A few weeks ago, a local listserv debate over the Constitutionality of bike lanes devolved into a rather asinine comparison between vehicular separation and racial segregation. In an effort to raise the level of discussion over whether bike lanes are good for cyclists, local cyclist Steve Goodridge and I wrote point/counter-point Op-Eds for the Herald Sun. Enjoy.

Lanes do their job
Phillip Barron
Guest columnist, The Herald-Sun

Just two weeks ago, Main Street was one-way through downtown Durham. City officials closed the street Saturday and reopened it for traffic going in both directions. How do drivers know the difference?

City leaders ceremoniously proclaimed its transformation from the stage at Durham Rising, the party celebrating downtown's rebirth. Several newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts have mentioned it. Maps of downtown Durham will be redrawn at some point. But many people will simply discover that Main Street is now a two-way street when they drive downtown and see the fresh yellow double line separating the lanes.

Lines on the road serve a purpose.

The yellow and white strips of reflective paint that city and state governments use on asphalt help to guide traffic. Drivers respond well to these guidelines, and that's exactly why there are lanes to facilitate the safe flow of traffic. We live (and drive) in an era when competition for drivers' attention revolves around anything but keeping the driver's eyes on the road. Cell phones, iPods, DVD players, and even video games have found a home inside automobiles. Lanes assist drivers whose attention may be split between Gnarls Barkley on the radio, Mortal Kombat in the back seat, a dentist on the other end of the phone and traffic.

Bike lanes do the same thing for drivers and cyclists that other lanes do. They guide all vehicles into predictable places on the road so that each person can safely go where she or he needs to go. The Pedestrian and Bicycling Information Center at UNC-Chapel Hill defines bike lanes as "a portion of the roadway which has been designated by striping , signing and pavement marking for the preferential or exclusive use by bicyclists."

By carving out a dedicated space on the road for bicycles, bike lanes remind drivers that they share the road with all different kinds of vehicles. As Nancy Gallman of Durham put it, "bike lanes create the expectation that bikes will be on the road, even if they aren't there right now." They train drivers to expect cyclists, and they welcome cyclists onto the road.

Bike lanes are critical for creating a bike-friendly community in one more way -- they calm traffic. A typical outer lane is 14-feet wide. A 14-foot outer lane looks pretty wide, and traffic engineers know that drivers speed on wide roads. A 10-foot outer lane, however, looks a lot more narrow, and drivers naturally (if not subconsciously) drive more slowly. It simply requires more concentration to keep your car in your lane if your lane is narrow.

We can reduce outer-lane width to ten feet by using the remaining four feet for a bike lane. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials sets their minimum bike lane width at four feet. Those four feet have to be asphalt -- the bike lane can't push cyclists into the gutter. Nor would a well-designed bike lane be painted next to parked cars where cyclists would be forced to ride in the "door zone".

Granted, there are many examples of poorly designed bike lanes, some of which make riding more dangerous for cyclists than it would be without a bike lane. Just look at Duke University's Campus Drive bike lane for a local example. But poorly designed bike lanes are unsafe because they are poorly designed.

Further, cyclists are permitted full use of the road in North Carolina. If the bike lane is unsafe -- because of gravel, pot holes, or any other reason -- then cyclists are free to move out of it. Cyclists, like drivers, are expected to choose the safest means of travel.

Well-designed bike lanes foster safe riding; they do this best when bike lanes are part of a larger network of safe roads and greenways. Durham's new bike plan is a master plan for how Durham can use bike lanes safely and effectively. When designing them, let's make sure they go somewhere and they are safe, because cyclists are likely to use bike lanes when they connect to neighborhoods, workplaces, and recreation centers.

As a recent Herald-Sun editorial noted, Durham will see more cyclists hit the streets as gas prices continue to rise. The most important thing the city and county can do to foster Durham's growing bike community is to adopt design standards that take cyclists into consideration when designing and maintaining all roads.

Phillip Barron is a member of the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, a citizens group advising local government how to make Durham more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. He can be reached at pbarron@gmail.com.

URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862926.cfm

Please hold the stripes
Steven Goodridge, Guest columnist

"Get in the &@$# bike lane!" yelled the driver of a pickup as I approached my left turn at the stop sign, my bike a few feet right of the centerline. It wasn't the first time that a motorist had harassed me for riding outside of a bike lane since the city had striped them on the otherwise quiet residential streets near my home. But it was a clear indication of just how little some people understand about bicycle operation in traffic, and how striping separate pavement for bicycles can have an unfriendly effect on cyclists.

Literally billions of miles of bicycling by experienced cyclists and countless studies of crash data have shown that, as noted cycling educator John Forester has written, "cyclists fare best when they act, and are treated, as drivers of vehicles." This is why cyclists are classified as drivers by the traffic laws in all 50 states. If you, the cyclist, want to get to your destination efficiently and in one piece, the best approach is to follow the basic rules of the road for drivers. Among these rules are destination positioning at intersections (making left turns from near the center of the road, right turns from right edge of the road, straight travel in between), speed positioning between intersections (faster traffic overtakes on the left, slower traffic operates to the right), and looking back and yielding to nearby traffic before changing lane position. With a little practice, these rules and related defensive driving skills make it possible to travel by bike virtually anywhere, safely and efficiently.

The trouble with marking part of the roadway surface as "bikes-only" is that this type of separation often conflicts with the best positioning of vehicle traffic under the rules of the road. If the motorist is turning right, he should approach the intersection from a position as far to the right as practicable. If the cyclist is passing slower traffic, he should do so on the left, not on the right. Curbside bike lanes encourage both parties to use the wrong positions, too often leading to tragic consequences like the December collision between a right-turning dump truck and a cyclist in a bike lane at Duke University. For their own safety, cyclists must often leave the bike lane and take a position farther left in order align themselves with their destination and improve their visibility to other drivers at intersections and driveways, where over 95 percent of urban car-bike collisions occur due to turning and crossing movements. Cyclists who drive defensively must also leave bike lanes that are striped where parked cars' doors can extend, or that have accumulated hazardous debris. (Bike lanes are notorious for collecting debris because motor traffic then no longer blows it off that portion of the roadway.)

"OK," some might say, "so maybe the stripes cause some problems. But don't they protect cyclists from cars and trucks between intersections?" Surprisingly, no. I've tried for years to uncover a documented safety benefit for cyclists. Only about 4 to 5 percent of car-bike collisions involve overtaking traffic, and there is no evidence that these collisions are made less likely by a stripe. According to police reports, most of these overtaking-type collisions involve roads that are too narrow to add bike lane stripes, where drivers overtook too closely to cyclists who were hugging the edge of a narrow lane. (In narrow lanes, traveling near the center of the lane reduces close passing by prompting overtaking drivers to slow down or to "unstuck" from the lane and move left.) These collisions are practically nonexistent where the lanes are wider -- 14 feet to 16 feet or more is recommended -- making it easy for motor vehicle operators to pass cyclists safely. Meanwhile, striping the edges of streets often increases motor traffic speeds by better delineating the clear roadway -- a phenomenon some traffic engineers call the "gun-barrel effect."

Bike lane striping is the only traffic control device that cyclists must routinely disregard for their own safety. Instead of reducing dangerous passing or harassment -- which rarely occur if the roadway is wide enough -- separation of traffic by vehicle type confuses the public about proper driving and where cyclists belong. Cyclists benefit most if the public understands that every street -- including those not wide enough for bike lanes -- is a legitimate bicycle facility. We don't need to separate drivers by class to share the road more effectively. We need wider pavement for passing, and better public understanding of cyclists' rights and responsibilities as drivers.

Steven Goodridge is an avid bike commuter and a League of American Bicyclists certified cycling instructor.

URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862928.cfm.

Posted by nicomachus at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote an earlier version of the story for The Urban Hiker, which was one of the best collections of local writing. When I moved to Durham, this magazine helped me quickly get a sense of my community. The Urban Hiker stopped publication in December 2004; I don't think it went under because of my submission, but I guess you never know.

Posted by nicomachus at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state's council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina's method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA's employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it's not clear whether the State's death penalty will be.

Photo courtesy of the Socialist Party of North Carolina

The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we're special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.

The stratification of species with which we're so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.

Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals -- locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.

Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.

Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.

We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.

Some say it's time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.

The change has to begin somewhere. It's exciting to see Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won't do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there's something objectionable about the way we imprison people.

