On Jackie Green and his current publicity

There is an article in the local paper regarding Jackie Green and his rejection of a plea deal over a couple of citations he was issued a month or so ago. Discussion around this article raises some questions (along with the ire of several who would ban bicycle use on the roadways), and has me pondering the likely outcomes.

One of those citations was for disregarding a traffic control device, the other was for obstructing traffic.

Reading Jackie's own report of the incident as he posted in a couple of Facebook groups, he admits to following his usual practice of "stop, and if there is no crossing traffic to be affected, proceed when deemed safe to do so." The "obstructing traffic" charge stems from that he was apparently in the left travel lane rather than the right travel lane (there are two travel lanes and a bike lane on that bit of road).

The local paper has an article about the case (new window), saying that Jackie has rejected a plea offer.

In that article, Matt Glowicki offers these two statements:

Jackie Green has contended since he was cited in November that cyclists don't legally need to use bike lanes and don't need to stop and wait at stoplights, as the practice could potentially be dangerous.

Bikes are expected to follow traffic laws, including those involving stoplights and stop signs, Louisville Metro Police spokesman Dwight Mitchell previously told The Courier-Journal. He also said Louisville cyclists generally must use bike lanes when they are present unless they need to be in another lane to turn.

I have talked with Jackie numerous times over the years, and his usual practice I mention above (stop, proceed when clear) is quite different than the characterization implied by "(cyclists) ...don't need to stop and wait at stoplights," as reported by Glowicki. I cannot say that I've ever heard Jackie express that the latter is okay. Jackie has, however, claimed that the practice of _waiting_ at stop lights is potentially dangerous, based on cyclists having been hit while waiting at lights (either from behind, or by other road users turning incorrectly). Jackie usually brings up the lack of structure around a cyclist that would protect against physical harm in such situations, and that such lack of protection meets the standard necessary under the "by their very nature can have no application" clause in the Louisville Metro ordinance (cited below with **). Several people I know have wondered how a judge would view his claim, and perhaps this citation will reach that point.

I'm not a big proponent of having different legal interpretations of core rules of movement for different types of vehicles, as such tends to be confusing and creates antipathy over perceived preferential treatment. I recognize that traffic light sensors are often poorly tuned so that they don't recognize a cyclist's presence, and continue to push for correcting that problem rather than having cyclists in the position of having departure from an intersection second-guessed. The light in question may not even be sensor-controlled, but may be part of a set of signals that are coordinated to enable smoother traffic flow. Whether the light is synchronized to others or sensor-controlled, however, is all but immaterial in this case; I'm not a fan of the practice represented by the "Idaho Stop." It's hard for me to go to bat for Jackie on this one.

The "obstructing traffic" issue is a different issue for me. Jackie has said that he often uses the left of the two travel lanes along that stretch of street (one he uses frequently), as the social harassment is less than if he uses the right travel lane. His stance is that the bike lane is not feasible the majority of the time, as it frequently has glass and/or other debris in it, and is what many refer to as a "door zone bike lane," situated so that a cyclist using the lane risks contact with a suddenly-opened car door. The bike lane on the street in question is almost entirely within the "door zone," with the remainder of the lane in the "startle zone," meaning that a suddenly-opened door would startle a cyclist into swerving, with potentially catastrophic results. It is far safer for a cyclist to use the regular travel lane, rather than have to do the all but impossible extra work of checking every single car for occupants before passing that car, while also maintaining awareness of traffic conditions that preclude swerving to avoid a car door and maintaining awareness of surface conditions (glass, potholes, other debris) that could cause a crash. It might be possible at walking speed, but at ten miles an hour or more? No.

Per Kentucky Revised Statute 189.287, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is charged with promulgation of regulations governing bicycle use. The regulation is 601 KAR 14:020. Section 7, sub-section b of that regulation addresses bicycle-only lanes and their use. Relevant to this discussion, note item 5:

"If a highway lane is marked for the exclusive use of bicycles, the operator of a bicycle shall use the lane unless:
1. Traveling at the legal speed;
2. Preparing for or executing a left turn;
3. Passing a slower moving vehicle;
4. Avoiding a hazard;
5. Avoiding the door zone of a parked vehicle; or
6. Approaching a driveway or intersection where vehicle (drivers) are permitted to turn right from a lane to the left of the bicycle lane."

