Life in the Non-Lane

Life in the Non-Lane

Riding daily on roads not designed for bicycles, I’ve had more than enough close calls with motor vehicles. “Not designed” is being nice. Most of the roads around here—somewhere in northeastern South Carolina—concede nothing to non-motorized two-wheel travel. Go ahead, try me, they seem to say. And I do. I have no choice.

Bicycles belong on roads. You take the roads you’re dealt. It took me a long time to accept this lousy deal.

During my first ten years in South Carolina I stayed off the paved roads, focusing instead on “mountain” biking, which was okay even though there isn’t a mountain within two hundred miles of my driveway. Why okay? Because dirt is what matters, not elevation, and there was plenty of dirt to console me.

A transplant from the state of Maine, which is something like 95% forested, I was delighted to find endless miles of sand-pack fire-road and single-track threading the vast regional woods of the Low Country. They were mine, all mine. Year after year passed without me once seeing another mountain bike in my wild domain. With each ride into the interior I discovered wonders: patches of primeval swamps, groves of pitcher plants, flocks of wild turkeys a-wing. I saw more bears, feral pigs, and coyotes than I did hunters or wardens in trucks.

But this couldn’t last; as it did in many resort areas in the south, suburbanization took off in the nineties. “Progress” took its toll on nature. Now it’s 2015: tens of thousands of acres of “my” local woodlands have been clear-cut for subdivisions, scores of them, built by corporations who tag their properties with a cute bucolic name—The Farm, Pelican Pointe, Waterford Plantation, Sawgrass Lakes—none of which mask the fact they these artificial “neighborhoods” and their schools, gas stations, churches, parks, parking lots, fast food restaurants, and strip malls are the antithesis of the natural setting their names pretend to embody. To my knowledge, in not one of these so-called neighborhoods is a bike lane to be found within the well-groomed streets or on the perimeter.

I tired of contending with NO TRESPASSING signs, locked gates, playing fields, golf courses, community centers closing off another cut-through, patrols, and outposts for utility crews. So I hung up the mountain bike and bought a road bike and soon, out of necessity, became an authority on life in the non-lane.

Figure 1: Typical.

Figure 1 invites the reader to extrapolate visually the availability of land to the right of the white line: a perfect setting for a bike path. This is the main artery on the campus of a nearby community college. As you’ve deduced, this campus has no bike path, bike lane, or—surprise, surprise—bicyclists.

Within a ten-mile radius of my front door, the same thing: no bike lane, no bike path. In two of the four directions, that radius extends for hundreds of miles.

Figure 2: The widest clearance in the area but not officially designated a bike lane. Speed limit is 45; most cars exceed that by at least ten mph. Eighteen-wheelers and RVs make for crowded company. Note the very rare wide sidewalk, unfortunately not safe (dips, entrances, debris, seams, walkers) for bicycles. It is also quite short, about ½ mile in length, doing the cyclist little good. To get where I need/want to go, I ride this road hundreds of times a year.

I hesitate to name my home city not only because in many ways it’s a charming little metropolis but also because I prefer to maintain anonymity on the personal as well as the public level. Unless you live in Portland, Oregon, Madison, Wisconsin, or some other haven for cyclists, your town probably resembles mine in that it lacks basic infrastructure for pedaling, which means you understand me when I say my town is a sketchy place for bicyclists.

Figure 3: The dreaded rumble-strip. These increase safety for incompetent, inattentive, or impaired motorists while increasing the danger even for expert bicyclists. Since traffic to the left of the strip is heavy, loud, and fast, I stick to the slim margin pictured, only, however, when riding on wide tires (32mm and above) for better stability and handling. It would be insane to attempt this narrow corridor on a stiff short-wheelbase racing bike with rock-hard 23mm tires, especially when you factor into the equation pieces of glass, clumps of overgrown grass, and other obstacles (including, alas, a dead animal, which has been decomposing for months in the same spot) that could easily throw your bike into the rumble-strip, where intense judder could cause a crash or send you flying into the right lane, or into the grass, where you would most likely pitch sideways into a litter-strewn ditch, breaking your neck in the process. Paradoxically, it’s best to ride these narrow quasi-lanes at a smart pace, as if signaling this message to cars: “I will not be intimidated, I will speed too.”

It’s true that in a bigger city ten miles southeast a rider can take his chances on a patchy network of poorly maintained bike paths. In that city, a famous tourist attraction, it’s safer to ride on the streets, dodging cars, manholes, and water department hook-ups that pock-mark the pavement, than it is to pick your way through a bike lane interrupted by hundreds of turn-offs into hotels, gift shops, condos, and eateries. The all but useless bike lane in this city is more like a confused blend of breakdown lane, sidewalk, corridor for joggers, and zone for idling tour buses, delivery trucks, and gawking tourists. No bicyclist can hope to travel its length without braking and swerving at least ten times per mile.

Figure 4: A curve, a few inches of shoulder, a drop-off, a crash waiting to happen. Note land to the right, perfect for a bike path. Our local community college at work.

Figure 5: Good surface, bad shoulder, but relatively wide for this area. The lack of rumble-strip provides some left-side wiggle room.

I study shoulders, calculating the odds to the left, to the right. Rather than fall prey to despair, however, I see the worst of them as skill-builders. Rumble-strips, for instance, are so bad that I had to learn to stay centered as I pedaled, as fast as possible given the traffic roaring past me, down the tight space available. I had to learn to dial out automotive noise. I had to find a center in the narrow lane and in my head too. I had to improve my pedal stroke—steady, clean, strong. I had to trust my eyes to focus on the sweet-spot about fifteen feet ahead. A cardinal truth: The bike will go where you look. In this situation, fifteen feet ahead is the best place to look.

I may add more images of shoulders to this post, making it the only “pull of the day” subject to revision.

It should be said that well-paved wide shoulders are delightful. This summer in west central Maryland I rode one such shoulder—it had to be twenty feet wide—for about thirty miles. What pleasure.

An earlier, much longer, draft of this post sounded too much like a jeremiad, cars and city planners receiving the brunt of my indignation. I guess I needed to get something off my chest. Since I don’t want to dwell on bad things in Pull of the Day, I started over. For what good will venting and blaming do? I live where I live and that’s that. I love bicycling as much as ever, non-lanes notwithstanding. I’d rather be spinning on my Rivendell in a narrow shoulder than be driving the Mercedes whooshing past me. I’d rather be sitting on my Brooks B-17 than in the heated leather seat of an Escalade. Any day.

The last word on shoulder-riding has yet to be written. It’s an aspect of bicycling that deserves further analysis.

As you navigate the wide variety of shoulders on your bikes, avoiding debris but otherwise staying straight and true, I wish you luck. Please do the same for me.

Roadysseus

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