As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.

This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title "Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals."

Posted by nicomachus at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

printer-friendly html
printer-friendly pdf

Phillip Barron
Originally published in the Radical Philosophy Review, Volume Three, Number One (2000) (pp. 89-96)

Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system's primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.

Continue reading "Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System" »

Posted by nicomachus at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an effort to better organize my site, I've created a new category of posts -- published works. Posts in this category will be links to other websites or, when I have permission, reproductions of texts that I've published elsewhere.

Posted by nicomachus at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phillip Barron
Originally published in the News of the National Humanities Center

Poetry, says Piotr Sommer (2004-05 Hurford Family Fellow at the National Humanities Center), is the "basic cognitive instrument" by which he measures life, "almost a way to deal with the misunderstandings and miscommunications of the world."

Editor of the Warsaw-based journal Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer divides his time between writing poetry, writing about poetry, and translating Anglo-American poetry into his native Polish. Literatura na Swiecie gathers together foreign literature into Polish translations, most often but not always contemporary literature. Sommer translates the journal's title as "somewhere between 'Literature in the World' and 'World Literature.'" To Sommer, the "somewhere between" symbolizes that even simple cultural concepts do not translate comfortably.

Through Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer is responsible for introducing or reacquainting Polish readers with such luminaries as Jacques Derrida and John Cage. A 1986 issue of Literatura na Swiecie on the New York Poets has been cited as perhaps the single most influential collection of American poetry on the Polish literary community.

Sommer has published two books during his residence at the Center and is spending his fellowship working on two others. Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), his first book-length collection of poetry translated into English, gathers poems from his previous Polish publications. Po Stykach (Slowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2005) is a collection of his essays on Polish and Anglo-American poetry and on the art of translation.

In Polish, Sommer explains, 'po stykach' is a "concise slangy phrase, so rich that I really cannot translate it into English in one phrase. It suggests doing something along delicate lines, which can be lines of contact or lines of argument. It contains the concept of borderlines as well. And also a sense of touch—in Polish, 'styk' means touch."

His current projects include a book-length examination of the influence of twentieth-century American poets such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Charles Reznikoff on contemporary poets in Poland. He's also finishing a Polish-translation anthology of American poets he's "been excited by in the last twenty years."

A poet who writes and a poet who translates, he claims, are different people. "Writing poetry in your own language, you both control it and let it behave the way it wants to behave," he explains. "You can allow it quite a bit of pleasure and freedom. You can even let it outpace you." A translating poet, on the other hand, doesn't want to give the foreign text a lesson, or correct the author's voice. "You study the original, see what you can do with it, and find a way to bring things into your own language," Sommer says.

When translating, he continues, "you must be prepared to take into account every single ingredient that works for the desired result in your language, to find the multiple levels of meaning, beginning with, let's say, such a basic unit as the sentence." Being careful, however, he cautions, "doesn't exclude freedom in the new language, naturally, because the result still must be beautiful. And because the new language doesn't have to—or sometimes cannot—behave like the original."

It takes tremendous effort but also serendipity for a poem to translate well into another language, Sommer notes. Between double meanings and colloquial expressions, translating is a process that constantly asks the question, "How much can we stretch our syntax and still keep it beautiful in our language?" Finally, Sommer adds wistfully, a thoughtful translator also must be willing to accept that something beautiful in one language may not be possible in another.

Posted by nicomachus at 9:19 AM | Permalink

Phillip Barron
Originally published by BikeReader.

Sweet are those moments when all your skills converge and you clear a technical section with more grace than you thought possible. That's what I call flow. Others call it groovin' or dialed-in. “'Spots of time' was the phrase Wordsworth used for such moments,” says Appalachian writer Ron Rash, “but the poet's words were no better than mine because what I felt was beyond any words that had ever been used before. You need a new language.” I hope you've experienced what I'm talking about. It's a rush like no other. In the mountain bike community, there are as many reasons to ride as there are riders. It took 15 years of mountain biking and the experience of single-speed mountain biking for me to realize explicitly what I'd known only implicitly all along: to me, finding flow is my reason to ride.

For Wordsworth, spots were key moments in his life; they formed remarkably vivid memories. He talks about the compression of time, the heightened senses, the feeling of being inside something important. He experienced spots most consistently in nature, and although many call his experiences mystical Wordsworth denied any supernatural element to these moments. Rather, they are about as grounded in this earth as you can get.

