Lisa and I had been contemplating an overnight bike trip to put on some mileage with the touring panniers, this weekend’s Florida Bicycle Association board meeting in Deland provided a good opportunity. FBA’s new Executive Director, Tim Bustos, moved back to Florida from California and has settled in Deland—making it the new headquarters of the FBA.

The meeting was Saturday and there was a meet-n-greet happy hour and dinner on Friday evening. I had a lunch meeting in Orlando, so we weren’t able to get on the road until 2:30. As long as we were not delayed by storms, we anticipated being able to make happy hour.

The Route to Deland

Heading out of town is easy. I have a tried and true route to Sanford/Lake Monroe. It uses mostly pleasant low-volume roads and 6.5 miles of the Seminole Wekiva Trail. There are a few traverses on busy roads, but they are made easy by simple strategies we teach in CyclingSavvy.

North of Sanford is more of a puzzle. I have ridden to the east side Deland and back a few times on a road bike. I know several routes to get there, but they would be out of the way for going to downtown Deland. U.S. 17-92 is the most direct route, but it is problematic for a couple reasons. First of all, it was going to be peak Friday (pre-holiday) rush hour when we got to Sanford. Second, FDOT has striped it with an inconsistent mishmash of shoulders and undesignated gutterspace intended for bicycle use. In some places that space is relatively tolerable to use, in others it ranges from miserable to downright dangerous.

I’ve ridden up 17-92 to Orange City many times to go to Blue Springs. With a small group of cyclists on a Sunday morning, we just ride two abreast in the lane and ignore the varying gutterside nonsense. For the southbound route, there are a few options to use parallel streets on the west side of 17-92. These options add miles, though, and they aren’t as easy to use northbound. So, as I was planning the route, I didn’t anticipate using them. If I had, I could have thought through strategies ahead of time and the ride to Deland would have been more pleasant.

The Ride to Deland

As we rolled out, clouds were gathering. We knew we’d get some rain and we were OK with that as long as we could stay out of the lightning. The clouds provided a welcome reprieve from the sun, making our ride through town even more pleasant.

Holiday traffic was already building by the time we reached Maitland. Using Maitland Ave from Packwood to Maitland Blvd was easy enough. The platoons of traffic changed lanes and passed us safely without incident or commentary. As we waited in the queue at the red light at Maitland Blvd, a large volume of traffic collected behind us. We decided to pull over and release it at the first driveway on the other side of the intersection. This took about 1o seconds and gave us a completely empty road all the way to the left turn onto Lake Shore. I regretted not setting up the cameras to record that, it would have been a really nice example of control & release. There is no legal requirement to do this on a 4-lane road, but with that volume of traffic changing lanes to pass, it would have been difficult for us to negotiate to the left lane in preparation for our turn.

A light rain shower started as we worked our way through the neighborhoods toward Altamonte Springs. But the clouds were not ominous, and the sun was peaking through.

The next high-traffic traverse was Central Pkwy in Altamonte. Central has 14ft lanes between Palm Springs and Douglas. Traffic was light before the I-4 bridge. We rode a little farther into the lane and everyone changed lanes to pass us. As we got to the bridge, a large platoon was approaching, so we moved to a lane-sharing position. Everyone passed us courteously, with plenty of clearance, slowing to reduce the speed differential. Once over the top of the bridge we were in another gap and moved back to lane control. There is a nice long downhill grade on the west side of I-4, We kept up with the traffic in the left lane all the way to the turn at Franklin.

It had stopped raining by the time we entered the Seminole Wekiva Trail through Sanlando Park. This route may seem a bit circuitous when you look at the map. Those who don’t live here might ask, why not just take Douglas? Those who live here know why. It’s a two-lane road with rolling hills and a high volume of traffic. I’ve witnessed near-head-on collisions as idiot motorists passed me into a blind hilltop. I have no proven strategy for dealing with that behavior in those conditions, so I prefer to just avoid encounters with it.

Goofing around on the Seminole Wekiva Trail

I can’t say enough about how much I enjoy a nice long section of trail that goes in my direction (as long as it’s not a peak trail-use time). The trail was virtually empty the entire way to Lake Mary. It was like having our own private, shady bicycle highway.

We made a pit stop at Panera to refill water bottles and check the weather radar. There were ominous clouds to the northeast and we saw a few streaks of lightning. The radar showed the storms moving northeast toward Daytona. I figured at our speed we’d probably follow behind them and avoid any significant weather.

At Lake Mary Blvd, we abandoned the trail. It runs parallel to International Parkway, but with 15 driveway crossings (meaning 30 bone-jarring gutter pan crossings), it’s not a better alternative to the road—a 4-lane divided boulevard with silky new asphalt. Even as we approached rush hour, traffic was surprisingly light on IP.

I had initially anticipated preparing the video cameras at this point, but with weather and time concerns, we chose not to take the time. Mine was mounted to my helmet, but I hadn’t adjusted it. Lisa’s was in its case. While we would have gotten some nice lane control passing behavior on IP, I most regretted that we didn’t get video just north of 46a. At this point IP grows a designated bike lane. We moved over into it after crossing the intersection. There was a queue of cars collected behind us at the red light. We waited for them to pass. They didn’t pass. I looked in my mirror. Every one of the cars in the right lane behind us was headed for one of the shopping center driveways. Fortunately for us, the driver of the first vehicle did not try to pass us before turning right. Kudos to him! A chain of follow-the-leader right turns would have been ugly for us.  This was an excellent demonstration of how being in the bike lane didn’t get us out of the way. In fact, it would have been faster for those turning cars if we had been riding in the left tire track.

