for you to wish that you did not have to drive through, the more unhappy you are because the more obstacles there are to your progress: other cars. You must hate cars, really hate them, more than we, as pedestrians, can ever imagine.

The Necessity of Driving

In a way though, driving has been forced on you. Many suburbs of Los Angeles do not even have pavements. Milton Keynes is little better. Life for many people is now impossible without a car. In order to either earn or spend money, the car has become a necessity. What is this doing to people? Advertisements claim that driving is a form of freedom, a kind of power. The ads are telling the truth but at the same time they're lying. Because cars are expensive, and speak of the physical control of space, they have become emblematic of wealth. Because male sexuality has been constructed as mechanical and thrusting, and because the car is a scale model of the nuclear family, cars have come to represent male power. As a driver you have power over pedestrians and passengers and urban space; so the car represents its own reality: motor power.

But the car can only take you where the car has already been. Driving is like shopping in a big supermarket. You are in a little bubble of your own and accountable to no-one. You can buy (drive to) any product (prefabricated destination) you like, but you can only chose from what is on offer. You are isolated and at the same time re-incorporated into a grand scheme of domination. You feel privileged but you are being used. The powers that be prefer roads to streets because a busy highway is just a prison with mobile cells. A driver can leave the road but can no more influence others to do likewise than a corpse can start an insurrection in a cemetery. A car is an accident looking for somewhere to happen and the more people have cars the more similar everywhere becomes, so the less meaningful is your "freedom of movement".

By arranging the space in which human activity takes place, the road network prearranges our movements. Even a 'Holiday' is nothing but one long journey, a linear sequence of experiences with no connecting structure but "What's next?". Ultimately the prescribing of experiences, prescribes emotions. You have no more power to influence the pictures on the windscreen on your way to work, than those on the television screen at home, so you feel powerless. Separation makes us feel lonely. Endless repetition of the same little rituals, enforced by the intractability of urban geography, makes us feel bored.

We can observe our boredom, just as we can observe a car park and feel as little empowered to do away with one as the other. The boredom is the consequence of the car-park and the car-park is the reification, the translation into the material world, of the boredom. This boredom is nothing less than the boredom of the market itself. It takes place within our tiny bubbles. It is a secret and lonely misery, as hidden as the misery of the widows of the motor-car, dreaming every night of their husbands burning helplessly to death, strapped to a plastic seat on a motorway.

The Transformation of the Planet

And as if this is not bad enough, it is getting worse. This traffic system can only exist in a state of perpetual expansion. It increases the distances over which goods and people must be transported. Then, ingeniously, it offers a solution to this problem: the car and the truck. It creates unsafe, empty, hateful streets, then offers the car as a form of safety. It creates a rich world greedy for status lifestyles and endless raw materials, then offers itself as an index of the degree of "development" of the poor world. Just as it is transforming the city it is transforming the rest of the planet.

Mining ores for raw materials carves great opencast scars in the landscape, often dispossessing native pedestrians of their lands and livelihoods at the same time. The ores are processed in huge plants. The metals and components are shipped across the globe in leaky hulks. Lives are warped in factories that assemble components, on plantations that grow rubber, in the mines and in the refineries, in the forges and the crippling foundries. And at every stage, up until throwing the burnt out wreckage of the finished product into a concrete ditch, hauling the used tyres out to sea by the barge-load and chucking the acid leaking batteries into a river, pollution is pumping out into the atmosphere, seeping into the hydro-sphere and being buried in the mud.

On top of this, cars need petrol which pollutes at its points of production and consumption and at every point in between: the supertanker, the filling station and the engine of your car. The fumes from burning petrol are the largest artificial source of atmospheric carbon in the world. The main carbon sinks which take carbon out of the atmosphere are the rainforests and the plankton of the southern seas. Unfortunately the rainforests are being destroyed and the plankton threatened by the ozone depletion ( a process itself accelerated by car fumes). Even without this destruction, the sinks would be unable to cope with the current number of cars. What is actually at stake here is the ecology of the entire surface of the planet.

The earth is not in itself amenable to human, or any other, life. Its current surface temperature and atmospheric composition have come about through interrelations between organism over the last three thousand million years and are even today sustained solely by the continuance of those interrelations. It is totally obvious that killing enough of these organisms and pumping enough shite into the air, sea and soil is likely to interfere with these delicate feedback loops. The surface of Earth could easily be made as hostile to life as the surfaces of Mars or Venus. The extinction of our species does not necessarily follow from this. If Moon and Mars bases can be contemplated, if artificial orbital biospheres can be devised, then life could still continue on a devastated Earth. Cities framed by geodisc domes or buried in caves of steel are no less feasible in purely engineering terms than say, the channel tunnel. It is this very feasibility of life in a completely artificial environment that belies the idea that the classes responsible for the Earth's current malaise will eventually be thanked for our salvation.

Green experts assure us they know what they are doing, and hurry up with the next 25K wage packet please, but the assertion that the holders of planetary power are not crazed enough to really, really do it is no more convincing than in the days of Mutually Assured Destruction. It does not matter which are psychotic and which benevolent, because the holders of power are always beholden to power itself. In a world governed by stock prices the buck stops nowhere. It passes Tokyo to London to New York and back to Tokyo again. Why should they care if the whole world is turned into a radiation soaked desert? If no human being can ever see the light of day with their own eyes? What does it mean for them if every beautiful and useless creature in the world is exterminated for ever? If we are reduced to drinking our own piss miles underground, dependent on them for every breath of oxygen we take? And if they are willing to save the biosphere at this late hour then why do the greenest among them proclaim that the rainforests should be rescued only in order that the plants be used to make herbal shampoo? If they care about the quality of life that their underlings lead, then why are millions striving in the south of the world to feed the debts imposed by the banks in the north?

The truth is that ecological disaster would be a stroke of luck for those that benefit from the domination of our lives. The car is an effective device for representing and extending power over space. Yet it is still vulnerable. While our air is still just about breathable, while the experience of sunshine on one's face still remains; then anyone can torch a car, pull a statue, burn down a bank or knock five terraced houses together to make a rambling commune. On the other hand the destruction of the atmosphere, would entail a massive centralisation of political power. The retreat into the silvery domed cities would make physical attacks upon the superstructure of urban life and economic power not only difficult but suicidal. In effect we'd all be living in one huge car and you can't set fire to one when your sitting in the back seat.

Life Beyond the Windscreen

"Why do people have to dash off somewhere? Just look at your kitten - it's dozing so peacefully! Machines will bring a new oppression of man. They will only stir up envy and competitiveness. The Revolution is in Jeopardy, but it will not be destroyed. If we win, then we shall annihilate these motors. Instead, we shall plant the groves of Jean-Jacques..."
- Unknown, Moscow, 1921
"We are holding this street to ransom till every car is a flowerpot and every road an allotment"
- Brighton Reclaim the Streets, Valentines Day 1996
We are not bursting with alternative methods of transport for you to go to all your ridiculous shopping centres, office blocks and so on. We are not going to sell you a ticket for the airship or a pony for the tow path. We do not believe in improving public transport. We loathe public transport. We hate paying for it, waiting for it, looking out of its windows at dirty, car choked streets.

Without traffic cities could come alive. If transport were both superseded and liberated then the countryside would become just as unrecognisable. Supersedence would allow vast swathes of public land to be freed towards making a city an exciting and pleasant place to be. Gigantic roundabouts in city centres would become the public forums once more, planted with trees and gurgling with fountains. The broad highways that slice our cities into fragments would become the genuine thoroughfares, linking communities rather than dispersing them. There would be an end to roads and we would have streets to walk down. Perhaps some would have canals cut along their centres with decorative footbridges and beautiful plumed birds stepping gingerly across lily pads. If activities were less geographically dispersed they might be forced to become smaller in scale. People would be brought into daily contact with one another. Streets would not be deserted, so street crime would become virtually impossible, making trust between diverse individuals and communities a realistic goal rather than empty liberal rhetoric. All of which would make feasible the idea of municipal democracy, the idea of small local areas being directly governed by their inhabitants. Workers councils in a factory would not bring workers control over production, if the factory just made components to be assembled elsewhere into an unknown machine. Similarly in the cities of today municipal democracy would not give people control over the conditions of their lives, they are assembled elsewhere. The supersedence of transport would, at the very least, create a possibility of democracy.