As a side note, I will note that the expression "at the legal speed" is sometimes used to mean "at the speed limit" by people who are ignorant of the rules of movement and of traffic law based on those rules. The implication is "if you can't keep up, stay out of the way." Since the street in question is a surface street and not a limited access freeway, "the legal speed" can be any number between zero and the posted speed limit, given that drivers are compelled to stop for traffic signals, slow to avoid hitting other road users that have stopped to parallel park, or figure out which house is the one they are planning to visit, and so on. Movement that is normal for a particular vehicle cannot be considered "obstructing traffic," as the vehicle operator is part of traffic.

Many people assume there to be some minimum legal speed on surface streets, since there is an enforceable minimum speed on some limited-access roads (although rarely posted any more--I remember seeing signs indicating "minimum speed: 40" on some roads with speed limits of 55). Indeed, the operator of a motor vehicle may be charged with obstructing traffic under KRS 189.390 (7), which reads:

"A person shall not drive a motor vehicle at a speed that will impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with law."

Note the use of "motor vehicle" in that statute. In KRS 189.010, section 19 (b), "Motor vehicle" is defined as a vehicle with specific exceptions. One of those exceptions applied directly to this discussion: line (8), which reads: "Vehicles propelled by muscular power." Bicyclists are thus exempt from KRS 189.390 (7), and this is certainly a valid application of the last phrase in the Louisville ordinance cited below.

I haven't discussed the citations at length with Jackie, but have had some message exchanges that are consistent with what he has said in open forums online. I happen to like Jackie, and I think he brings some important discussion to the metaphorical table, even if I disagree sharply with some of his views on traffic rules and roles. I don't know that he or his legal team would call me to function as a witness on his behalf, should the citations go to trial, or just how I would respond. I would be more likely to defend him on the "obstructing traffic" issue than on the traffic light issue, as the reader will surmise given my comments above. That ambiguity of defense would likely give him reason to not call me.


**Louisville-Jefferson County Metro ordinances, Title VII, Chapter 70, section 3, paragraph (C) reads: "Every person riding a bicycle or an animal on any roadway, and every person driving any animal on any roadway, and every person driving any animal-drawn vehicle shall be subject to the provisions of this traffic code applicable to the driver of any vehicle, except those provisions of this traffic code which by their very nature can have no application" 

Ironman cometh

About the time of last year's Ironman (tm) event, the announcement was made that this year's event would be held in October. I don't remember all the reasons given, nor are those reasons relevant to much of what I do (since I'm not a triathlete). I suspect that there were reasons other than the publicly stated ones, as is sometimes the case.

Several potential reasons involved hot weather. Late August, the historical time for the Ironman(tm) Louisville event, is bloody hot. October is relatively cool. Athletes don't have so many heat-related problems in cooler weather (thank you, Captain Obvious).

However, it's now scheduled for the same month as the Kona championship event, which means that there will be fewer professional athletes here, among other things not immediately apparent to a non-triathlete like myself.

For the last five or six years, I've done a stint in my kayak while the athletes were swimming. I have found this to be a wonderful time to be on the river--the before dawn quiet is great to experience while paddling into position, and helping the swimmers stay on course feels good to me.

This will be the fourth year for me to get to the river by bicycle. In April or May of 2012, I acquired a Bikes at Work trailer, and found I could haul my kayak on it easily. This made for a great way to get home after my on-water duties had completed--River Road is tough to navigate during the bike portion of the event, but I can use the Waterfront Park path to reach the Butchertown Greenway, which gets me to Story Avenue just east of its intersection with Frankfort Avenue, from which point the homeward trip is pretty easy.

Over the five or six years I've been kayaking during the swim portion of the Ironman (tm) event, I've eyed some of the other boats people were using, and been envious. My boat is a Mainstream Inspiration found at Sam's Club in 2000 or 2001, before I quit patronizing the Walton family businesses.

It's a decent cheap boat--great for recreational use on flat water and open moving water. It's far from fast. It's wide. The coaming feels tall. The underside of the boat has channels molded which probably make it track better, but make it a challenge to pivot-turn.

One of the boat models I've been eyeing covetously is the Current Designs Kestrel 140. It has more dry storage room (two holes--one at each end of the boat), which help make the boat more buoyant when empty. It's narrower, with a smoother hull profile, so moves faster at similar output compared to my pig of a blue boat. The smoother hull also means that, despite being three feet longer, it turns better in close quarters AND can be sculled to one side more readily. It also has a rudder, which makes for easier straight tracking in wind (or if one has an uneven paddling style). It's lighter than my Mainstream Inspiration, too.

