Quibbles - July, 1999

Time passes by so fast...seems difficult to believe that we are beyond the half way mark of this season! Already, five of my nine tours have been completed. These include the two Peach Blossoms, Atsion, USPRO and the Atlantic Highlands. Did you miss these tours? If so, let me tell you a little something about each ride.

The first of the Peach Blossoms was held on April 10. The weather was wonderful and the Peach Trees were in bloom. This was the first major tour led by RePete for this year. Our group was small...but the beauty of the day compensated for the small turnout. The peach trees were in bloom with pink and white flowers as our group pulled into Brownies. We enjoyed a “Cuban” at this 50’s style eatery before taking to the mountains that surround Mullica Hill! The route took us through some of the best 50 miles in South Jersey. Also featured were such notable events as the climb up Breakneck Hill. The name alone is description enough. This prepared us for High Street...yes, we roller coasted through several more hills!! Did I hear someone say that South Jersey was flat?

The second of the Peach Blossom tours was on April 25. The weather repeated a great day and many of the trees were still in bloom along with some apple blossoms!! Two great rides and two great days...

Now on to the Atsion Tour. This was held on May 22 over some truly flat countryside going through Wheaton State Forest. We paused to refresh ourselves at Indian Mills WaWa before pushing on to Atsion Lake. The lake provided a welcomed site...a preview of summer. Here lifeguards were being trained for the crowds that would be arriving. The trip home offered a special bonus...a wedding. We stopped to see the bride and her party as they left the church. We were a curious site mixed among family and friends who were dressed in suits and gowns. Oh well...each family may have thought we were part of the “other” family. I am sure more then once the question was whispered, “who are they?” Now the answer being, “they are part of his family, I told her not to get involved with him!” Imagine if we came to the reception!!!

The USPRO Race in Philadelphia was held on June 6. This tour was full of adventures and misadventures mixed in with the excitement of the race. Details are located in Freewheel’n. You will find this yet another typical RePete tour!

Then the recently held Atlantic Highlands tour was ridden on June 27. We rode to the highest point on the Atlantic Seacoast south of Maine! From this vista the Sandy Hook Coastline along with the skyline of New York City was viewed. This is the most challenging of the Quest Tours...but the effort is rewarded. The return trip allowed a breather with speeds over 35mph!!!

RePete extends his thanks to all that participated on these tours!


Now...if you are one of the few that somehow did not join in on fun and excitement of these tour, there are still four more remaining!! Let’s take a look at each...

Fort Mercer: A journey into the past to Red Bank Battlefield. Date: Sunday, July 25.

Smithville: The charm and splendor of a quaint restored village. Date: Saturday, August 21.

Four Lakes: Not one, or two, nor three but four post card like vistas! Date: Saturday, September 11.

Piney Hallow: The last for this season...don’t miss it! Date: Sunday: October, 31.

You can get full details of each on these rides by simply clicking on the name of the ride.


RePete has some wonderful news to share with you. Regular visitors to this site will recall that a special appeal was made last year. A very close “friend” had lost their job because of a merger. A request was made for help finding employment for this cycling buddy. Well, I am happy to announce that you can stop sending in the suggestions and job offers...this “friend” has accepted a position. The details provide an attractive package and keeps this individual within the same industry.


RePete is a confirmed roadie...none of those off-the-road trails for him. Riding on the road does mean having the knowledge and awareness of safe riding techniques. Different aspects of sharing the road with motorist will be presented beginning with:

“Where to Ride on the Road.”
We’ve all seen bicyclist who wander from left side to right, who go from the sidewalk to the street and who weave in and out between parked cars. From moment to moment, nobody can tell what these bicyclists are about to do. Pedestrians jump back, and car brakes squeal as such bicyclists approach.

On the other hand, we’ve seen bicyclist who seem to blend into the traffic flow smoothly and effortlessly. You always know where they are headed and what to do around them, whether you’re on a bicycle, in a car or on foot. They make bicycling look easy - but aren’t they taking a risk? Isn’t it safer to avoid the traffic as much as possible?

Part of the Traffic Pattern
With very few exception, the safest way to ride is as part of the traffic, going with the flow of the normal traffic pattern. Generally, the more you follow the normal traffic pattern, the safer and more predictable you become. The rules of the road set up a pattern for every situation.

Riding right begins with riding on the right. Some bicyclist think they’re safer on the left, where they can see cars coming, but riding on the left is actually one of the biggest causes of car-bike accidents. If you ride in violation of the traffic laws, you greatly increase your risk of an accident. You also give up all of your rights. If you get into an accident, the counts will almost always find that it was your fault!