Transports supersedence would open the way to its liberation. No longer bound by the rationalities of traffic, of daily repetition, of time, economy and above all safety; no longer taking place through ravaged lifeless, empty ugliness, all journeys could become pleasurable, even frivolous. All movement could be joyriding. As I write the Crab-apple trees outside my window have just been cut down by the council because drivers thought it a nuisance to find windfalls in their bonnets. It is amazing that you spend so much time cleaning and polishing machines that make every thing else in sight a filthy stinking mess. Crab-apple trees are not a nuisance. Cars are a nuisance. Without cars we could have trees everywhere: Limes, Alders, Rowans, a line of dark poplars instead of the Westway, Great Oaks instead of the Brent Cross flyover. Where do you think oxygen comes from anyway? Out of your fucking exhaust pipe?

These changes would not be guarantied by the abandonment of cars, but the lack of these changes is guarantied by your persistence in driving them. There is nothing revolutionary about anything so rational as abolishing the car, though it might take a revolution to liquidate the multinationaly vested interests that prevents such rationality being achievable.

Rebelling Against The Car

To recap: lots of people hate cars, its just that you don't hear much about it because there is very little overlap between people who hate cars and people who own newspapers and TV companies. Campaigning against the car, its spatial domination, its destruction has a peculiar advantage over recent campaigns of direct action. Unlike warehouses, politicians and nuclear rockets, motor cars and their conduits are not hard to find. The thing that is so infuriating about them is also what makes them so vulnerable: they are absolutely everywhere.

Traffic is not just an issue to be dealt with by reformist measures like the granting of pedestrian precincts, pelican crossings and so forth. This is not to say that reformists haven't achieved reforms. However reform cannot challenge the political power of the Road as an institution, nor the power of Capital which it serves. In fact piffling restrictions on the car only serve to reinforce and legitimate the machinery of motor power, rather like the way that abuse spotting social workers can only legitimate the everyday barbarism of the Family, by picking out its most "dysfunctional" exemplers. We no more recognise the distinction between "green" cars and others, between "green" petrol and its rival products, than the macho distinction of performance between "good" and bad driving.

We hate cars because we are sick of seeing our world around us torn apart, a world where we have no control over anything we do. We are sick of watching ourselves do the necessary. We could be participating in the enjoyable. There is a distinction between watching a spectacle of life and really truly living. Unfortunately those anarchists ( whoops, out of the closet now) who have adopted this distinction as part of their opinions have often obscured practical political activities that tend to confirm their theories.

Luckily though there are many car haters turning their hatred into successful, collective, playful transgressions of the law of the motor car. For instance, in February '96 alone, cyclists in 17 towns brought traffic to a standstill in the now monthly Critical M@ss demonstrations, thousands fought the construction of the Newbury Bypass while 5 other anti road campaigns across the country occupied territory against the Department of Transport, car showrooms were invaded by activists in Glasgow, roadbuilders offices occupied in Winchester, London & Southampton, 600 raving car haters reclaimed a major road in Brighton on St.Valentines day for 4 hours listening to live bands, dozens of drummers, boinging on a bouncy castle in the middle of the street while eating pink candyfloss and loudly and lavishly proclaiming 'Snog Not Smog!'. There is a growing movement raving and ranting against the car.


But if we affect to despise this system so much, as it presents itself as all a society could ever possibly be, if we hate everything that is part of it, if we are such nihilists as to despise any silly little single issue campaign and favour only an assault on all fronts, then why pick on the car? Is it that the car is a symbol? Well symbol it definitely is but it is also a physical reality. Its ceaseless traffic in traffic is what stops us enjoying life. And maybe even what stops us communicating with you. That's why we want to smash your windscreen; we want to break through to you and tell that there's a world out here. We want to reach out to you and prise your hands from the sweaty steering wheel and gently lift you out of the car. Before we pour petrol on the seat and set light to the ugly thing. By petrol was it born and by petrol shall it die. So don't say you've not been warned.

"Things all got too much for author Kudno Mojesic. He was arrested in the street outside his Belgrade home attacking cars with an axe, yelling 'Away with all cars, they are the devil's work!'"
SUNDAY MIRROR, LONDON: 11TH JANUARY 1976.
Reclaim the Streets

Some relevant links:
The Importance of the Car to the Modern Economy
The Ecological Effects of Roads
Oil and the Future
Away with all cars
Dead Trees EF!
c/o 6 Tilbury Place
Brighton
BN2 2GY
UK
support@eco-action.org (PGP key)

This is a dead trees ef! page.

Eco-action Homepage - get active!

Programa para el archivo

Revisar la literatura sobre ciclovías, comenzar a estudiarla. Archivar aquí los resultados de esa revisión y estudio.

Freedom from fear, por Mighk Wilson

Freedom from fear

Mighk Wilson

Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

–- protagonist Paul Atreides in the Frank Herbert novel Dune

Undoubtedly, one of the most common deterrents to bicycling is fear. Fear of motorists. Notice I said "motorists," not "cars" or "traffic." When people talk about bike safety, especially those who are afraid to bike on the roads, they aren’t much concerned about potholes or dogs or sand on the corner or their ability to control the bike. They fear the motorist they can’t see and who supposedly can’t see them. This fear is based on the belief that a significant number of motorists are likely to hit bicyclists while overtaking them. Does it happen? Yes. Is it common? Not at all.

Beliefs are survival tools our brains use when we don’t have sufficient direct sensory information to make a decision. Good beliefs can protect us from potential dangers. Bad beliefs mislead us into being fearless when we should be wary or fearing the wrong things. While I sit at my desk in my office I believe my bike is sitting in the bike locker where I locked it and left it, even though I have no evidence to support that belief. It’s not until I go out there, open the locker and look inside that I know my bike is actually there. I couldn’t function sanely if I spent the day believing my locker was being broken into. Conversely, if I believed no one would wish to steal my bike, I wouldn’t bother locking it and would again sit at my desk believing it was still there.

What kinds of events contribute to our beliefs about bicycle safety? First and most common is sensory information -- observation of the motorists and bicyclists around us. Such observations often convince people that bicycling is unsafe. It only takes a few incidents of carelessness or rudeness by motorists to convince some that cycling is a dangerous activity even though most interactions with motorists are non-threatening. We humans are easily startled when something big comes rushing up from behind us. Think -- predator! Even after 25 years of cycling an overtaking car still occasionally startles me.

Second are the lies that motorists tell when they have treated cyclists poorly. Catch up to a motorist after one has nearly sideswiped you and you’ll most likely hear one of the following lies: A) "I didn’t see you." B) "You belong on the sidewalk." C) "You’re supposed to ride all the way to the right."

Third are stories about crashes. The media does not report "20,000 people rode their bikes today and none of them were hit by motorists." They usually report that someone has been killed while cycling and make little or no effort to explain why the crash occurred.

The fourth way is through statistical data on bicyclist-versus-motorist crashes. Here again the information is skewed toward the negative. The statistical data people receive through the media is vague and misleading.

My purpose on these pages is to show you why proper cycling on roads is quite safe and can be accomplished by normal adults. I’ll be covering a few statistics (okay, a lot of statistics) my own experiences, the skills and practices necessary for safer cycling, and some reasoning about the motorist’s perspective.

The Crash Data

I collect a good deal of information about cycling crashes. It’s part of my job as a bike coordinator. Regrettably, what most people get to see are just raw numbers and media reports. (Some are even echoing these reports in their arguments to get cyclists removed from the roads.)