The usual route we use from IP to the St Johns bridge was closed for construction a month ago when I was up there scouting a route for the Cystic Fibrosis ride. I didn’t know if it would be open again, and didn’t want to chance it and have to backtrack.

We decided to use a CyclingSavvy strategy on SR 46 to bridge the gap. By now, rush hour traffic was intensifying. We got video of this on the way home (embedded below), but I really regret not shooting this rush hour traverse. It worked perfectly. We heard one angry honk from several cars behind us at a point where we were traveling in a queue of heavy traffic (a traffic jam of motorists). But it was as safe and uneventful then as it was again on Saturday afternoon and would be on any given Sunday morning.

Likewise, we had a flawless traverse of the I-4 interchange at 17-92. It’s less complicated northbound than southbound (we shot video southbound on Saturday). But there was a massive amount of traffic merging onto 17-92 from I-4. That was no problem at all, we controlled the right lane until we saw a motorist slowing to merge behind us, then we moved to the wide shoulder to climb the bridge. Aside from the wide shoulder, the bridge sucks. The pavement is grooved concrete—perfect for catching glass shards and setting them up like sharks teeth—and the traffic noise is a deafening combination of high-revving engines and tire buzz from the surface.

Descent into Hell

The other side of the bridge is where things become problematic, especially  in heavy traffic. The first thing that happens is the shoulder opens up into a high speed right turnout for Lake Monroe Park. It’s pretty easy to come down that bridge at close to 30mph on the bike, so I typically move to lane control if I have a gap. I was able to do that, but Lisa (who is in better shape and climbed faster than me) was waiting at the park entrance. I pulled in and stopped just as a huge platoon of traffic came over the bridge. Watching the endless traffic and looking at the 2-foot-wide gutter space on the road ahead (just enough to make us look like jerks for controlling the lane), we decided the quiet solitude of the Spring to Spring trail would be worth the extra travel distance.

This trail winds under a lush canopy. It’s really beautiful, albeit somewhat impractical for transportation. The tight blind corners can be quite treacherous where there are a lot of users of varying skill. It was completely empty Friday evening.

When we got to the Dirksen trailhead, I got out the iPhone GPS to determine which way to go. I wished I had taken the time to fully plan an alternative to 17-92. We could go left to Shell Rd or right and use a neighborhood route. I’ve used Shell many times, but it is a narrow 2-lane collector road serving a lot of neighborhood streets and I didn’t know what rush hour traffic would be like. The route we chose turned out to be a really nice one. We used it on the way home, too.

Since I wasn’t sure how heavy rush hour traffic would be on Highbanks, I opted to go back to 17-92 early, rather than attempt a left on Highbanks from Naranja. Where we entered 17-92 again at Colombia Rd, there was a standard 5ft “bike lane” (undesignated). The hostility began almost immediately. Approaching Highbanks the bike lane continues to the right of a dual-destination right lane. Traffic was stacked up at the light and numerous cars were flashing right turn signals. I pulled into a gap as traffic ahead of me slowed. A white car came from behind, accelerating to close the gap and attempting to buzz me. I slid to the right and let him pass so he could slam on his brakes behind the stopped traffic. Then I pulled back into the lane and stopped behind him. He waved his middle finger at me as I stood there behind him. I pretended not to notice. It was clear he had only accelerated after seeing me signal and move into the lane (there was a lot of space behind me when I did it and traffic was slowing in all lanes). Lisa had pulled into the queue several cars ahead of me. He blasted his horn at us in parting.

The striped area is 29 inches wide.

That set the stage for the next few miles. Now we had reached FDOT’s despicable 29-inch, double-striped, gutter lane. I’m pretty sure this is what the roads of hell look like—heavy traffic, hostile motorists and a nasty, substandard space painted to look like a bike lane.

This stretch of road goes over some gently rolling hills. We were able to get enough of a gap in heavy traffic to control the lane on the down-hill (with light traffic changing lanes easily), but we decided to stay far right when climbing. Interestingly, I think the width of our panniers counteracted the normal effects of the substandard lane. I have ridden in this space on a road bike and experienced very unpleasant close passing. But I think our panniers hanging out over the fogline caused everyone to move over more than usual. This didn’t eliminate the yells of “get off the road,” which, as often as not, issued from vehicles in the left lane.

I was relieved for that gutter lane to go away at Enterprise Rd, but I had forgotten what the road configuration was like on the other side of the intersection. Thinking the high-speed entrance was a merge lane, we took advantage of a gap to to move into it and release the traffic that had stacked up behind us at the light. I figured it would lead us to the next section of bike lane, which I remembered being standard-width.  To my dismay, the arrows pointed the other direction. Instead of a long merge lane, it almost immediately became a 1000ft continuous right turn lane. That was our cue to make a right turn and look at the map again.