I ride to find that state of flow in the woods. This doesn't mean that I ride slowly or on flat trails. There is a state of grace that a rider can achieve while riding over roots and rocks, through rollercoasters and bowls, over logs and logstacks, and all the while maintain speed. Flow is possible on a technical trail – it's just harder to find. But, the difficulty reaching it is what makes it so rewarding. It's about dabbing less, stepping out of the pedals as little as possible. It's about accepting what comes around the corner. It's about loving the challenge of the trail laid out before me.

In a state of flow I briefly forget that my bike and I are two separate things. I forget that I am a clumsy bi-ped who can't move gracefully down a mountain without help. I forget that it shouldn't be possible to travel this fast over roots, rocks, twists, and turns. I move so smoothly, so instinctively that it is difficult to say that I am responsible for my movements, since no deliberate act of will could fit so harmoniously into the environment. When in flow, I'm not totally in control of my actions. There's something else going on, something more than me, a bike, and a path. It's as though the three merge temporarily. Flow never lasts long – usually no longer than a few seconds at a time. But these moments, scattered throughout a two hour ride, convey a lifetime of experience.

The lifetime, the wisdom of these moments is what interests me most. Nietzsche took moments like these as evidence that the there is no end-point at which history is aiming. He knew, because he experienced moments of clarity where all the wisdom of eternity seemed within reach, that the present contains within it everything we need to find meaning in the world. “The world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment. What could ten more years teach that the past ten were unable to teach!” I don't know about history's aims or universal meanings, but I do know that the compression of time in these moments is something special.

These moments are wise in the sense that every spot of time or moment of flow has taught me something. I've learned some new skill or that I'm capable of something I'd not experienced before. Compressed time isn't the same as time slowed down. Time slows down when you fall. You know you've lost your balance, you know you're past that critical point where you could have caught yourself, you know you're going to slam your shoulder into that rock. It all happens in slow motion, maybe because your mind is working twice as fast as normal.

Compressed time isn't slow – if anything, it's sped up. Maybe this is where we recover the time that slows down when we fall. Nor are spots of time or sessions of flow inevitable. When you fall, the crunch of the shoulder to the rock is inevitable; every thought that races through your mind before the crunch just delays what is guaranteed. Falling, no matter how drawn out, has a clear end. You see it coming.

But a spot of time is different; experiencing one is not guaranteed. Nor is it clear, while you're in one, how long it will last or even whether it will end. When you're in a spot of time, you aren't conscious of anything else – not even the fact that you're in it. You realize what just happened only when it's all over.

More than irregular, spots of time are also elusive. I never experience one when I try to. I know I'm more likely to experience one in the saddle of my single-speed than in front of a glowing computer monitor, but that's about it.

Before going single, I had my own ideas what to expect: tougher climbs; more cautious, thoughtful riding; keeping the momentum. What I wasn't prepared for was how quickly I felt freed from thinking about speeds and gears. My first few single-speed rides were experiences in liberation. I was focusing on the trail, not on the bike. I'm very comfortable with my bike – I've had it for four years, I have probably 6,000 off-road miles on it, and I've ridden it up and down the East Coast. But as a single-speed is the first time that the bike moves like it is an extension of me and not just a machine I manipulate. As a geared bike, at best, I just manipulated it well. Now, before turns or hills, I spend my time picking my lines, not my gears. Keeping momentum on climbs is a challenge of a different sort, though not as difficult as I expected.

Some people insist that a spot of time is something experienced in stillness. That clarity is something you achieve through meditation, cross-legged on the floor staring at a candle flame. Maybe. Like Wordsworth and Rash, I meditate in motion. There is a stillness, a calm, within flow, but it is more spiritual than physical. The urge to mountain bike comes from the soul. Riding in the woods is a spiritual experience, but not a religious or even a mystical one. Like Wordsworth, I've found greater solace in staying firmly planted on dirt.

Standing on dirt with me, Norman Maclean says of the elusive nature of these moments that “poets talk about 'spots of time,' but it is really [fly] fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.”

Continue reading "SSpots of Time" »

Posted by nicomachus at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)