For example: in Orange, Seminole and Osceola Counties there were 644 bicyclists-versus-motorist crashes in 1994; 11 resulted in death. Scary thought, huh? But how many of those involved a cyclist driving on the right side of the roadway (not on the sidewalk) during daylight hours and obeying the signs, signals and rules of the road? Only 74, and of those not one was a fatality. Of those 11 deaths, 8 occurred at night, and 5 involved cyclists hit from behind. (How often do you see a cyclist out at night without lights?) The other 3 daytime deaths involved kids who failed to yield (ages 10, 15 and 16). These are the proportions of crash types you’ll see in most Florida cities.

Of those 74 crashes, 24 involved an overtaking motorist, and that’s the type of crash people fear most. That’s 24 daytime, non-fatal, motorist-overtaking crashes for an entire year for an area with more than 1.1 million licensed motorists (not including tourists). That means only one motorist out of 46,000 (0.002%) in our area in 1994 was so incompetent as to hit a bicyclist from behind in broad daylight. Only 13 resulted in significant injuries and only 4 in incapacitating injuries. Only 2 of the 24 motorists claimed they "did not see" the cyclist.

So what’s happening? A very small number of motorists are unsafely and unsuccessfully passing cyclists and the ensuing crashes are sideswipes that result in mostly minor injuries. Fortunately there is a way that you can reduce the tendency for motorists to pass unsafely. None of these overtaking crashes occurred on roads with wide curb lanes, bike lanes or paved shoulders. They happened on narrow lanes. And the law says that when the lane is narrow you are allowed to leave the right-most side and ride toward the middle.

"What of the other 50 crashes?" you ask. They resulted in 27 significant injuries; 4 incapacitating. They mostly involved motorists who failed to yield at intersections and driveways, and neither bike lanes, sidewalks nor paths offer protection from such crashes. Indeed, on sidewalks and sidewalk-style bikeways you will be more susceptible to such crashes, not less. On the roadway you’ll be more visible. The same defensive driving skills you use as a motorist will normally keep you out of such crashes.

And what of those scary media reports of cycling deaths? The old newspaper adage goes: "’Dog Bites Man?’… that’s not news. ‘Man Bites Dog,’ now that’s news." The commonplace goes unreported; the unusual gets the coverage. Furthermore, we like to have our beliefs reinforced and media producers share the belief that bicycling is dangerous. No one likes being told their beliefs are wrong.

If I owned a radio station I would broadcast a daily bicycle crash report. The most common report would go like this: "Twenty-thousand people rode bikes today. Only one was involved in a crash with an automobile. He was slightly injured while riding on the sidewalk facing traffic and was struck by a motorist exiting a driveway."

Individual Risk

What are the odds of one individual (like you or me) getting hit from behind by a careless or incompetent motorist? The experiences of a handful of other cyclists do not determine your personal risk of being hit by an overtaking motorist. What determines your risk are your behaviors and the behaviors of the passing motorists.

I’ll use my own experience here; I encourage you to work out your own numbers.

First let’s look at my old commute to work. For about 3 years I bike-commuted 6.5 miles each way to our old office in Winter Park about 3 times per week. (Today the office is only 1 mile away in downtown Orlando.) None of the route had bike lanes. About 2.5 miles had wide curb lanes, but the remainder had narrow lanes (11 feet or less) and about a mile of that had parallel parking. Not what most folks would call "bike-friendly." It took about 35 minutes, with about 5 minutes spent waiting at red lights. I would say a car would pass me on average every 15 seconds, 4 passes per minute. That works out to 720 passes per week; 108,000 passes over 3 years.

I’ve been cycling for over 25 years at about 5,000 miles per year. Probably 2,000 of the 5,000 were urban and suburban, and mostly here in the Orlando area. The vast majority of those miles have been on roads without bike lanes or paved shoulders, and few had wide curb lanes. At 15 mph that works out to about 3,300 hours of urban cycling. At 4 per minute (a very conservative estimate) that comes to about 792,000 passes. Out of over three-quarters of a million passing motorists, not one has hit me. (I haven’t experienced any type of motorist-versus-bicyclist collision in 25 years, unless you count the time I ran into the trunk of a parked car while adjusting my toe strap as a teen.) If 1 out of 10,000 motorists (one-hundredth of a percent) who passed me failed to see me, and 10 percent of those who didn’t see me didn’t avoid me I would have been hit 7 or 8 times in the past 25 years. Did I mention I also ride regularly in rain and darkness?

What about "luck?" Luck is a superstitious belief system some use when they don’t understand statistical odds. Remember, only 24 cyclists were hit from behind during daylight hours in our area in one year. If luck had anything to do with it, then there are thousands of "lucky" cyclists in our area. Millions of bicycle trips are made each year but only a handful result in injuries or death. Those who use the sidewalks seem to be less "lucky" since 198 of them were hit at driveways and cross-streets (eight times as many as those hit from behind).

I'm a normal person with normal skills. I make no claim of invulnerability. To claim invulnerability from the risk of passing cars is comparable to claiming it from lightning or tornadoes. While these forces are undeniably lethal, none are very likely to happen to me, or to you.

Training, Skills and Practices

Speaking of skills, another erroneous belief is that to ride safely in traffic one must be an "expert" or have "special skills and training." Strangely, people who believe special skills and training are necessary don’t bother to suggest what those skills or training might be. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know what they are.

Using myself as the example again, I ask, "What particular special skills have I mastered to consistently keep overtaking motorists from hitting me?" None that I know of. I’ve used a rear-view mirror attached to my helmet, but don’t look at it every second. Besides, I don’t think looking in a mirror is a special skill; motorists do it all the time. My mirror broke a while back and I got along fine for a few months until finally replacing i.

What about training? In elementary school in the 1960’s I got the usual "Officer Friendly" presentation on bike safety. His message? Always stop and look both ways before entering the road, ride on the right side of the road, stop at stop signs and red lights, and signal your turns. That was my sole bicycle safety training until I was into my early 20’s. My parents didn’t (and still don’t) ride any significant amount. (Dad was surprised to learn you’re required to ride on the right side of the road, not the left.) As a kid I rode an enormous amount of mileage compared to most. Every day during summer vacation I was out on the suburban streets and country backroads, traveling farther and farther each year. At age 14 I rode my first century, solo. I was doing self-supported, multi-day touring before I graduated high school. The bike continued to be my primary mode of transportation after I got my motor vehicle operator’s license. For about 10 years I rode entirely on roads with no more training than the police officer’s simple presentation. This did not occur in some sleepy small town, but in the bustling suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I did not see my first bike lane until I was 27. In my early 20’s I started reading Bicycling Magazine, and picked up some pointers there. I didn’t ride regularly with a club until 1988. I didn’t read John Forester’s tome Effective Cycling until seven years ago. So much for the argument that safe cycling requires elaborate training.

I will not deny that I am an "expert" cyclist today (guilty as charged!), but I wonder when it was that I graduated to that level. I suppose one could say I was an "expert" cyclist at age 14 since I rode that solo century and regularly rode in heavy traffic. But I somehow achieved that level with no more training than the "Officer Friendly" pitch.

What skills and practices do I use while cycling? Let’s break those skills and practices into two types, General Driving Skills and Practices and Cycling-Specific Skills and Practices. General driving skills and practices are those you use when driving any vehicle. Ask yourself if you are capable of all of these:

traveling on the right
stopping for stop signs and red lights
yielding when entering the street
scanning for and negotiating with overtaking traffic before moving left
scanning for threats from cross-streets, driveways and turning vehicles
keeping out of the right turn lane when going straight
turning left from the left or left turn lane

If you practice all of the above you will eliminate the vast majority of motorist-versus-cyclist conflicts and crashes.

Cycling-Specific Skills include balance and steering, braking, shifting, and scanning over your shoulder. Three emergency maneuvers are taught In the Effective Cycling curriculum and other bike courses: the "rock dodge," the "quick stop" and the "instant turn." In 25 years I’ve not used either of the last 2 except when teaching Effective Cycling courses. At bike rodeos we teach 10-year-olds how to do the "rock dodge" in a couple of minutes. If you’ve been cycling a while you probably do it instinctively. There were 2 crashes in 1994 that involved an overtaking motorist and a cyclist avoiding an obstacle, one of them at night and neither involving serious injury.