A bit over a week ago, I passed the Quest Outdoors "Trail's End Outlet" during a sale they were having. They had boats arrayed in the front parking lot, and one of the boats they had was a Kestrel 140. It was a demo boat, and was marked at a price within the range I was willing to pay.

So, yeah, I brought it home. Of course, I had to go to Quest Outdoors again a couple days later, to get a decent paddle for my new boat, and a spray skirt (in case the weather is cool enough on race day, coming up less than two weeks away).

Frequent readers know that I usually ride a bicycle instead of using a car. My stop at Quest was on my way home from work on a Friday, and I was on my Big Dummy.

You already know where this is going. Yes, I hauled the boat home by bicycle.

Of course, it was only AFTER I got home that I learned there is an elastic gizmo that keeps the rudder in its stowed position for transport.

The balance with the boat aboard was not bad at all. There was a slight lateral wiggle, but not so bad that I couldn't signal turns. I had fun seeing the looks on other road users' faces. There was some little bit of buzz at the store when the sales staff learned I planned to haul it home by bike, and a couple of customers were surprised to see me load it as if I had done so numerous times before.

I got stuff so that I could haul the boat by car, too. The easiest put-in place to reach by bike is the Rowing Club dock, at the Yellow Parking Lot for Waterfront Park. However, the Ohio River is hosting an algae bloom these days, and most people are avoiding paddling on it or within a mile or so of it on the tributaries (like Beargrass Creek or Harrod's Creek), and I wanted to spend some time in the boat on flat water before Ironman (tm), so that I could learn any big differences between this boat and my old boat.

I used the car to haul the boat to Long Run Park last week, and was quite pleased with the new boat from the first few paddle strokes. It really is faster, smoother, and better-handling. Yes, it's a bit easier to tip than the old wide pig, but the edges of its roll are easier to manage. I suspect that I will be able to learn to roll this boat at some point. I haven't needed that skill so far, but it seems a useful thing to be able to do. The old boat is so wide and tall, however, that I didn't think it would roll well. There is a kayak group that teaches rolls in winter, so I'll see about that this time around.

Cycling Savvy classes are scheduled!

With this post, I am ending what has probably been the second-longest period of not making blog posts.

The longest period ended when I started typing this blog five or six years ago.

At times I wonder whether to close this blog. My original purpose was unclear to me even at the time, but this blog quickly became a way of holding myself accountable for bicycling more and leaving the car home more. Many of my topics have been closely related to my cycling experiences and those of others who have influenced my thinking. Some have been reactions to the actions of others who would alter my cycling experience for better or worse. A few have been on other things, like the passing of my long-time friend Aloysius Ebenezer Qat, Esq, six years ago.

Much of my social commentary has taken place on that book of faces, as the thoughts are more ephemeral and of narrower focus (and value) than what would justify a blog post.

In any case:

I have been working a bit to get the Cycling Savvy Louisville classes for 2015 on the schedule, and can announce them to the general public now. The May and June classes are on the schedule!!

I am deeply grateful to the fine people at Spalding University (having been a student there for three semesters in the early 1980s, I keep wanting to call it Spalding College), who have been more than helpful in their dealings with me. They are providing state-of-the-art classroom space for our Truth and Techniques sessions and lovely flat parking lots for our Train Your Bike sessions. They are even welcoming our students to eat at their student center between the Train Your Bike and Tour of Louisville sessions!

On a more personal note: People who know me well know that my grandmother passed away on January 11th of this year. She was 97 years old. A few days before she passed, she looked at me and said, "We've been friends for a long, long time!" I think there was some dementia--enough that I've not been sure she really knew who I was the last few times I visited her--but she knew I was someone important to her. She spent her last week in a hospice facility a couple miles from her home. I was sad that she couldn't experience her home one last time--she had been in a convalescent care facility for six or seven weeks following a fall from which she never truly recovered--but it wasn't to be.

I have been honored to have been her favorite grandson. At times, I suspect I was also the least favorite grandson. I didn't have any competition for either title, as the siblings and cousin on that side of my family tree are women. Still...

Cycletracks? No, thank you. I want safer roads.

I've not seen much traffic on local blogs regarding the Lexington Road Corridor proposals (http://louisvilleky.gov/government/advanced-planning/lexington-road-corridor-transportation-plan), although there has been some (notably Broken Sidewalk's bereft-of-critical thinking post cheering for the cycletrack option a bad idea).