We were entering Orange City. Once past the continuous RTOL, 17-92 has fresh pavement and freshly-striped (undesignated) bike space which meets the 5ft standard. There are numerous intersections and driveways, every few hundred feet, all the way through the heart of Orange City. I was concerned about hook/cross crash risk with that volume of traffic and that many opportunities.

Orange city is one of those places that looks to have a rich grid on the map, but in reality 80% of it is dirt roads. Looking at the map, we had an option to go to the right or left for a parallel paved route. I’m very familiar with the roads on the west side of 17-92, but I have never used them at rush hour and didn’t know what kind of traffic volume there would be. It’s also hilly on that side. I decided we should take Levitt, on the east side. It seemed easy enough and looked as though it would bring us out on Minnesota, which is where I wanted to set up to get through the 472 interchange.

Turns out, we should have taken the known west side route. Levitt was wonderful, no traffic at all. With good reason. Despite Google marking it yellow—as a thru route—it is not. We had to backtrack 2 blocks and head back out to 17-92. And the sky was beginning to look ominous again.

The crossing of the 472 interchange is complicated. Well, the physical strategy for it is quite easy. The complicating factor is the human element of very hostile motorists. The over-exposure to meanness had already frayed our nerves and worn us down.

My original intention was to turn onto 17-92 from Minnesota with a green light. This would have given us an empty road to get through the interchange. But now we were going to be doing this with a platoon of traffic.

The light was red. We pulled up behind the queue in the left tire track. My hope was that the majority of traffic in the right lane would be heading for that ramp, so we would be able to release them to our right very quickly (the ramp forms 300ft past the intersection). If all went as planned, it would look like the photo on the right (you can see that video clip at 3:29) and there would be no incivility.

I was half right. The traffic flow was perfect, except for the guy who slid easily into the ramp, then slowed down to yell “get off the road!” No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

For a mile or so after the interchange, the shoulder was clean and striped to the left of right-turn lanes. We used it without incident. North of Taylor, it begins to disintegrate. The RTOLs cut through it, there is gravel and sand—it’s basically unusable. We were grateful for it to go away entirely.

At Beresford Ave, thru traffic is diverted off Woodland and the road becomes 3-lane (one in each direction with a center turn lane). This made for easy passing, which all but one motorist managed to do without hurling insults at us.

We arrived at the Dubliner to a warm welcome from our FBA colleagues. And beer. Within seconds, the sky opened up as the next round of storms arrived.

Culture Shock

I do most of my cycling in the urban core of Orlando. Within my 5 mile range, it’s very rare that I even get honked at. I hadn’t heard “get off the road” in, well, longer than I can remember.  I occasionally venture to the burbs and typically experience some amount of incivility, but it is not so constant that it colors the whole trip.

I’m sure traffic volume had some influence on the hostility, but it wasn’t like we were causing a back-up. Most of our time on 17-92 we were completely marginalized, attempting to use the inconsistent-but-consistently-crappy infrastructure. Of course, that makes the hostility harder to bear, it’s like being kicked while you’re down.

This Slate article, Your Commute is Killing You, gave me a few clues about the intensity of the hostility up there.

Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day. If you are commuting, you are not spending quality time with your loved ones. You are not exercising, doing challenging work, having sex, petting your dog, or playing with your kids (or your Wii). You are not doing any of the things that make human beings happy.

People who live in that corridor—Debary, Orange City, Deland—have some of the longest and most miserable commutes in the metro area. Add in some hate radio and you have a recipe for a sociopathic attitude toward other road users. The pervasive belief that cyclists don’t belong on the road is made worse by the marginal gutter lanes intended for our use.

I don’t know how to solve the incivility problem since there’s no political will to do it—even among bike advocates—but it is definitely an impediment to cycling. One thing is for sure, we are not going to build our way out of it, especially with facilities that reinforce the beliefs behind it. Even for people like us who are comfortable and confident in traffic, relentless hostility takes a psychological toll on our will to ride assertively… or our desire to ride at all.

The Wiggle Route

For the ride home, I wanted nothing to do with 17-92. My goal was to avoid every inch possible.

We attended the morning half of the board meeting and headed home after lunch, around 2:30. I’m not familiar with the streets of downtown Deland, but decided to see what Florida Ave had to offer. Good choice! It had light traffic and signals to cross the busy roads. When we got to the end of it we jogged a block to the west and took Clara Ave as far as it went. A small subdivision connected us to McGregor where we’d have to go back to 17-92.

Riding south around the 472 interchange is facilitated by Firehouse Rd. I’ve used this a number of times, it takes you around the outside of the ramps and back to 17-92 south of all the merging and diverging. From there, it’s another 800 ft to Minnesota. This time we used the west side route.

It was very hot out, these residential roads offer more than a refuge from neanderthals and noisy traffic, they offer a blessed tree canopy!

When we got to the end of the west side route, we did a quick dogleg to the east side of 17-92 and followed a route I had explored a month ago as an option for the Cystic Fibrosis ride. Hillside was a bit stop-sign-infested, but the route worked well, taking us to Saxon Blvd. Using Saxon for 1000ft to get to Enterprise was easy with the dogleg technique we teach in CyclingSavvy.