Obviously you’re not going to head out onto a busy road without having mastered balance, steering and basic braking. Many novice cyclists don’t understand shifting, but I don’t see any evidence that that leads to a significant number of crashes. That leaves scanning over your shoulder. Now it’s not the scanning that’s the skill, but scanning without making the bike swerve. We can teach this skill to 7-year-olds in a few minutes. Most readers of this article are already capable of it. In 1994 there were ten cases in which an adult cyclist supposedly veered left in front of an overtaking motorist. Four of them were riding in the dark or at dusk and one was intoxicated. It’s critical to understand that this skill is necessary whether one is in a bike lane, on a sidewalk, or on a road without any special accommodation for cyclists.

(I say supposedly because "He just veered out in front of me!" is almost as common as "I didn’t see him!" Experienced cyclist Duke Breitenbach was hit and injured in Lake County by a motorist who had just passed three other cyclists on a four-lane highway on a bright, sunny day. The driver said, "He just veered out in front of me!" and the Florida highway patrolman believed him. Duke told the patrolman he most certainly did not veer, but the officer treated the cyclist with a Ph.D. as though he was a juvenile delinquent.)

Now we come to cycling-specific practices. Taking the lane is the most important cycling-specific practice because the ones mentioned above won’t discourage motorists from passing you in an unsafe manner. If the lane you’re in is too narrow for a motorist to pass you safely and you keep all the way to the right, some motorists will try to pass you within the same lane. This is both dangerous and unpleasant. Dangerous because you will have no room to maneuver around a road hazard and the motorist may even sideswipe you. I guess I don’t have to explain "unpleasant."

Another very important practice is keeping at least three feet from the driver-side doors of cars parked on the roadway. This very similar to taking the lane. In big cities like New York and San Francisco "dooring" is a very common and serious crash.

Taking the lane is something I’ve only been doing since I read Effective Cycling about six years ago. I’ve noticed a few important things since then. First is that I have far fewer close calls with passing cars. My roadway position forces motorists to give me a wider gap. I’ve found it to be less stressful cycling this way. No, I do not experience more annoyed or aggressive motorist behavior. But when a motorist does get annoyed and passes aggressively I have much more room to maneuver. As for the threat of the inattentive overtaking motorist, all I can say is I’ve yet to hear the sound of squealing brakes coming from right behind me. Horns? Yes, but no more than before.

Behind the Eyes and Between the Ears of the Big, Bad Motorist

A while back I mentioned lightning and tornadoes. Reasonable people strive to understand the true nature of such forces so they can learn to avoid harm. In the same way, a cyclist must learn the true nature of motorists.

We can break motorists into four classes: competent ones who don’t want to hit us, incompetent ones who don’t want to hit us, intimidators who don’t want to hit us, and those who want to hit us.

If you bike in a vehicular manner, follow the rules and use lights at night, the competent type will not hit you. Why? Because you are both acting in a predictable manner and following traffic rules based on logic.

The intimidator will honk, scream, and even maneuver in such a way as to threaten you, but won’t hit you unless you escalate the conflict.

There is very little you can do to avoid being hit by the psychotic fourth type. Neither a wide curb lane, bike lane nor paved shoulder will stop them. But worrying about them is like worrying that ball lightning will come bouncing into your house and smack you in the head. Cycling only on paths separated from the roadway might work, but keep in mind that cycling on sidewalks increases your risk of being hit at a cross-street or driveway two- to ten-fold regardless of your level of experience. Stories of motorists who hit cyclists with intent to harm or kill fall into the "Man Bites Dog" category. In over 125,000 miles and 25 years of cycling I’ve had only one motorist attempt to hit me. He did so because I made him pass me twice on a narrow roadway. I recommend you not do that. Now we’re left with the incompetent motorist.

Even incompetent motorists care about self-preservation. The primary threat to a motorist is another big vehicle coming from the side or front, so that’s where his attention will be. On urban and suburban roads there are many driveways and cross-streets, so motorists are always on the lookout for what’s ahead of them. In order to be avoided you must be seen. The best way to be seen by a motorist is to put yourself where he’s normally looking – right in front of him. The one serious exception is the intoxicated driver. I avoid cycling after dark on major roads on Friday and Saturday nights. Of course intoxicated motorists put everyone at risk; motorists and pedestrians as well as cyclists.

Taking the lane forces motorists to move into the adjacent lane and gives you the space you deserve. I recently wrote an article about roadway positioning and one reader said he disagreed with my recommendation to take over a narrow lane. He said he always rides "right on the white line," is frequently passed too closely by motorists, has been run off the road a few times, and that when he gets a chance to confront them they inevitably say, "I didn’t see you!"

Both he and I have biked for many years. I’ve been taking the lane for more than five years. (Before that I my experiences were quite similar to his.) Why did those motorists "not see" him yet consistently see me? The answer is simple; they did see him. Of course they’re going to say they didn’t see him, they just startled or threatened him through rudeness or carelessness and probably believe he doesn’t belong on the roadway. The motorist will blame only one of two people, the cyclist or himself. The cyclist on the roadway – even the one riding on the white line – is in plain view of motorists. If motorists routinely missed seeing bicyclists riding straight ahead of them it would be the most common type of motorist-versus-cyclist crash, but it’s one of the least common. "I didn’t see you" really means, "I intentionally passed you in an unsafe manner but I don’t want to admit it." They might as well say, "I cannot be held responsible to avoid hitting you because you are virtually invisible."

Here’s a story to illustrate the silliness of the "I didn’t see you" line. My wife Carol and I were on our tandem at dusk in downtown Orlando. We were signaling a left turn and moving into the center of the lane. A motorist passed us on the left, crossing the double yellow line, again, as we were signaling a left turn. After the unsafe pass I decided to go straight instead of making our left and see if we could catch her. We caught up with her a few blocks later as she was exiting her SUV to enter a house and I asked for an explanation for her action. She said she hadn’t seen us. We were on a tandem with a trailer with a yellow flag and a flashing red taillight on a slow-speed, well-lit street and she crossed the centerline to avoid us... but she "didn’t see us." What were her response choices? A: "I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that" or B: "I didn’t do anything wrong; you did something wrong." But since she couldn’t identify anything we had done wrong she could only say, "I didn’t see you."

If so many motorists don’t see you, how do they avoid you? They are very likely to hit you if they don’t see you, even if you’re riding on the white line. If they do see you, why do they pass you in an unsafe manner? Because you let them or they are extremely rude or maybe a combination of both. If someone’s going to be rude to you, where do you want to be, up against the curb with nowhere to go or out in the lane where you have room to maneuver?

Unfortunately there is an important difference in behavior between urban/suburban roads and rural roads. Out on rural roads motorists often let themselves get distracted. This is especially true when the road is very straight and there are long distances between intersections. High-speed, fatal, motorist-overtaking crashes are the ones that draw the notice of the club cycling community and the media, since they usually happen to "one of our own" and to someone who does a lot of cycling. These deaths are relatively rare, but their emotional impact is far-reaching. Our only recourse to reduce these is to push for strengthened motorist training and accountability, for paved shoulders, and for the removal of dangerous motorists from the roads.

We all have our stories about aggressive motorists, but most result in just that – stories. Many of us have friends or acquaintances who have been hit or even killed (I’ve lost two). But then, those of us in bike clubs know a lot of cyclists. These deaths are always on high-speed rural highways. Florida has more than its share of long, straight, boring rural roads where motorists can nod off or distract themselves with radios, cell phones, cassette players and whatever else. Out there you have to make yourself as conspicuous as possible; a solid and brightly colored jersey is best.

The more bicyclists people see the more they will look for them and the more they will believe that bicycling is a reasonable means of travel.