In short, the proposal is to do a road diet on the stretch of Lexington Road between Grinstead Drive and Baxter Avenue.

Good idea, so far, in that road diets in general reduce motorist-vs-motorist crash frequency. We've seen drops in crash frequency in the two road diet installations for which data are available, and expect to in the other more recent installation.

However, there remains the question of what to do with the "extra pavement" left when changing from two lanes each direction to one lane each direction plus either a two-way left turn lane or buffer between the opposing-direction lanes. The length of the project area (~1.7 miles), coupled with the result of one travel lane and no good sight lines for passing (especially along Cave Hill Cemetery) all but forces the city to consider bike lanes to the outside of the general travel lanes, as it's hard to imagine that motorists would tolerate being limited to bicycle speeds for that distance.

So, despite my well-known antipathy regarding painted bike lanes (90% of which give the rest a bad name), I'm sort-of okay with edge-of-pavement painted bike lanes in this case.

Sadly, though, there is another proposal on the table, and this one is very problematic. It's called a cycletrack, and as the illustration at the top of the Broken Sidewalk blog shows, it's a two-way bike lane to one side of the rest of the road.

When I was actively riding club rides, the most common routes for the Sunday afternoon ride and many of the Tuesday evening rides involved this very stretch of Lexington Road. Let's face it, many who enjoy those rides treat them as social opportunities, if not informal races, which results in fairly large groups of cyclists occupying an entire travel lane (all eleven feet of it). Imagine, if you will, such groups confined to a five-foot-wide lane (by law, in fact), with opposing traffic to each side. There is NO room to pass other cyclists without likelihood of head-on collision with either another cyclist or a motorist.

Those in favor of the "cycletrack" option would have you believe that, instead of a five-foot-wide bike lane to the outside of the primary travel lane, you would have a ten-foot-wide bike facility (never mind that it's a two-way street that is only two and a half times the operating width of a cyclist). Cycletrack proponents barely acknowledge the increased crossing-type hazards that such facilities create at intersections, and if pushed to recognize them, dismiss the dangers by saying that additional phases of a traffic light cycle can be added (reducing through-put for motorists who are already anxious about perceived loss of service related to the road diet), or signage and green paint (with magical properties) can be put in place to alert people of the additional hazards created (how many such fixes--and fixes of problems caused by successive fixes---does it take to satisfy Rube Goldberg?). These "fixes" do one thing well: Add complexity that leads to poor compliance and poor safety ratings. That these types of "fixes" have allegedly worked in other cities is more a reflection of a lack of tracking of close calls and lack of understanding of crash causes than of the efficacy of the fixes. Happily, cycling is pretty safe even when done wrong.




Most of the arguments I've heard in favor of cycletracks have focused on "how potential cyclists would feel safer using them than the regular travel lane." There is a conflation at work here: "Feeling safer" is more accurately said as "it's quieter for me." It isn't safer, as has been found by countless cyclists who have tens of thousands of miles of crash-free bicycle driving without such facilities have documented. And what of those potential cyclists? How many of them would simply find other excuses for not using bicycles once the cycletrack has been installed? It reminds me of a game of "Whack-a-mole." The whole "potential cyclists" and "many bicycle users feel better in these" bit comes from a taxonomy devised by Roger Geller in Oregon. Geller's model tells us that there are four types of transportation cyclists (strong and fearless, enthused and confident, interested but concerned, and no-way, no-how!).

Let's look at that taxonomy for a moment: First, how is a person who says "No way, no how!" a transportation cyclist? The people in that group wouldn't ride a bike for transportation on a bet! Second, at the other end of Geller's spectrum, there are two groups that he essentially dismisses as irrelevant--the two groups that have some subject matter expertise when it comes to cycling as a transportation option.

Geller would likely put me in the "strong and fearless" group, based on how I answer the questions in his survey.

I resent that pigeonholing, as I consider myself risk-averse. I am not interested in being hit and am hardly a daredevil. I have instead looked at how crashes happen, where they happen, and why, and have used that knowledge to inform my own cycling style so as to enhance my demonstrable safety rather than do "what feels like it might possibly keep me out of the way."

I urge all who enjoy cycling in our city, and especially on Lexington Road, to go to the site I've linked above and learn more. I suspect you will find that, if you consider your own safety of any importance, you will dislike the cycletrack option being considered. Please make that position known to the people who are making these proposals.