Where Is the Road Edge?
Generally, the usable width of the road begins where you can ride without increased danger of falls, jolts or blowouts. A road may have a shoulder, its edge may be covered with sand or trash or the pavement may be broken. Don’t ride there. Closer to the center, there’s better pavement, which is swept clean of sand and debris by the passing cars. The right side of the road begins here.

Most bicycle accident are simple falls or are caused by hazards in front of you. Train your eyes to scan the scene ahead, and look for blindspots. Ride far enough into the lane to avoid the risk from these blindspots. If you ride too close to parked cars on your right, you can’t see around them into side streets and driveways. Where there are parked cars, the usable width of the street begins about 3 feet out from them - or from a wall, hedge or other obstruction. As you approach a blind intersection or driveway, you should be even farther from the edge of the road - imagine a car hood poking out. Don’t ride in this danger zone!

Sure, many people - even some bicycling “experts” - will tell you, “Always keep as far to the right as possible,” and, “Look out for opening car doors.” But at speeds above 5 miles per hour, you can’t stop in time to avoid a car door. Your only choice is to swerve out into the street - maybe into the path of a passing car. It much safer to ride in a predictable, straight line, where everyone can see you.

Extra-Wide Lanes
If the road has a paved shoulder or an extra-wide right lane, don’t ride all the ay over at the right edge. Instead, keep riding in a straight line 3 or 4 feet to the right of the cars. Stay at a steady distance from the left side of the right lane.

If you stay all the way over at the right edge of the shoulder, you’re much more likely to be cut off by a right turning car - and when this happens, it’s harder for you to avoid an accident. By the time you see the car, it will be blocking your path. If you’re closer to the car, you can turn with it and avoid an accident.

There’s only one important exception to this rule. In several states, it’s legal for bicyclist to ride in high speed limited-access highways. Here, you can ride at the right side of the shoulder, avoiding the wind blast from big trucks. Except at the on and off ramps, limited-access highways have no cross traffic, so there’s no problem with turning cars or pedestrians.

Riding In A Narrow Lane
On a narrow two-lane, two-way road, stay alert to strings of cars from the front, in case one pulls into your lane to pass. You can ride near the edge of this type of road if cars are coming from only one direction at a time. Then cars from the rear can pass you without having to move as far into the other lane.

But if cars are coming from both directions, you have to take control of the situation. You can’t take chances that the drivers behind you will try to pass you in oncoming traffic. Glance behind you, and if there’s traffic there, take the first opportunity to merge safely to the middle of the right lane. Also merge to the middle of the right lane at a blind curve where there might be oncoming traffic. On a right curve in a narrow lane, this technique make you visible earlier to the drivers behind you.

It may seem dangerous to make a motorist slow for you, but it’s not. The usual reason that bicyclist feel unsafe on narrow roads is that they do not take control of the situation. Remember, the drivers behind you don’t have room to pass you safely anyway. If you ride all the way over at the right, you’re inviting them to pass you where the road is too narrow and, too often, you will get squeezed off the road. If you show clearly that it’s not safe for drivers to pass you, they’re unlikely to try.

On a road with two or more narrow lanes in your direction - like many city streets - you should ride in the middle of the right lane at all times.

When you Go Faster Than Cars
If you’re going as fast as the cars, pull into line with them. When riding down a hill at high speed, you need more room to steer and brake

Your correct position on the road follows a sensible set of rules, the same as for a car driver. Keep to right if you’re going slowly, but pull to the left to pass. The way you carry out these rules is just a little different, since your bicycle is narrow and usually slow.

Before you pass, look back for traffic to make sure that you can pull safely into the passing lane. Don’t sneak along next to the traffic. Give extra distance to a big truck or bus! Sometimes, the car, bus or truck you’re passing will pick up speed while you’re still next to it. Then just keep the same position in the land and brake lightly if necessary to fall back. When you’re behind, look bake to the right for traffic, then merge back to your normal position in the right lane.


Use these directions sensibly...be ready to modify and change them based on the unique situation. Remember on over-riding commandment of cyclist...in an accident, ties go to the motorist. In the next update, RePete will review Riding Through Intersections.

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*My thanks to Rodale Press, Inc., the publishers of Bicycling Magazine and especially to John S. Allen for “Street Smarts - Bicycling’s Traffic Survival Guide” that provided the information in this article.

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Road Warrior - Part 1

The traffic engineer has a battle plan to make the streets safe for democracy.