National Risk Analysis Rates

There’s no such thing as absolute safety. Risk is a relative thing. In 1993, Exponent Corp. (then Failure Analysis Associates, Inc.) published fatality rates for various activities. Here is how some of the activities scored, in Fatalities per Million Hours of Activity:

Motorcycling 8.80
Life Overall 1.53
Automobile travel 0.47
Bicycling 0.26
School bus travel 0.22
Airline travel 0.15

Cyclist Ken Kifer validated Exponent’s rate using data from the Bicycle Institute of America on his Web site, Ken Kifer’s Bike Pages (see Sources).

That 0.26 rate applies to all bicycling fatalities. Here is some recent data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to further break them down. There were 117 cycling fatalities in Florida in 1999; 91 were adults (18 and over); 54 of those adults were riding at night.* Only 5 (4%) were sober adults riding during daylight hours on the roadway and obeying the rules of the road. Four percent of that 0.26 rate comes to 0.01. One should also keep in mind that only about 44% of motorist fatalities involve 2 or more vehicles (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), so we could drop the risk of being killed as a motor vehicle occupant by another motorist to 0.21. So proper daytime vehicular cycling for sober adults (even on those "dangerous" rural highways) is about 15 times less fatal than airline travel, which is widely considered to be one of the safest forms of transportation available, and 21 times less fatal than being an occupant in an automobile.

(*I am not saying that people should not ride at night, only that cyclists should make themselves conspicuous.)

Fatalities aren’t the only crashes we worry about, of course; what about injuries? In a study of trampoline safety, Exponent included comparisons of bicycling and automobile injuries (as Hospitalizations per Million Hours of Activity):

Football 12.4
Bicycling 7.5
Automobile 3.0
Trampoline 2.5
Swimming 1.9

Don’t let that 7.5 number mislead you though. Once again, the above includes all bicyclists and all types of crashes. We’re concerned here with just the motorist-versus-cyclist crashes. Professor William E. Moritz at the University of Washington surveyed experienced cyclists in 1996 on their activities and crashes. He found only 11% of their crashes involved motor vehicles. Experienced cyclists also experience one-fifth as many crashes per mile as "novice" cyclists. So the risk of being injured by a collision with a motorist is certainly much less than the 7.5 per million hours shown above.

How much less? We may not have enough data to calculate that. The rough cut estimate would be to take just the 11% that involve motorists from the 7.5 hospitalizations per million -- that drops us to 0.83. But we really need to know how many hours of on-road exposure cyclists experience, plus the number of injury-producing crashes with motor vehicles in which the motorist was at fault. (While it’s not appropriate to apply the data from fatalities to injuries, remember that only about 4% of Florida cycling fatalities involved a sober adult cyclist obeying the rules of the road and riding during daytime hours.) Moritz estimated that his survey respondents experienced crashes (of all types) on major roads without bicycle facilities at a rate of 66 per million miles (or one crash per 15,000 miles). Those same cyclists traveled only about 7,000 miles per crash on multi-use trails and about 700 miles per crash on sidewalks.

Don’t Forget the Good Stuff

I could spend many pages describing the benefits we get from cycling that more than balance out the small risk. Here’s one recent example. A 1999 study from Sweden on physical activity and health found, "Even after adjustment for other risk factors [and that includes crashes], including leisure time physical activity, those who did not cycle to work experienced a 39% higher mortality rate than those who did."

What Does All of This Say About Cyclists and Society?

Very young children will cover their eyes when playing "peek-a-boo" with their parents. They believe that because they can’t see their parents, their parents cannot see them.

Most of us believe what we want to believe. Those who want cyclists out of the way because they see them as a hindrance will certainly use ignorance, lies or sophistry (plausible but fallacious argument) to convince us that bicycling on roadways is dangerous. They use the false-danger argument because society tells them it’s wrong to say they’re superior to others. It’s socially acceptable to say bicycling is inherently dangerous, not that a fellow citizen is a nuisance when exercising a basic liberty. But the most effective way in which motorists convince cyclists that they don’t belong on the roads or that they will be in great danger is through intimidation and harassment. Such behavior reinforces the scare stories and bad statistics in the media. That is why I encourage cyclists to take legal action when motorists commit assaults. (Assault does not require physical contact, only threat.) Such incidents are rare, but ripple through the community as a wave of intimidation.

Being afraid of real risks and threats is healthy. But the belief that bicycling is dangerous is based on intimidation, scary stories and vague statistics. The bicycling community must attack the true threat to bicycling – the attitude that cyclists are intruders, second-class road users or sacrificial lambs. We cannot and will not change that attitude by saying, "Please give bicyclists a place to ride." Indeed, such pleas reinforce the belief that bicycling on roads is dangerous.

We change it by saying, "Bicyclists are human beings, citizens and vehicle drivers, and have the inalienable right to liberty. Travel on our shared public roads is an essential element of this liberty. Treat us with respect."

And by encouraging one another to claim our rightful piece of the road.

Sources:

"Is Cycling Dangerous?" From the Web site of Ken Kifer -- http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/health/risks.htm

Effective Cycling, John Forester, MIT Press

Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die, Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D., Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2000

Exponent Corp. Web site, http://www.fail.com/index.html

"All-Cause Mortality Associated With Physical Activity During Leisure Time, Work, Sports, and Cycling to Work," Lars Bo Andersen et al, American Medical Association, http://www.archinternmed.com

http://www.floridabicycle.org/freedomfromfear.html

Bicyclists, motorists and the language of marginalization, por Mighk Wilson

Racism, sexism and mode-ism

Some might be offended by the idea of comparing the hatred and violence directed at bicyclists with the hatred and violence directed at people due to race, culture or gender. Yet, I believe it is entirely appropriate.

In his book The Culture of Make Believe author Derrick Jensen shows how violence in our culture is tied to three factors. First, is the person significantly different from me; do I see him or her as less human, or less important, than myself? Second, does this person seem to have something I want, like resources (as the American colonists saw the native tribes) or labor* (as Europeans and colonists saw Africans), or do I see this person as a threat to the resources I hold (as the Nazis saw the Jews). Last, will my culture support, accept or choose to ignore my hatred or violence? If the answer to all three is yes, violence is all but inevitable in our culture.

One can be significantly different not only by being born to a certain race, culture or gender, but also by choosing to live in a different way. The problem is broader than racism or "mode-ism." It is a way of thinking that is pervasive in our culture; the belief that power and privilege deserve the highest regard and the lion’s share of the rewards.

To some in our culture, bicyclists are strange people who wear odd clothes and act childishly. Native Americans were described in those same terms by colonists. But what do we take, or seem to take, from motorists? It’s time, the ultimate abstract resource. We are perceived as being a "hindrance" to motorists. We supposedly steal their precious time. (Never mind that the vast majority of motorist delay is caused by motorists.) And where does our culture stand on hatred toward cyclists? I can’t say it’s supported, but it is often ignored and accepted as "natural."

African-Americans can’t change their skin (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Women can’t change their gender (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Most bicyclists, after all, choose to be bicyclists. But it wasn’t many years ago that a white person could be attacked or even killed for choosing to befriend an African- or Native-American.

The bulk of this essay will address the many injustices, and elements of those injustices, that bicyclists experience.

Bicyclists as Minorities

Jensen describes how Irish immigrants had to struggle in the U.S. during the 19th Century to rise from being "minorities," hated almost as much as African-Americans, to members of the ruling class. For the purposes of illustration and comparison, one could say there was a hierarchy of "Whites," Irish, and African-Americans in those days (though of course there were many other minority groups). Today we could draw a similar hierarchy of street users: motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Just as the Irish could take advantage of the fact of their Caucasian skin to help themselves overcome prejudice, bicyclists can take advantage of the fact that most states classify them as vehicle drivers (or the equivalent) to get along on our roads.

What happens when you’re in the position of the being that middle minority is you can get pushed or pulled in either direction. The Irish could have aligned themselves with the African-Americans since they were both terribly discriminated against and hated during those years, but they really weren’t given the choice. When it comes to putting food on the table and somebody else holds the key to the pantry, you do what you can to befriend the key holder.

