January is already over, and it’s time for another First Friday ride!  As always, we roll out from Loch Haven Park at 6:00 p.m. for a casual, family-friendly, law-abiding, hour-long ride around Orlando.

All bikes and all bicyclists are welcome!  Front and rear lights are required; helmets are required for kids under 16, and are a good idea for kids 16 and up.

Thanks to Greg Bailey for setting up a CaringBridge site for Nick Vollman. Greg posted a link in the comments to our post calling for prayers.

You can visit that site for updates on Nick’s recovery and send messages of love and support to Nick and his family in the guestbook.

Also, David’s World Cycle is asking for cards, signs, posters and messages of support to post on the wall in Nick’s room at ORMC. From their FaceBook page:

Here is a picture of Nick Vollman’s room in ICU. It is so important that we show him all of our support with our messages of encouragement and hope.
Help us to plaster his room with cards and pictures and messages to let him know that when he opens his eyes that he is loved and prayed for. Please forward all of your well wishes to the College Park Store address at 2517 Edgewater Dr. Orlando, FL 32804. Attention Nick Vollman.
Thanks so much for all the prayers!

We are sending out a huge prayer request for our very own Nick Vollman from the College Park store. Please please pray for Nick. He was involved in a terrible bicycle accident. There is tremendous power in prayers and we are asking that everyone please pray for Nick’s speedy recovery!

No details on the crash. It happened on Edgewater Drive. Nick is in the ICU at ORMC. He’s seriously injured. Please send prayers, healing thoughts, positive energy… whatever you got!

Bike Gear Classifieds – FREE to post

BikeFlock.com is an online cycling classified ads and business directory designed by a cyclist, for cyclists. The idea is to bring together local communities to buy and sell bike gear and post information to help cyclists in their daily lives. A lot of effort has gone in to organizing the site so that it’s easy and painless to use. We have also made the site very search engine friendly to attract potential buyers.

Many cyclists have boxes of unused bike gear in their garages. BikeFlock.com is founded on the idea of simple ad posting. At BikeFlock.com, users need only register and verify their e-mail address to be eligible for ad posting. After that, users only need to fill-out a simple form–and the listing is up instantly! Each ad will run for thirty (30) days, giving users plenty of time to reap the benefits of such postings. It is FREE to post in all sections of this website, so flock on board and have fun!

Be sure to tell your friends about BikeFlock.com.

And while you’re there, don’t miss the CyclingSavvy post: Three Cycling Tips That Could Save Your Tailfeathers! Save a life, pass it on.

With recent approval of a contract with B-Cycle, Broward County commissioners took a big step in initiating a bicycle-sharing program in the county.

The bike-sharing program is intended to reduce traffic congestion as well as reduce carbon monoxide emissions while also providing residents and tourists a cheapr way to travel.

“We’re hoping to generate interest and I think that there are a lot of people that want to ride bikes,” said Commissioner Kristin Jacobs who spearheaded the bike-sharing program. “We don’t have a system in our county that makes [bike-riding] as safe as it could be and with launching this with B-Cycle, it’s just the beginning of looking at the county-wide effort to understand where the [bicycle-friendly] gaps are in our system.”

To access the public bicycles, 20 bike stations are scheduled to be setup in Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Pompano Beach. To rent a bike, users can swipe their credit card or a pre-purchased card that allows rentals daily or monthly, which can be returned at any kiosks.

Where exactly the bike stations will be located is still being studied, possibly near the beach or downtown area in Fort Lauderdale. The official launch of the program is expected in April 2011.

At the launch, 200 blue bikes will be available for use for residents 18 years and older with plans to add about 375 more bicycles over a five-year period.

“We have a long way to go, but the point is to start,” Jacobs said.

The county will purchase the bikes through a Florida Department of Transportation grant. B-Cycle will manage and operate the program, which will feature bicycles that have tracking systems. B-Cycle, which has managed similar bike-sharing programs in Denver and Chicago, will be responsible for the liability and maintenance of the bikes.

“At the end of the day, it’s about health and wellness in the most environmentally sustainable way you can come up with,” Jacobs said.

As the bike-sharing program moves forward, Jacobs said discounts for bike riders could be offered at various restaurants and retailers near the beach and downtown areas to encourage more residents to try the program.

“Anytime you can get a car off the road for a short trip, it’s better for the environment and it’s better for the people pedaling their bikes,” Jacobs said. “We’re trying to get people to use the bikes as a mode of transportation.”

The above picture is the stripped down model. Here is a picture of the ones being used in Chicago.

From the LA Times:

Driver gets 90 days in jail for hit-and-run involving bicyclist

Angelina Everett hit Ed Magos with her SUV in downtown L.A., kept driving and called police more than an hour later. The jail time — rare for bike hit-and-runs — is a victory for cycling-safety advocates.