We swooped down through Glen Abbey and back across 17-92 again. A short collection of neighborhood streets brought us down to Highbanks. I usually take Shell Rd from here, but it has less shade than the neighborhood streets on the east side, so we crossed back over and headed for the Spring to Spring trail.

We did it! We rode from Deland to the St. Johns bridge without having to use 17-92 for more than a few hundred feet. Best of all, there was not only zero incivility, we exchanged friendly waves with 4 motorists and heard, “that’s the way to travel” from one.

One thing I really wanted to do on this trip was shoot video of the 17-92@I-4 interchange. Most people climb the bridge on the wide shoulder, but on the other side of the bridge, you have to leave the shoulder to stay to the left of the right-turn lane, then hold your ground with merging traffic and control the chute to Orange Blvd. The lane in which you enter Orange Blvd., becomes the on-ramp to I-4 East, so you have to change lanes right away. So here’s what it looks like:

Since road construction forced us to cross the 46@I-4 interchange, we shot some video there as well. This is pretty straight-forward—it works best to control the left thru lane through the interchange. The traffic lights at I-4 collect so much traffic that if you rode through in the right lane, you’d probably have to do a jughandle turn to make a left on Wayside. Here’s what that one looks like:

The rest of the trip was equally pleasant and uneventful. We stopped for a snack at Panera. The Seminole Wekiva Trail had a few more users on it than Friday, but wasn’t crowded. We used a slightly different route to get to Central southbound. Instead of taking Laura to Central and climbing the hill on Central, we took Citrus to Douglas and entered the left turn lane for Central. This allowed us to turn onto Central with a green light and climb the bridge in peace without a platoon of traffic passing us.

The wiggle route is about 4 1/2 miles longer than going directly up 17-92. It has more stop signs, obviously, but fewer traffic lights. It was definitely worth it for the solitude and shade.

I probably won’t be riding to Deland again any time soon, but I look forward to using the wiggle route on my next trip to Blue Springs—at least for the ride home.

This is CyclistView video from Brian DeSousa’s first visit to Orlando. I first used it in a post called Take the Red Pill. At the time I had no idea how to edit video, so Brian kindly did a quick edit. I was recently preparing a DVD and decided to re-edit the video to emphasize some key points about traffic.

Platoons and gaps

One of the challenges I have with creating videos of confident traffic cycling is that it is mostly uneventful. Of course, that’s exactly what I want to show, but, well, it’s almost too boring to watch. It consists of less than a minute of cars changing lanes to pass, followed by less than a minute of nothing. So, if I show several minutes of continuous video, it’s going to have long periods of nothing but a cyclist on an empty road. Thirty seconds feels like an eternity if you’re watching nothing happen in internet video. I recently cut together a 6 minute video of me riding on University Blvd, just showing the platoons and not the gaps, I eliminated about 3 minutes of empty-road footage to get that. And it was shot at the tail end of rush hour. Unfortunately, eliminating the boring parts actually means I’m not telling the best part of the story. It makes it look as if passing traffic is a non-stop experience. It isn’t.

Funny thing about video. It’s incredibly useful for telling a story about how bad things are. I could do that in one or two sessions by riding too far right and then cutting together a 2 minute video with numerous close calls. You can find stuff like that all over YouTube. It’s much more difficult to portray cycling as safe and uneventful without producing something soporific.

The reality of delay

In the video above, I called attention to the van. From the time it comes up behind us until it is able to pass, the “delay” is 30 seconds. As much as I hate passing a queue, doing so gave us some valuable footage because we passed that van. Including the time we waited through one light cycle (I cut that part), it had been 4 1/2 minutes since the van had passed us. Notice that there are cars queued in front of that van. Those cars had already been ahead of us on the road before we ever turned on to Orange Ave — possibly by 30 seconds or more.

One thing I’ve seen entirely too often — from motorists, cyclists and law enforcement — is an obsessive lack of perspective about a cyclist’s impact on traffic. In my experience, 30 seconds is a relatively long time for a motorist to have to wait to pass me. Rarely, it may be a bit more. Usually it’s 0-10 seconds. Invariably, that motorist will then wait behind other traffic (that was already in front of us) at the next red light. At the red light he is stopped, when behind me he is still moving.

Courtesy scolds

Lately upon the internet, I’ve heard my fill of blather about courtesy (mainly chest-thumping from other cyclists about what better citizens they are than my friend Reed). They seem to wish to outdo each-other by claiming how dutifully they’ll hug the gutter or how quickly they’ll skitter into the shoulder upon the appearance of a motorist.

Courtesy is an important aspect of civility on both sides, but reality should have some bearing on the matter, especially when courtesy is being balanced against the cyclist’s safety and efficiency. If I’m on a 2-lane road with constant oncoming traffic for as far as I can see, I typically will pull over or practice control & release. Additionally, if I am first at a red light and a lot of traffic queues behind me, I will often drive through the intersection and turn into whatever business is on the corner. In 10-20 seconds (usually, little more than the time it takes to turn around) the traffic will often be gone, then I ride out on the empty road. That’s less about courtesy than my own comfort.

In most of my riding on arterial roads, the platoon looks like the one that catches up to us in the video above. Most motorists change lanes far enough back to open the sight lines and everyone goes by with little or no slowing. Occasionally an inattentive or incompetent driver will wind up stuck behind me until the platoon clears. But even so, all of them will be waiting together at the next red light. My getting out of the way would make zero difference in their trip time.