Bicyclists are in a similar situation, but we have not collectively decided who we wish to ally with. This is because, for most people, bicycling is a discretionary activity. Many cyclists can choose to become motorists. The vehicular cycling proponents argue against special accommodation for cyclists such as paths and bike lanes, claiming that these facilities are like "bicyclist ghettoes," making us into pedestrians-on-wheels (POWs?) At the other end of the spectrum are bicyclists who wish to be completely separated from motorists at all times. Most of us fall somewhere in between. No wonder planners, engineers and elected officials inexperienced with cycling have such a difficult time figuring out how to "accommodate" bicyclists.

Much in the way whites have made erroneous assumptions (some well-intentioned) about racial and cultural minorities, non-cyclists have made erroneous assumptions about cyclists. These assumptions are evident in their language, and lurking in this language are hints of paternalism and ridicule. We’ve all grown up with this language, so to many of us – cyclists and pedestrians -- these assumptions are accepted as natural laws.

The primary belief, held by most non-cyclists and even many cyclists, is that bicycling with motor vehicle traffic is difficult and dangerous. It’s believed to be so difficult that it is beyond the abilities of the average person. Try this: if someone tells you that bicycling with traffic is difficult, ask him or her to explain why. Ask them to explain the knowledge and skills necessary for cycling with traffic that are beyond the abilities of the average person. Chances are good they will give you a blank stare, because they don’t know. Yet somehow they "know" it’s difficult. (The answers: knowledge – the same rules of the road as for motorists; skills – balance/steering, braking, scanning for and assessing speeds of approaching vehicles, hand signals, looking over your shoulder for other traffic without swerving.)

The danger part is also rather peculiar. The assumption is that operating your bicycle as a legal vehicle on the roadway is what’s dangerous. We all know that it is not the roadway that is dangerous, but time and again that is the statement made. "I won’t bike on that road; it’s too dangerous." Setting aside the matter of just how relatively risky a pursuit cycling in traffic is – after all, every human activity carries risk, including being a couch potato – the responsibility to reduce this danger is rarely placed in the hands of those who pose it. The road does not present the risk. A solo bicyclist on a road does not experience much risk (aside from steep mountain descents and other extreme situations). A bicyclist following the rules of the road in traffic does not pose a risk. The main thing that poses life-threatening risk is the human being operating the motor vehicle on that road.

What you are most likely to hear from a novice (or non) bicyclist is that it’s scary. Who or what is making it scary? The design of the road? Of course not. The bike itself? Of course not. It’s the speed and volume of the cars on the road and the behavior of the operators (and sometimes passengers) of those cars.

Manifest Destiny

"Traffic," in the language of bicyclist (or pedestrian) safety, takes on the characteristics of a force of nature. It’s as though a stream of motor vehicles was a herd of bison or a flash flood, and not conscious, individual adult humans with morals and decision-making ability. There’s no point in trying to control a wild herd or a flood, right?

Why this tendency to translate human responsibility into an uncontrollable force of nature? It should be obvious. They are the majority; they hold the power. It’s in their interest to portray traffic – in the context of the motorist/bicyclist/pedestrian hierarchy – as something natural that cannot and should not be "unreasonably" controlled. It’s quite reminiscent of the concept of Manifest Destiny.

We often describe criminal behavior as "sick." I believe this implies that such behavior is unnatural. After all, if such behaviors were natural, how could we in good conscience punish people for them?

Humans have been drinking alcoholic beverages and getting drunk for thousands of years. Animals have also been observed getting drunk on fermented fruit. So alcohol use is quite natural. Motor vehicle use has been prevalent for less than a hundred years. A high percentage – at least a third -- of pedestrian traffic fatalities and injuries involve intoxicated pedestrians. Many traffic engineers and law enforcement officers use this as an excuse to do nothing for pedestrians. Only if a motorist is himself intoxicated is he severely punished for killing a pedestrian. Dennis Costello, a regular contributor to the Pednet internet list wrote:

The thing that the anti-drunk-driving people fail to understand is that the problem is not the drinking, it is the car! In the past, there was much less drunk driving because most people in urban areas lived within walking distance of a bar. Excessive drinking only produces drunks, while drinking and driving kills people.

7,326 fatality crashes were caused by intoxicated motor vehicle drivers in the U.S. in the year 2000, killing 16,653. 1,594 intoxicated pedestrians and cyclists were killed the same year. 25,168 people were killed in auto crashes that didn’t involve drunk motorists; 5,429 of those were pedestrians and cyclists, and 3,835 of those were sober. So even though 50% more people are killed by sober motorists, and 40% more pedestrians and cyclists are sober than drunk, we focus on intoxication as the problem. If we’d totally eliminated alcohol use we still would have had over 25,168 driver and passenger deaths (over 3 per hour) and 3,369 pedestrian and cyclist deaths (over 9 per day) for the year.

If we’d totally eliminated motor vehicle use instead, we might have had a few dozen cases of drunken bicyclists killing pedestrians, and a few drunken bicyclists and pedestrians dying through their own incompetence. Drinking and walking, which has been done since man discovered alcohol, is characterized as irresponsible. Drinking while operating a motor vehicle is clearly much more dangerous to other people than drinking while bicycling, but the latter carries the same penalty as the former. Somehow drinking is the bigger problem than motor vehicle use. I can only surmise that people believe motor vehicle use is more natural and safe than drinking.

In June of 2002, Robert Noel, a lawyer whose dogs killed a woman in his San Francisco apartment building, was sentenced to the maximum four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. He was not even present when the dogs attacked. They were under the control of his wife, Marjorie Knoller, who was convicted of the same crime that July. What kept Ms. Knoller from being convicted of second-degree murder was the lack of evidence that she knew her actions would have resulted in the other woman’s death. In October of 1998, cyclist Ray Howland was struck and killed by a motorist who carelessly took a turn too wide and hit Ray as he stood on the paved shoulder waiting for his friends during the Mount Dora Bicycle Festival. The motorist, who saw the other cyclists approaching and knew that cyclists would be common on area roads that weekend (he was an area resident), was found guilty of careless driving and fined eighty dollars. Both the dog owner and the motorist had the responsibility to control things they knew had the potential to harm others. Both were being careless with those things. Comparing these two cases one might conclude that carelessness with a massive, powerful dog is a more serious crime than carelessness with an even more massive, even more powerful motor vehicle. Owning and operating a motor vehicle must be more "natural" than owning and walking a large, aggressive dog.

Much as 19th Century American leaders terrorized and killed Native American tribes, justified their actions through Manifest Destiny, and then blamed the tribes for contributing to their own downfalls, motorists terrorize cyclists and pedestrians (especially when we get in their way while obeying the written laws), justify encouragement of still more and faster motor vehicle use through the construction of enormous parking lots and wider, more frightening highways (which bicyclists and pedestrians help pay for), and them blame cyclists and walkers for acting – out of fear for their lives -- in ways contrary to the rules of the road. Just as it did not require a majority of Colonists to terrorized and slaughter the Native American tribes, only tens of thousands of troops, it only takes a minority of motorists to terrorize bicyclists and pedestrians and discourage them from using the public roads. If only one-in-a-hundred motorists are rude to bicyclists, it will not take long for a cyclist to experience harassment.

If there were any Colonists who objected to the slaughter of native tribes, they kept fairly quiet and certainly had no impact on policies. Or if they did promote a policy it was one of shoving tribes into reservations; soothing their conscience while freeing up prime land for agriculture and logging. The same can be said for motorists. Bike lanes and paths allow motorists to feel they’re being benevolent lords while at the same time getting cyclists out of the way so they can drive faster.

What’s more, there are many cyclists who believe in this segregation. Why? Because they’ve been won over by motorist propaganda that says cycling with traffic is dangerous and have been threatened one-too-many times. Consider this quote from a post to the Florida Bicycle Association list:

"Claim the Lane" annoys motorists and further discourages people from bicycle commuting as it fosters further fear. If I owned a bicycle shop, I would be very concerned about the negative images this form of bicycle advocacy portrays….I will only donate to those organizations (like the Rails to Trails Conservancy) that promote safe, sane, responsible bicycle advocacy and who listen to the needs of the public. They want bike trails, lanes, and other conveniences.