Gihon Jordan is annoyed. Some idiot driving a cable television truck had cut him off this morning as he was cycling south on Third Street, and then - the gall of some people - the moron had pulled over and strolled into a bar!

Gihon Jordan dislikes rude, inconsiderate people. He especially dislikes reckless drivers and maniacs in motor vehicles who disrespect pedestrians and bicyclists, who have as much right to the road, Jordan insists, as those behind the wheel.

Jordan is on the phone now. For more than an hour, he’s been trying to reach someone at the cable company who will listen seriously to his complaint and make sure the impolite driver is disciplined.

Most people would have shrugged it off - just another indignity of urban life in fin de siecle America. But Jordan is not like most people. For on thing, he’s crazy.

Not insane - asylum crazy (yet), but crazy in the way of dreamers and visionaries. For instance, Jordan believes that people belong in cities and that cities should be civilized. He believes they should be peaceful, safe and easy to around. He believes people who live in cities should be citizens - that is, they should be courteous, they should care about the commonwealth, and they should exercise their citizenship by not letting thugs and galoots break what others make, ruin things for everybody, and jeopardize the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by, for instance, cutting you off as you’re pedaling south on Third Street.

That’s why Jordan’s spending half his morning tangling with the cable company. That’s why, when you mention his name, co-workers and associates roll their eyes and shake their heads. “That’s Gihon,” they say, in a tone of voice ranging from admiration to exasperation. “He’s crazy.”

It is a heartening fact. For Gihon (pronounced GUY - um) Jordan, 44, is a city bureaucrat. Specifically, he’s a traffic engineer in the Street Department. He is not, by a long shot, the only crazy person on the city payroll (City Council comes to mind). But to the extent Jordan’s craziness is a function of genius, passion and determination, he is a rarity among, a work force famous as a refuge for hacks, clock-punchers and officious, by-the-book brain donors.

He is, by profession and inclination, a futurist. He has spent most of his life in the planning business, and in recent years he’s earned national recognition as an expert on “traffic calming.”

Traffic calming?

Jordan sees it as nothing less than the salvation of the nation’s cities, and Philadelphia in particular. Traffic is strangling our urban centers, slowing the progress of trade and transportation, endangering the lives of pedestrians and bicyclists, fouling the air with poison, assaulting the ears with an ever-[resent din, making cities stressful and unpleasement.

Traffic calming means slowing traffic down and thinning traffic out. it means getting more people into fewer cars. or, better yet, getting them out of cars and into buses, trains and trolleys or onto bicycles and their feet. It means thing like the Chestnut Street Transway and the bike paths along the river drives. It means putting cops on bikes and converting expensive stoplight intersections to safer stop-sing intersections. it means lowering speed limits, temporarily closing street (like South Street and West River Drive), installing speed bumps on residential streets, and raising the price of meter parking to get cars off the street so the entire width can be used and the moving traffic will do just that - move.

“I don’t want to move vehicles around,” says Jordan. “I want to move people around.

“Philadelphia is an extremely livable city because it was designed for the pedestrian, not for the car. In an economically competitive world, we’ve got to go with our innate strengths. Let’s not retrofit the car into a system not designed for it.

“An awful lot of people are tired of subsidizing the destruction of their lives by the automobile. It’s time to stop subsidizing the problem and start accommodating the solution. The US. is the Third World when it comes to public transportation. While SEPTA is starving, we’re spending millions to avoid the slightest inconvenience to cars.

“People’s basic desires are pretty simple: They want good things for their loved ones, healthy families, and to live in a place that is safe, clean, quiet and friendly. Philadelphia can be that kind of place - with a balance, equitable transportation system.”

Gihon Jordan is a slender wiry man who moves with the nervous energy of a squirrel. His all-cotton dress shirts are usually wrinkled, and he combs his sandy blond hair straignt back in the manner of a mad scientist. His mind is fertile, protean, quick - presenting, in rapid, dazzling succession, facts suggestive of Buckminster Fuller, Edmund Bacon, Thomas Edison, Rube Goldber, Gandhi, Dr. Seuss and Pee-wee Herman.

He was born in Syracuse, New York, and grew up in Edison, New Jersey. He is the grandson of a civil engineer and Penn professor who supervised the construction of U.S. Route 2 in Montana. At Penn, Jordan majored in electrical engineering and studied religious thought. He earned a graduate degree in energy management and took business courses at Wharton. For 2 1/2 years, he pedaled his Peugeot on a grand tour across America, covering 20,000 miles and visiting 40 states, Mexico and Canada. (He recently returned from a bicycling vacation in Uganda.) He ran a house-call bike-repair business then wrote environmental impact statements and long-range master plans for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. When he worked for the city Planning Commission, he assembled a prize-winning redevelopment plan and data bank for North Philadelphia.