Increasing confidence with evidence

Shooting and watching hours of video has really given me concrete proof of how little actual impact I have on traffic. This further empowers me to ride assertively as an equal vehicle driver. It makes my bicycling experience calm, enjoyable and virtually conflict-free. It gives me the freedom to not worry about what’s behind me. It makes me feel as if there is no limitation for me to access any destination by bike.

I hope that sharing a few minutes of video here and there does the same for you.

I don’t know much about video cameras. I’ve never owned a camcorder. So please take this post as my observations, not expert advice. My adventures in bike video and video editing began in October 2008 when Brian DeSousa came to Orlando.

Brian was generous in showing me CyclistView equipment and methods. And, of course, in providing valuable video of me cycling in Orlando traffic. With all that great video, I had to learn to do some basic editing. I hacked away at iMovie (the free version), later upgrading to the more-robust-but-frequently-aggravating iLife version. This was my first iMovie product.

Brian riding in front of the double paceline. Screen shot from VholdR video.

Brian returned in March. He spent a few days here and shot a bunch more video with me, including some group video that Dan Gutierrez used for an educational piece, and the downtown cruiser video I edited for this post. All of this video was shot on a VIO POV 1. I also had the opportunity to use a VholdR while Brian was here in March (more on that later).

Since Brian’s first visit, I’ve had the itch to buy my own camera. Bike cam video is such an incredible educational tool. But I wanted the best camera for the job, which meant plunking down big bucks on something I’d essentially use for hobby and volunteer work.

Robert Seidler shoots video of CO author, Rodney, for the LE Toolkit

The FBA Law Enforcement Toolkit project gave me a legitimate business expense to purchase my own POV 1.5 this fall. In November, Robert Seidler and I put our new POVs through the paces collecting video for that program.

Versatility & stability

Robert sets up the hazardcam on his Bike Friday

One of the main attractions of this camera is the tiny profile of the camera head. You can mount the thing almost anywhere.

I had always been under the impression that mounting a camera to the bike would produce too much vibration. Many of the bike-mounted videos I’ve seen require a lot of digital stabilization, resulting in image loss at the edges.

When we mounted cameras to our bikes to shoot road hazards, I figured a little camera shake wouldn’t be a bad thing. The idea was to show why bicyclists need to avoid the edge of the road, and that conditions that are merely annoying to motorists can be intolerable and dangerous for bicycle drivers. Well, it turned out the camera was almost too stable for that purpose. It certainly belies the pain and suffering one experiences on a road like Summerlin Ave. Here’s a sample:

Choosing a Lens

The POV 1.5 comes with a 110° wide angle lens. VIO also offers a 70° lens for tighter shots. I’ve experimented with both. The 110° is ideal for both image stability (especially on the helmet mount) and showing the the peripheral scene. For traffic interactions in their entirety, this is essential. One limitation I’ve found with the wide angle is that it makes everything look farther away. If you’re demonstrating properly-functioning traffic dynamics, this is an asset, but if you want to show traffic conflicts, it doesn’t work well. The last 2 clips in the video below compare motorists passing into oncoming traffic. In real life, the one shot with the 110° was slightly farther away than the one shot with the 70°, but nowhere near as far as it looks on the video.

70° lens mounted to the rack

I found the 70° lens works best mounted to the bike. On my helmet, the tight field shook wildly, exacerbating every bump, no matter how hard I tried to absorb the shock and hold my head steady. On moderately rough pavement, the video is unwatchable (the above clip of Mighk on the six-lane road—U.S. 17-92—is on fairly smooth pavement).

110° lens mounted near the bottom of the rear rack

I like the 110° mounted on the back of the bike, but haven’t found a good forward-facing mount. There is too much side-to-side movement when it is mounted to the handlebars. When mounted to the frame pointing forward, the peripheral movement of the bars and cables is disruptive.

The helmet mount requires a still head while your body absorbs the bumps. Photo by Mighk.

A helmet mount is best for shooting overall traffic dynamics because of the high perch. There is also a benefit to being able to turn my head to follow action (like here). The downside is I can’t turn my head for a shoulder check when I’m holding the camera on a subject. I put a take-a-look mirror on my helmet visor, I’m still getting used to that. Another downside is the inevitable stiff neck. Plus, on our rough roads, I get sore quads and calves from holding myself off the seat and using my legs as shock absorbers. But as Dan G. says, “we suffer for out art.”

The display

The recorder unit is mounted to the Arkel handlebar bag mount with Velcro. It's handy to start and stop recording and to check the image.

A valuable feature this camera has that most other helmet-cams don’t is an LCD display. Being able to aim the camera and see what the image looks like on the fly is a big time-saver. When Brian and I used the VholdR, we had to set up the mount, then take out the card, put it in a portable player, check the image, and do it again until it was right. Then, since it was on my helmet, I had to focus on holding my head in the exact same place as when I set it up. At one point we tried to set the VholdR up on another rider in a hurry — skipping checking the image — it was aimed wrong and the resulting video was useless. With the POV, I can check the image without recording anything. And I can check it again as I’m riding to make sure it’s aimed where I want.