Evidently one of our primary purposes as cyclists is to avoid annoying motorists. I replied, in part:

How does a citizen obeying the law while traveling on a public road portray a negative image? I wonder why one's liberty and safety should take secondary status to the desires of some motorists to pass.

Don’t get me wrong. I like paths. They’re often very pleasant places to ride. But they simply do not and will not solve the huge, over-riding problem – that motorists threaten bicyclists on a regular basis. Neither will bike lanes or paved shoulders remove the hatred. My brother was hit by a beer can thrown from a passing car as we rode on a paved shoulder. Evidently the occupants did not think it prudent to confront us directly. It was easier to drive off at 55 MPH, like Klansman driving off into the night after a cross burning.

It’s also relevant to note that, like the Native American tribes, we were here first. Bicyclists were responsible for the first paved roads in America, and many inventions developed for bicycles were later incorporated into automobile design. Most European colonists would have died soon after arriving in North America if it hadn’t been for their help of native tribes. As soon as the colonists got a large enough population and learned how to take advantage of the environment, they quickly over-ran the native population. As soon as manufacturers learned how to build a reliable vehicle (but still far less reliable than a bicycle) the rich started buying them. The rich of course always have the best access to political power, so motorists – in spite of operating a vehicle that was clearly a danger to others – were quickly given precedence over pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians. As this transfer was being made, some questioned the wisdom of allowing such vehicles to be sold and used. Here is an excerpt from The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington:

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles ... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward changes in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

(The character George, referred to in the excerpt, was killed by a motorist at the end of the story. The Magnificent Ambersons was made into a movie, starring Joseph Cotton, in 1942.)

Eighty years later, the London organization "Take Back the Streets" echoes the Ambersons quote:

The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street. "Just remember: Look left, look right, look left again… No ball games… Don't talk to strangers… Keep out of the road." The idea is to keep everyone indoors. So, when you come to challenge the powers that be, inevitably you find yourself on the curbstone of indifference, wondering "should I play it safe and stay on the sidewalks, or should I go into the street?" And it is the ones who are taking the most risks that will ultimately effect the change in society.

The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of gasoline. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, "turnover." It doesn't matter who "drives" this system, for its movements are already pre-determined.

We can ride four-abreast on the reservation paths and the motorists won’t care; we’re out of their way. But ride four-abreast on the road and we become law-breakers and targets for harassment. If you leave the reservation you will be compelled to live within the terms of the colonists, but will still be harassed and ridiculed while you do so. Participate in a non-violent Critical Mass ride and you risk being beaten by law enforcement (this has happened and is documented) for the crime of delaying the important people in motor vehicles. Their time is more important than your time, your happiness, and your freedom to associate with your friends and neighbors while you ride.

Subspecies of Bicyclists and Where to "Put" Them

Earlier I said that cyclists have adopted (or been taught to accept) many "truths" about the nature of traffic and of bicycling with it. This is also true of bicycle planning, design, and education professionals. We speak in terms of "Type A, B & C Cyclists."

"A" cyclists are "advanced, proficient or professional" (does that mean you get paid to ride?) and can ride confidently in most traffic situations. "B" cyclists are novice adults who presumably have little more ability to ride with motor traffic than children. And "C" cyclists are children. "A" cyclists are sometimes characterized as "aggressive." We supposedly shouldn’t design for aggressive "A" cyclists because they are such a small percentage of the cycling population. When I protested to a local consultant that I prefer the term "assertive" he dismissed my argument as "semantics." Really? "Aggressive" implies that I behave in a way that threatens others; "assertive" that I peacefully assert my basic right to mobility. Being aggressive when on a 30 lb. vehicle surrounded by faster multi-ton vehicles does not sound like a sane course of action. For a planner, engineer or politician, calling someone "aggressive" gives them justification to ignore that person’s needs and rights.

Supposedly these three "types" of cyclists need different types of accommodation. Funny, we teach the basic skills and traffic principles mentioned earlier to 9-year-olds. All cyclists need only one type of accommodation: the accommodation of all motorists to be polite, sympathetic and cautious.

I’m repeatedly told – by law enforcement, other motorists and other cyclists – that this change in cultural attitude toward cyclists will never happen. Or that it will happen after we’ve built a system of separate bikeways. How do we expect motorists to learn to get along with cyclists if at every opportunity we strive to segregate the two modes? Separate-but-equal didn’t work in the 1950s with race. As the Supreme Court noted, separate-but-equal was really only separate. Some bike advocates believe that bike lanes give "legitimacy" to cyclists. I don’t know about you, but I respect Native Americans as a group because they have a rich culture that we could all learn from, not because they live in reservations. And the many people who still hate Native Americans do so with the same intensity as those who did 150 years ago, in spite of this segregation into reservations. Why should motorists who hate bicyclists change their minds because the government gives bicyclists a special place to ride?

If I’ve got you riled up so far, hang on…

Duh Laws

There are two laws that govern the relationship between cyclists and motorists. We all know of both of them, though only the written one is consciously recognized. The written law was created by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws & Ordinances and adopted by most states, including Florida. It’s called the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC). Many states have made modifications to this uniform code over the years, but it’s mostly the same essential concept. This law is enforced by officers of the states, counties and municipalities. The other is the unwritten law enforced by many motorists as well as by some officers.

The written law was developed primarily by people – traffic engineers -- who wanted bicyclists out of the way. John Forester documented this very thoroughly in Effective Cycling. Florida is generally credited as having one of the more bicyclist-friendly statutes in the country. Our law (FS 316.2065) defines bicycles as vehicles and says we have all the same rights as the drivers of other vehicles…"oh, aside from all these exceptions here in paragraphs five and six." The law, based on the UVC, uses vague language in explaining how far right one must ride, so vague that it takes five minutes to explain to someone what "as far right as practicable" means. Then it goes on to list some circumstances in which a cyclist may leave the right side. It’s quite a paternalistic law when you think about it. I have a simpler version everyone could understand without legal translation:

Bicycles are vehicles. Every person propelling a vehicle by human power has all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any other vehicle under this chapter, except as to provisions of this chapter which by their nature can have no application. A bicyclist shall move as close as is safe and practical to the right edge of the roadway to facilitate the passing of overtaking vehicles when the bicyclist considers it safe to do so.

If the law were written in such a simple manner, Kimberly Cooper and her attorney would not be spending hundreds of dollars in legal fees to appeal convictions for citations written for taking the lane on a St. Petersburg street. The lanes in question are 10 to 11 feet wide, clearly too narrow to be shared by motorists and cyclists. Yet the St. Petersburg Police Department and the Pinellas County court believe otherwise. The police never made the case that the lane was wide enough to share safely. (The burden of proof is supposed to be on the prosecution, right?) Who is better qualified to determine when it is safe for a motorist to pass a bicyclist: the motorist, a law enforcement officer, or the bicyclist? The answer is "the bicyclist" for two reasons. First is that the bicyclist is the more vulnerable roadway user; vulnerable not only to the impact with a motor vehicle, but also to potholes and other dangerous things on the pavement. Second is that the cyclist has more experience with being passed than the motorist (or officer) has with passing. In an average hour of cycling I’ll probably be passed by over 100 cars, while during the average hour of auto driving I might pass at most one or two cyclists.

The rationale for the written law as it stands is that interactions on public roads occur between classes of vehicles and pedestrians, not between individual persons. Faster-moving travelers are presumed to be more important than slower-moving travelers. And of course bicyclists are also assumed to be "out for recreation" (not contributing to the economy). For the sake of "efficiency" it "makes sense" to limit bicyclists (a minority) in their use of the roadway so that motorists (the majority) are allowed to travel faster. Remember your grade-school civics lessons: matters of basic liberties are not decided by majority rule. I don’t know about you, but I interact with other road users only one or two at a time. All the bicyclists using the roads on a day do not interact with all motorists who use them on that day. Each cyclist interacts with a dozen or so motorists during each mile of her trip, and each motorist (in the Orlando area anyway) interacts with at most two bicyclists during an hour.

