New commute

The new commute is almost night-and-day different from the Lincoln commute, except with respect to the fact that both routes are technically primarily on bike paths. I say "technically" because the bike path here has a million stop signs along it, whereas the path in Lincoln had exactly none. So while it makes for a reasonably nice commute, it doesn't promote quite the same Zen-like state that facilitates writing bike commute haikus.

This morning, riding along, I noticed that there was a woman up ahead of me who seemed to be going at a fairly similar pace. Eventually, I realized that it was sytharin, so I caught up and we rode along together for a stretch. So that was fun.

I need to make some modifications to the Berkeley end of the route still. As a whole, the route goes: down a hill, along a bike path, then up a hill, with a couple of turns and traffic lights towards the Berkeley end of the route. As RAC has observed, while there's a lot of bike infrastructure here, most of what counts as infrastructure is stuff that has simply been slapped on top of the existing infrastructure, because there isn't a whole lot of space to put in things that are specifically for bikes without engaging in some extensive, expensive overhauls. Such overhauls tend to turn into politically intractable turf wars. I suspect that the bike path exists because it runs under the BART on land the government already owns. One of the roads that heads up the hill towards campus, Virginia Street, is labeled as a Bike Boulevard, which means there are giant bike symbols painted on the road, and purple signs that inform you that you are on a bike boulevard. There are also a handful of wayfinding signs, which are good to see, and strategic permeable membrane barricades to discourage motorists but allow cyclists to use the low-traffic road.

On the other hand, Virginia Street crosses two busy streets that lack any sort of signal control, which can lead to the stressful situation of being stopped at the intersection with cars piling up behind me while I wait for four lanes of traffic to clear. Californians aren't especially patient with other drivers, but in many cases they have learned to be patient with cyclists because there are just so.damn.many of us. However, the problem is that many people start riding bicycles here without ever learning traffic skills, so the bicycle-motorist relationship gets to be ambiguous. Some riders just willfully blow through intersections, which makes me anxious, and I presume makes motorists anxious as well. On the third hand, there are a ton of stop signs up everywhere, and if I were to stop at each and every one of the stop signs along my commute, it would probably double the amount of time the commute takes. Stopping and starting is also energetically expensive. To handle that, I am just going to make an effort to be as courteous as possible, stopping when appropriate and thanking people who stop and wait for me.

But back to the subject of crossing the busy roads. On Monday, on the ride home, I watched a cyclist approach one of these crossings, hop off her bicycle, walk it across in the crosswalk, and then hop back on. Whereas the bicycle-motorist relationship is a tad awkward and ambiguous, the motorist-pedestrian relationship seems to be much more clear: motorists MUST stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. I absolutely agree with this aspect of the hierarchy: pedestrians should universally have the right-of-way.

I tried this cyclist's strategy on my way home from work yesterday, and it worked magically well. I am still uncertain about how I feel about using it, though. It sounds like I may be able to avoid using it by fine-tuning my route further. But boy is there a lot to figure out with riding my bike here.

Here's one last major thing I'm puzzling over. In congested areas where the cars pile up at traffic lights, cyclists appear to nonchalantly forge ahead and jump the car line by passing on the right. This often occurs in between a row of parked cars and a row of stopped, waiting cars. In Arizona, I made the tactical decision to not engage in this style of passing-on-the-right because it can easily lead to a "right hook" accident (driver turning right cuts off the cyclist, who smashes into the side of the car). However, in Boston way back in the college days, I used to routinely do this along Mass Ave while biking to and from the boathouse, without major incident. I suspect drivers here are accustomed to paranoid checking for sneaker bicycles, but I don't see it as especially fair to jump the queue. Despite my reservations, I suspect I will start right-side queue-jumping anyway just because if I don't I will probably just piss off other cyclists who don't want to wait in the back of the car line. The main reason this could turn into a problem is that I need to continue NOT doing this when I go and ride my bike elsewhere.