Accessories

My favorite accessory is the Ultra-Clamp, an incredible little contortionist with a vise on one end and a camera mount on the other (you can use any tripod-ready camera with it). It can be purchased from VIO or HelmetCameraCentral with the camera, or you can get it at a photo store. I bought mine at Colonial Photo and Hobby.

We used a magnet-mounted platform (included with the basic camera kit) to attach the lens to a cap for shooting pedestrian crosswalk issues

The basic POV kit comes with a number of nifty mounting devices, but it’s missing some essentials that must be purchased separately. I bought the C-Clamp and Wide Flange Base to attach the lens to the ultra-clamp. I also use them to Velcro the lens to a helmet. VIO sells a separate mount kit, but I didn’t see anything in that with similar functionality.

Wish list

I hope the next generation includes an HD version and a bigger LCD (my old eyes need some help). I wonder if the color could be more vibrant.

An incredible tool for education and advocacy

In building instructional materials for cyclists and law enforcement, point-of-view video is priceless. It’s not possible to shoot accurate traffic interactions with video in a following motor vehicle. We’ve used a car to get motorist-perspective video for the law enforcement program. It’s valuable footage, but if the video car follows the cyclist for more than a few seconds, it really screws up the traffic dynamic (even on a multi-lane road). Then if the video car passes while there is traffic behind it, the cyclist is left with a herd of of angry motorists. (The same thing happens if any motorist sits behind a cyclist instead of taking ample opportunities to pass.)

The greatest gift the POV camera has given us is the view of the world behind the cyclist. Being able to show a continuous view of traffic overtaking safely, especially on roads most people think cyclists can’t use safely, is like shining a light under the bed and exposing the lack of monsters. Watching Brian and Dan’s Cyclistview videos gave me the courage to ride much more assertively on high speed roads. Once I experienced it, courage was no longer required — having cars pass in the next lane (8 – 10ft away) is so different and so much more pleasant than what most cyclists experience, it changes your entire perspective of the road.

This is an important tool for the education of non-cyclists as well. Once we demonstrate our legal right to use the road, the bogus safety and delay arguments become the weapon of choice for those who want to remove us from it (“That may be the rule, but…”). POV video is a powerful defense against mythology, misinformation and deliberately specious arguments.

Here’s an example of rear-facing video in daylight and darkness on Curry Ford Rd.

LE Toolkit production vehicle. We did almost all of our transportation for this project by bike. This often involved riding at slow speeds on arterial roads. The POV allowed us to run video along the way.

The video was shot by Robert Seidler. The daylight video was shot from the POV attached to the seat stay of Robert’s Bike Friday.  For the darkness video, the camera was attached to his seat post. The darkness video was shot at 6 AM on our way to meet the Colonial High School Bike Bus. Not much traffic eastbound at that hour, but drivers typically speed on such a road when it is empty. They all still saw us from a long distance and changed lanes. Our speed was never above 15mph, it was probably around 12mph. I was hauling a trailer with 150lbs of production gear.

The VIO POV was a huge asset to the project, allowing us to get valuable traffic interaction video while we rode from location to location.

Photo by Mighk

Today was a stellar day! The weather was perfect and my work for today consisted of shooting on-bike video for the Law Enforcement Toolkit. The objective was to shoot the best practices of bicycle driving with a uniformed officer. My subject was Bill Edgar of OPD (with appearances by Mighk). Bill runs the bicycle training program and trains bike patrol officers all over North America.

One important segment of the program deals with a cyclist’s use of a “sub-standard width” lane. For the purpose of the statute, that’s a lane less than 14 feet wide. A cyclist is allowed the full use of a sub-standard* lane — meaning you can ride anywhere in it you choose and motorists must change lanes to pass. The lane in the photo above (Princeton St) has 13 feet of usable pavement (from the gutter seam to the lane line). It looks pretty wide with a small car in it, but it’s too tight to share with SUVs or large commercial vehicles. A cyclist’s best position in the lane is one that makes it clear to motorists that they have to change lanes.

Unfortunately, some motorists resent having to change lanes, and they make a big fuss about it.

So, as I was riding directly behind Bill on Princeton, one such motorist came upon us. Unable to see any details of the cyclist in front of me, he laid on the horn to try and intimidate us out of his way. That’s when Bill moved left into view… and the horn went silent.

It’s unbelievable that the guy went on sassing Bill after we stopped. I guess that’s the personality of someone who would honk like that (frequently wrong but never in doubt). The video doesn’t show it, but he was shaking like a schoolboy. I’m guessing his bravado was a cover for having peed in his pants.

We actually did demonstrate 2-abreast riding in a sub-standard lane (including Princeton St) with Mighk. Oddly enough, there was no honking.

Help us stop hostile behavior

The Law Enforcement Toolkit is a product of the Florida Bicycle Association. The first phase has been funded and is almost ready for beta testing, but we need more funding to complete the training program and implement it in Police Departments around the state. The purpose of the LE Toolkit is to educate traffic enforcement officers about the rights and responsibilities of bicycle drivers. Informed law enforcement is key to changing the culture and making the road system safer and more civil for everyone. Please help support this program with an individual, club or business membership, or a tax-deductible donation.

*Sub-standard is a misleading term, since >90% of the lanes in Central Florida are less than 14ft wide.