Like Native Americans who can no longer hunt on land that their ancestors hunted for generations because they were evicted from it by the United States government in the 1800s, bicyclists lost the ability to freely use an entire lane during the 20th Century. Just as Native Americans were described as children, so were bicyclists. It was for their own good, right?

The "two-abreast" part of the law is also discriminatory. (Imagine implementing it in China.) But there’s a logical loophole in it that allows two-abreast cycling, or even more than two-abreast cycling, in most circumstances. The law says we are not required to keep as far right as practicable if the lane is of substandard width. (By the way, FDOT has clarified for the record that it considers lanes less than 14 feet in width to be substandard for the purpose of sharing between motorists and cyclists.) It doesn’t say, "You can ride four feet from the curb instead of two feet when it’s substandard." So you can ride two feet from the left side of the lane if you wish. We all know it is illegal for a motorist to pass on the right in this circumstance, so tell me, what does it matter from a practical perspective if there are one, two, or even three other cyclists to the right of the first cyclist? The motorist’s ability to pass is unaffected. On most of the rural roads club cyclists and racers use the lanes are only 10 to 12 feet wide, fitting the criteria for a substandard width lane. So any individual cyclist has the right to use any part of the lane. Let’s say a pack of 50 cyclists is traveling such a road. Which is safer: for the cyclists to all hug the white line, single file in a paceline that would stretch at least 400 feet, which would take a motorist about 10 seconds to pass (risking a sideswipe all the while because he’ll try to squeeze by even when there are oncoming vehicles); or for the pack to ride four-abreast, taking up only 100 feet of length and requiring only about 3 seconds to pass? And please don’t tell me we shouldn’t travel in large packs:

"Congress shall make no law … abridging… the right of the people peaceably to assemble."

Hundreds of employers can choose to open and close their businesses at the same time, encouraging thousands of motorists to individually take to the roads during the same period, causing widespread congestion, deaths, and billions of dollars in injuries and property damage, and the community responds by throwing millions and billions more at the "problem" to enable even more businesses and motorists to continue an insane system. But if thousands of cyclists think it would be fun and would make a neat political statement about the way our public streets are used, and to gather one Friday evening per month and ride in a large, non-violent mass for a couple hours, adding minor delay to the street system – it’s time to call out the cops in riot gear and bust some heads.

Then there’s the unwritten law. It’s based on ridicule, an attitude of superiority, ignorance or disparagement of the written law, and the ability to flee the consequences of antisocial behavior. If it were written it would say:

Stay out of our way or we will scare the crap out of you, hit you, or maybe even kill you.

This unwritten law is the one that has the greatest impact on bicyclist behavior. As I said before, this law does not have to be enforced by many officers or self-appointed deputies to be effective. My wife was a victim of this vigilante justice system. A motorist threatened her, hit her with a lit cigarette that burned her arm, tried to get her to run into the rear of his vehicle by slamming his brakes, and finally got out of his vehicle, stepped in front of her, grabbed her handlebars, stopped her and threatened her some more. Fortunately an off-duty sheriff’s deputy saw the incident and gave the motorist a stern talking-to. He didn’t call the city police department to come pick this guy up for assault, though (it happened in the city and was out of his jurisdiction). Why not? He told my wife that, while he understood that cyclists have the right to use the roadway, such treatment was to be expected.

Imagine if she had been a black woman walking down the sidewalk and assaulted by a white man walking the same sidewalk. Is such treatment to be expected?

Florida Bicycle Association board member Duke Breitenbach was struck from behind by a motorist a few years ago in Lake County. The driver had already passed three other cyclists not far behind him. The motorist claimed Duke had swerved in front of him (of course) even though there was no reason for Duke to have done so; no crossroad, no driveway, no debris. It was a four-lane road; the motorist had an entire second lane in which to pass. The Florida Highway Patrol officer who worked the crash visited Duke in the hospital and told him he believed the motorist’s story, not that of the four cyclists. Furthermore, he told Duke he felt that bicyclists were a nuisance.

Let’s make a fictional comparison to Duke’s story with a different cast of characters. A white man trips a black man as he’s walking out the door of a store because the black man had the nerve to buy the last six-pack of Budweiser at the only open store in town. The black man falls hard (his hands are full) and breaks his arm. The white guy tells the police it was an accident, while three friends of the black man saw it happen and describe it as intentional. The cop visits the black man in the hospital and says he won’t arrest the white man because he believes his story. "Why don’t you just leave town, boy."

A Florida Highway Patrol officer once told me, when I suggested that the pedestrian’s right-of-way should be respected and enforced at marked and unmarked crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as spelled out in Florida law), that that must not be done because, "I’m not going to stop all the traffic on SR 436 because some guy wants to cross the street to get to the Wendy’s for a Frosty."

Most traffic engineers believe pedestrians should walk hundreds of yards (along sidewalks barren of trees, in the sweltering Florida summer) out of their way to cross at signalized intersections. Why? Because in order for motorists to realistically be able to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as the law already requires), they must travel at 25 to 30 MPH. The Motorist’s Manifest Destiny belief says this is unnatural.

Let’s also remember that the engineer’s rationale that the majority should be given priority gets tossed out the window when bicyclists become the majority. This is true not only on rural roads, but on shared use paths and in cities where bicyclists far outnumber motorists, such as in China.

In the early 1990s, then Florida DOT pedestrian and bicycle coordinator Dan Burden was invited by the Chinese government to go there and help address some of the problems they were experiencing with the huge numbers of bicyclists in their larger cities. Thinking their purpose was to find better ways of accommodating cyclists, Dan went eagerly. When he arrived he learned that the "bicycle problem" was that there were too many of them and that they were impeding the handful of motorists. Dan said, "Sorry, I can’t help you." (Meaning "I won’t help you.") Of course this would not happen in the U.S.; that many cyclists would exhibit a clear block of voting power.

Or would it? Take a trip on the Pinellas or West Orange Trails and you’ll see that the paths, which can carry 1,000 to 5,000 vehicles (bicycles) per day, are made to stop for cross streets that carry only a few hundred vehicles per day, and even for driveways. This is in clear violation of the engineering community’s own manual on traffic control. The message is clear: people in cars are more important than people on bicycles, even when they are the minority.

Act Up

We are ignored and despised and threatened and injured and sometimes even killed because we are "different," because we are believed to "take resources" from motorists, because we are believed to be doing something childish, or worse, inherently dangerous and therefore foolish, because those who despised and threaten us are not held accountable, and because carelessness behind the wheel of a motor vehicle that results in the death of another is not considered to be a serious crime because it is "inevitable."

We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists are "different." We can do this by celebrating bicyclists as individuals, telling our stories, and showing how we contribute to our communities.

We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists take time and resources from motorists. We can do this by showing that we contribute more than we "take" -- through our stories.

We need to destroy the belief that bicycling among motorists is inherently dangerous. We can do this by cycling conspicuously among motorists.

We need to destroy the belief that despising, harassing, or threatening bicyclists is acceptable. We can do this by shaming and ridiculing those who express such thoughts. Tell them, loudly and in public, "You should be ashamed of yourself." Then tell them why.

We need to destroy the belief that deaths and injuries of cyclists due to motorist carelessness are inevitable. We can do this by characterizing such carelessness as the equivalent of being careless with a gun, careless with poison, careless with dynamite, or careless with a large, vicious dog.

We have made some progress with cycling in this country over the past ten years. Money is flowing toward bicycle programs and accommodation. Our public health agencies are beginning to recognize cycling more as a solution to our sedentary lifestyles than as a safety problem. But we also have fewer children cycling to school, we still hear stories of motorists who intentionally injure and kill cyclists, and we still are harassed by motorists on a regular basis. Even though our interest is in an activity that many Americans enjoy and that also imparts many benefits to those who choose not to bike, we still are treated by many policy makers as a "special interest group." Those of us who drive bicycles know it is special, in a very good way.

Fuente: http://www.bicyclinglife.com/EffectiveAdvocacy/Marginalization.htm