His first name comes from the Old Testament (“I’m on Page 2 of Genesis; Adam and Eve are on Page 3”). He is a peace-loving Quaker who calls himself “an ethicist.” An environmentalist and an expert on air pollution, he bicycles or takes the trolley to work and has never owned a car. Explains Jordan, “I have a high IQ.”

He is a champion of “criteria-based decision-making” and “win-win-win solutions.” An incorrigible optimist, he fearlessly faces challenges packing “a goal and a vision” and spouting such Gihonisms as:
“If you ask the wrong question, you’ll always get the wrong answer.”
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem look like a nail.”
And, pace Albert Einstein, “You cannot solve the problem using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place.”

His eyes dart from side to side, his synapses spark, sputter and arc, and who knows what will issue from his mouth. One moment, he is mimicking you mother, scolding you in a cartoony, high pitched voice: “Now, Artie, don’t ride your bike on the big road.” The next minute, he’s lapsed into academic mode, lecturing you, chalk in hand, about “uncosted negative externalities.”

He works in a cramped corner office with another traffic engineer on the 11th floor of the former Insurance Company of North America building at 16th and Arch. The walls are decorated with bumper stickers (“Share the Road With Bicycles”), signs (“My other car is a bicycle”), posters and photos (one showing downtown Ho Chi Minh City, its wide boulevards filled with nothing but bicycles), and mottoes and inspirational saying (“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age” - Albert Einstein). The look is homely, disheveled, like the collage dorm of a rather earnest idealist who is a flat-out, storm-the-ramparts radical when it comes to The Cause - namely, bicycle transportation and the rights of cyclists.

Leaning against the wall in one corner is a traffic signal, lit up like a Christmas Tree. It is no ordinary signal because the red light is the product not of a standard incandescent bulb but of semiconductor technology - specifically LED’s, light-emitting diodes. “An ordinary traffic-signal light bulb last 6,000 hours; an LED lasts 100,000 hours,” Jordan rhapsodizes. “We’ve got 3,000 signalized intersections in the city. That’s 30,000 signal faces and 100,000 bulbs, which we have to replace every year. We spend $2 million for electricity alone. LED’s are three times the price initially, but they use only one-fifth the power and last 10 times longer.”

Part of Jordan;s job is trouble-shooting. His district encompasses Center City, North and South Philadelphia, and the river wards. He’s responsible, he says, for “everything that happens”: missing street signs, road marking, the placement of no parking signs. A large portion of his day is spent attending meetings, fielding complaints, refereeing disputes, and catching flak from irate citizens and politician (What moron put up the no parking sign in front of my house?”)

Those are the duties spelled out in hob description, the trivia and ephemera that generally interfere with what he regards as his real work - solving big picture problems with rule-breaking convention-defying, bureaucracy-busting vision and common sense.

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Part 2 will be in the next update of Quibbles and will include Gihon Jordan’s ideas for traffic signals, signage, cops on bike and road shoulders.

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My thanks to Art Carey of the Philadelphia Inquirer for this article.
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H E L P !! Are there any editors out there that are interested to help with this site? RePete needs your help! If you know some HTML coding, or simple can provide articles of interest to us cyclist...then email me and volunteer you services. Your name will become forever a part of this ever growing web site as a guest editor. You can submit most anything...just ensure there is a cycling tie-in. Don’t be shy...email me now!!


And along this same thought...the task of maintaining this web site has grown greatly. Rather than lower the quality and mass produce a cookie cutter site full of the same dribble as in other sites, RePete has decided to reduce the frequency that Quibbles is updated. This will now be released 5 times a year rather than the 8 times under the current schedule. Therefore, the next update will be scheduled for late summer/early fall. Freewheel’n will continue to released monthly except in December. You can continue to view these while waiting for the next Quibbles...


Until then...Safe Cycling...and have a great cycling Summer!

RePete
7/5/99

You can now visit Freewheel’n. These are also submitted and published in the South Jersey Wheelmen’s monthly newsletter. You can read my latest release by visiting this site after the middle of each month.

Then there are the Quale sites where topics are varied, like the highly imaginative Tales of Pauline.

Also visit the Quote site that contain your comments. Here you will find submissions on Bicyclist Against Helmets and many other issues and links. Additionally, don’t forget to visit the South Jersey Wheelmen and the Outdoor Club of South Jersey web sites.

The next update of Quibbles is scheduled for late summer/early fall and for now......have a

Great Summer!

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