The thought of making a left turn from a multi-lane road is one of the things that makes people think vehicular cycling requires speed and athletic prowess. It seems like it would be a really difficult thing to do. But most of the time it’s actually really easy, and you have options.

Making a standard left turn is easier than you think.

First of all, traffic is not constant. As I discussed in Getting the Road to Yourself, traffic travels in packs. With a little anticipation, you can usually make a multi-lane merge while you have the whole road to yourself between packs. That technique only requires overcoming the belief that you need to always be riding in the right lane. The video in the above Flash presentation shows Brian and I riding 4/10 of a mile in the left lane on University Blvd. It turns out the gap was almost that long as well. We could have gone over pretty much at any time, but we had no way to know that. The previous two packs had been long and only a few seconds apart. Had another pack overtaken us, they would have filed into the lanes to the right to pass us. There’s no penalty for planning ahead.

If traffic is very dense, or you miss your opportunity, you can sometimes negotiate a merge as traffic slows for a red light. However, motorists are difficult to negotiate with when they are driving faster than the speed of thought.

Plan B

Having another option is a great stress-reliever—with left turns, you have more than one. I usually have the plan B option in mind when I’m anticipating a left turn on a busy road. I’ve decided by what point I want to have merged into the left lane (slightly ahead of where the left turn lane begins). If I check for traffic and it’s thick behind me, I stay to the right and make an alternate turn. Sometimes I use an alternate as my first choice and don’t even bother anticipating a merge.

Unsignalized Intersections

I plan my routes to avoid having to make a left from a multi-lane road at an unsignalized intersection. If you can’t make a standard turn, it’s best just to travel to the next signalized intersection, execute your left turn of choice (or a U-turn), ride back to where you wanted to turn and make a right.

Nice work, Preston! I was contemplating doing something similar with still photography, but this is perfect.

Other posts on the door zone:

The Swinging Door

DIY Door Zone Warning

The Politics of Sharrows

This cannot be brought up too much. Most cyclists I observe in the Orlando area are hugging the edges of parked cars, bike lane or not. That is a practice that can get you killed.

And now take a moment and ask yourself: “Why do they paint lines telling me to ride where I could get killed?” Let me know what you come up with, because I sure don’t get it.

What do these signs tell you when you're riding? Should you always merge right when a lane is added to the road? Do you know when a bike lane stripe is misleading you? What do you do when your lane is going to end? What can a roadway cyclist learn from a pedestrian countdown clock?

We write often about vehicular cycling, AKA Effective Cycling. The focus of vehicular cycling discussion and education is usually on the mechanics of how to position ourselves, handle certain road configurations and avoid the mistakes of other road users.

The mechanical components of cycling education are:

• the rules of the road;
• crash causes (and statistics);
• road configurations (intersections, turn lanes, interchanges, weave lanes, diverges, drop lanes, bike lanes, etc.);
• safe positioning on the road at and between intersections;
• and emergency handling techniques.

The overarching goal of teaching all that mechanical information is to give students the resources for situation awareness—the key component of mindful cycling—in traffic.

Situation awareness is the perception of environmental elements within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.

That sounds pretty complicated, but it actually becomes second nature once you understand where the dangers are and where they are not. For example, it’s hard to have good situation awareness if you’re obsessed with overtaking traffic. A cyclist’s decision-making requires paying attention to the road ahead and reading the signs and environmental clues that allow for proactive decision-making.

We need to look for roadway hazards like parked cars, potholes and curb extensions. We can travel more efficiently and safely when we anticipate and look for signs of changes in the roadway, like:

• the right lane becoming a continuous right-turn lane, drop lane or highway on-ramp;
• a new lane entering from the right (where you’ll need to merge right), or forming a short weave lane (where you should not merge right);
• the bike lane ending or traveling to the right of right-turning traffic, or being striped completely wrong;
• expiring pedestrian countdown clocks that can tell us whether to speed up to make the light, or slow down because it ain’t gonna happen.

All of these things require situation awareness and forward attention.

Looking and planning ahead is something novice drivers (of all vehicles) don’t do well. This is partly due to their inexperience with road design and traffic dynamics, and partly due to anxiety. Anxiety diverts a tremendous amount of cognitive energy away from awareness.

Mindfulness vs vigilance: going beyond defensive driving

Defensive driving can be characterized by vigilance.

When I first started riding a motorcycle, I experienced a lot of “surprises” on the road despite being tense and watchful. Although I had taken the MSF safety course, motorcycling felt quite dangerous to me because it seemed like there were conflicts everywhere. I was always driving defensively and reacting to my environment, in a state of hyper-vigilance. It was quite exhausting.

Yet, after several months of riding, the surprises went away. I discovered that as I relaxed, I was able to see and anticipate the movements of other drivers. Once I lost the anxiety, the world slowed down around me and I found myself in a state of awareness that did not require so much vigilance or defensiveness. The combination of my relaxed state and the foundation of knowledge I’d acquired in the safety course allowed me to easily process what was a threat and what wasn’t. As I sensed the need, I would casually shift my speed or position on the road to increase my visibility or avoid conflict.