This is a rare victory. Wow, things are out of whack.

In a 911 tape played in court:

Everett called in to report that she had “collided” with a bicycle, and told the 911 operator that she kept driving after the accident because of heavy traffic. When she returned to the site of the crash, she went on, Magos was gone. She asked the 911 operator, “Am I going to jail?”

“No, ma’am,” responded the operator, who went on to tell Everett that people didn’t go to jail for hit-and-runs involving cyclists.

It’s kinda on the same level as hitting a wayward animal. You know, a consequence of our way of life.

This is the part that makes me feel hopeful that WE can change things:

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the city attorney at first declined to press charges against Angelina Everett, the 37-year-old fashion designer who, witnesses said, struck Magos with her white Porsche SUV while making a left turn onto 2nd Street, just west of Figueroa.

Activists said the incident — and the city’s response — proved that officials didn’t take bicycle safety seriously. On Feb. 24, they organized a protest ride that traced the route Magos took each morning on his commute from East Hollywood to City Hall, where he works as a computer programmer.

The next day, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck responded to their charges in a news conference in which he announced new department-wide training on cyclists’ rights and promised a new investigation into the crash. The city attorney’s office later decided to take up the case.

The more public officials want to jump on the bike-friendly bandwagon, the more leverage we have to make them get their actions in line with their words.

Kudos to the LA cycling community!

You can follow Marty’s recovery here.

I was headed to the Health & Fitness Fair at First Presbyterian Church on Jackson St to promote Bike/Walk Central Florida and CyclingSavvy. My printer crapped out, so I needed to stop and get some fliers printed at Staples. And I was running out of time.

As I approached Colonial on Maguire, I could see I wasn’t going to make the light. I remembered that the right turn lane gets a mid-cycle green arrow in the mornings, so I opted to turn right on Colonial instead of going to Fairgreen. Good decision. I had the road to myself to Primrose and got the left turn arrow there right away.

Leaving Staples, I decided to head out onto Bumby. In my mind, I was headed for my rat path to go down Robinson. That’s how I normally get downtown. Then I realized it would be a lot quicker to take South to Rosalind. I typically avoid Bumby because the pavement is so awful, but there I was, so I was taking it to South Street.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much traffic. A few cars stopped in the right lane behind me at the red light at Robinson, but they had no trouble changing lanes within the next block. I skillfully navigated the good pavement to keep from giving my laptop too rough a ride.

When I turned right on South Street, an OPD car was turning left from the opposite side. I held my breath for a moment (remembering Mighk’s encounter). But the officer passed without incident. I think it was a CSO, anyway.

A couple blocks ahead, I saw another cyclist on the road. Even though the sun was at my back, he wasn’t easy to see. He was wearing dark clothes and riding on the edge line (which is about an inch from the edge of pavement). He blended into the landscaping. The lanes on South Street are very narrow (~10ft). I watched to see what the other drivers would do.

It appeared as though they didn’t see him, or they didn’t recognize how narrow the lane was, until it was too late to change lanes easily.

Behind me, motorists were avoiding the right lane—changing lanes way back. After they passed me, some would move to the right lane. They would stay in the right lane until just before they got to his position, then brake, wait for a gap in the center lane and move left to pass. Only one gave him less than three feet of clearance, but all of them seemed to have more trouble passing him than they did me. It appeared as though they didn’t see him, or they didn’t recognize how narrow the lane was,  until it was too late to change lanes easily.

This is actually consistent with what a number of non-cyclists have told me about their experience with encountering a cyclist controlling a lane — it makes it easier for them because they know exactly what to do and within plenty of time to do it seamlessly.

I was riding a little faster than the rider ahead, so just before Summerlin, I overtook him. I don’t usually do this, but as I went by, I said, “Take the lane, man, it’s yours!” When I stopped at the red light at Summerlin, he pulled up next to me and said, “Thanks. I guess I remember reading something about that in the Sentinel.” He was going to Church Street, so I invited him to ride with me. We had a nice chat and I was glad I had said something.

I arrived at First Pres in good time and it had been a flawless ride — not a single negative encounter (or so I thought). My destination and the stop at Staples put me on roads I don’t normally use. My entire route was on what would probably be considered busy roads, but at 9:45am, there wasn’t much traffic.

It’s helpful to have a picture perfect commute when you plan to be talking up active transportation how great it is to ride a bike in this town. And I had a great day sharing the love of cycling in Orlando!

Who knew?