As a motorcycle driver, making the transition from anxious and frequently-surprised to relaxed and mindful was relatively easy—much easier than as a bicycle driver. Why? Because I didn’t have to overcome any cultural stigma about my right to control my environment. There is no taboo against a motorcycle driver controlling a lane, because motorcycle drivers are never expected or required to share a lane.

Unfortunately, that stigma (reinforced by bad laws, speed-centric road users and mollycoddling bike advocates) keeps most bicyclists from making a complete transition to mindfulness. For some, vigilance is as good as it gets because they’re operating in ways that make conflict inevitable. This state of mind is not only stressful, it’s not enough to protect them.

Mindless bicycling

Mindless cycling has many forms:

• Simple ignorance: obliviousness of the need to follow the rules of the road, the danger of riding against traffic, the potential hazards of car doors, blind spots and being invisible to other drivers (not understanding where the dangers are, thus mindlessly staying out of the way of same-direction traffic at all cost).
• Selfish ignorance: Not considering the impact or logic of our actions. For example, passing a short queue of cars in a narrow lane, and then making them have to pass you again, and again (queue jumping isn’t all bad, but it does require some mindfulness… and caution).
• Cultural ignorance: the stunted decision-making that comes from the belief that we are not fully equal vehicle drivers. This results in delayed actions or decisions which increase the difficulty of riding in traffic. An example is, waiting until the last minute to merge to the left lane for a left turn and getting trapped by a platoon of overtaking cars, when you could have merged earlier in a long gap between platoons and been where you needed to be when they began to overtake you. Another example is using a gap to swoop clear to the opposite side of to road and then ride against traffic to the left turn.
• Facility-induced ignorance: riding through a door zone or into the blind spot of a truck because the paint stripe leads there.
• Groupthink: from club rides to charity rides to critical mass, groups of cyclists can be some of the most frustratingly mindless road users. Some practice submissive inferiority behavior at the expense of group safety. Some use their feeling of empowerment to treat the road like a playground (to the point of endangering other bicyclists). Some just mindlessly follow route marks without thinking about anything (I watched a group on an MS ride, swoop across 3 lanes of traffic when they encountered a left-pointing route arrow).

Unlocking our mindfulness

Whether we are alone or in a group, we all have a responsibility to be mindful individuals.

Becoming a mindful cyclist is much more a psychological process than a mechanical one. Unlike other vehicle drivers, knowledge and experience alone doesn’t take us all the way to mindful practices. Simply teaching a person the mechanics of safe cycling doesn’t always change their behavior. Information is an important component, but it takes more than that to overcome the mythologies and change our self-perception.

Achieving optimal situation awareness, safety and ease of travel on my bicycle required not only understanding the dynamics, but overcoming my enculturation into staying out of the way. Once I opened the hatch and jettisoned that baggage, I was able to achieve the same zen state of mindful bicycling that I experienced as a motorcycle driver.

As a cycling instructor, I’m always looking for the key that unlocks that hatch for students. My end goal is not to deliver information, but to inspire transformation.

Mindful advocacy

The best accommodation a community can offer for cycling is an ongoing, sustainable education system which nurtures and empowers mindful, safe, effective bicycle drivers. The result is good for bicyclists, bicycling and the community at large.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV3gfabmrnc

Just for fun, here’s another video of a cyclist (well, 2 cyclists, one is wearing the camera) riding assertively, safely and comfortably in a wide lane (Goldenrod Rd, south of University Blvd.):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glQzlKSiW4w

Comparing the videos, is it not clear who really benefits from the bike lane?

Step back from the all-consuming need to “promote cycling” and ask yourself, how does it benefit cyclists to punish the competent and knowledgeable in an effort to offer a hollow illusion to the uninformed and fearful?

If advocates could get over the bike lane distraction, perhaps they would focus on the real problems of connectivity.  Winter Park has exacerbated those problems by converting asphalt to rough, unevenly-laid bricks on most of its already-limited quiet connector roads. Routes I used regularly 15 years ago are now virtually unrideable. But in the name of symbolism, they’re intent on wrecking the thoroughfares, too. Thanks.

The Goldenrod Road and Mills pre-bike-lane videos were shot by Brian DeSousa of CyclistView. The Mills post-bike-lane video was shot by John S. Allen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdlpJqHxLxk

WARNING: Turn down the volume before playing.

In October, CyclistView videographer, Brian DeSousa, shot video of me riding through downtown on my Surly. I never got around to publishing it, but I showed it to friends. Many were very surprised that it could be so easy. It never occurred to them that they could ride on Orange Avenue before seeing the video. Well, that gave Mighk and me an idea. We needed to shoot this with a comfort bike! So on Brian’s last visit, we did.

Here you go. Imagine the “feel” of our city and how it would change people’s perceptions and expectations if this was a common sight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu5V_qUagGc

Aside from the lousy pavement, downtown Orlando is an easy and friendly environment for biking. You don’t need special facilities, athletic prowess, a “fast bike” or nerves of steel. Riding in downtown traffic does not require speed or vigilance. All you need are a few simple skills and a calm assertiveness that comes from your belief that you belong on the road.

You can help change the face of our community. Get out there and ride on the roads like you mean it!

Thank you Brian for the exceptional video work! You have given us a tremendous gift! And many thanks to Retro City Cycles for letting me ride the Schwinn Jenny (that thing was fun!).