While I had an absolutely flawless ride to downtown, a member of the cycling community in a car happened to encounter me on Bumby and had a completely different point of view. He was incensed that I not only had the audacity to ride in the middle of the lane, but that I was flaunting my “right to the lane” on my shirt (see photo above). He wrote a 3-paragraph, all-caps rant to Mighk Wilson (because, you see, Mighk is responsible for all bicyclists in the metropolitan area) about how every motorist who had to pass me (all 6 of them in 1/2 mile on a 4-lane road) now HATES cyclists.

Not only did he project his beliefs about the inferiority of bicyclists onto motorists who passed me without incident, he projected negative intentions on me. He asserted that I want to “antagonize” motorists to make my point—not just by controlling the lane and wearing the BMUFL shirt, but by using that road at all, when I could have “easily used a parallel street with much less traffic.” Much like the “advocates” who have been deriding Reed Bates, he basically accused me of undermining the needs of cyclists by making motorists change lanes.

Wow. And here I thought I was just driving to a health fair to promote bicycling.

The Cyclist Inferiority Complex

Inferiority complexes cause people to have overactive imaginations about negative feelings and intentions of others.

This dichotomy between my positive experience and this observer’s extreme negative reaction, attribution error and subsequent raging complaint has certainly given me cause to ponder what Forester coined the Cyclist Inferiority Complex. There is disagreement, even among bicycle driving advocates, as to the appropriateness of this label. But I think it describes a very real pathology.

There is no doubt that the general traffic culture has been skewed to give priority to drivers of motorized vehicles. The dominant organizational culture of both traffic engineering and law enforcement is skewed to enforce this priority. The engineering juggernaut can be seen as recently as the process to ordain the SLM (sharrows) as an official marking—in order to allow the marking into the MUTCD, the minimum placement recommendations were reduced so much as to invalidate the purpose of the thing. Dan Gutierrez is cataloging the results of that now. I will soon be sharing another frustrating saga on the enforcement of imaginary laws, and how police officers are stubbornly refusing to interpret the exceptions to the FTR and MBL law in favor of a cyclist’s right to travel safely.

Most of the contention about the CIC label surrounds applying it to cyclists themselves. I refrain from using it to describe people who are simply, naturally afraid to ride in traffic. We all come into adulthood with this baggage, it takes education to get rid of it. In fact, key components of the CyclingSavvy course were specifically designed to free students from the baggage — you simply can’t teach strategies for safe and empowered cycling with that stuff in the way.

What’s interesting is, while motorists have been enculturated in this belief system, too, the majority actually hold onto it with less ferocity than cyclists do. As I mentioned before, non-cyclists have related to me, without animosity, the experience of encountering an assertive cyclist. When I explain exactly why we ride that way, it connects the loop between experience and knowledge and makes complete sense to them. In my experience, the motorists who reject this information and refuse to get it are as much a minority as the ones who honk (less than 1% of those I encounter).

Inferior cyclists seem convinced the assertive ones will anger the gods of the temple of speed and cause them to smite the tribe.

There seems to be a larger percentage of cyclists who are hostile to those of us who do not act like second class citizens. I have encountered these everywhere: browbeating former students when they try to practice what we’ve taught them; writing hostile comments about our educational videos; inhabiting advocacy forums and running advocacy organizations that refuse to support the rights of assertive cyclists (then deliberately discrediting said cyclists in order to save face). They seem convinced we will anger the gods of the temple of speed and cause them to smite our tribe (and refuse to give us more bike lanes). There really isn’t any better way to describe that behavior than to call it an inferiority complex. It does more to undermine the legitimacy of cycling than anything motorists do.

…

But it really was a lovely ride.

And a lovely ride home, as well. I took the quiet streets. Because I wanted to.

I enjoyed this story because it talked about the gory details of how the charity went about doing things. How they designed a bike from the ground up and ended up with a 55 lb., one speed bomb-proof bike, the likes of which could be found in every Sears, Wards and  Western Auto store in America until the ’70′s.

• Of course it has fenders.
• Of course it has a bell.
• Of course the tires are wide.
• Of course it has Northroad handlebars.

See for yourself.

You can see more photos of Abel and better pictures of his new bike here.  It’s a reminder of the power of bicycles.

The first First Friday ride was a blast! We had 19 riders so we split into 2 groups. The object is to have a small enough group that it’s easy to communicate between front and rear riders and for the whole group to make it through a traffic signal. We decided to ride the same loop with one group riding clockwise and the other counterclockwise. We passed each other on Maguire, with lots of cheering and fanfare.

Both groups had a great ride — positive interactions with motorists — and returned triumphant! We’ll plan to meet at the same location October 1.

Afterward, most of us headed to Ethos for dinner and more socializing… and a toast to Kitzzy’s birthday. We filled the space in front with our bikes.

We have a really terrific community and it’s getting richer all the time.

Photo by Jason Buckner.