(white wall tires, chrome fenders and a 7-speed hub)
I wasn't commuting, that's for sure, but I knew my way around the city. And there's one thing that I learned very quickly: New Orleanians don't know how to drive...period.
Now I'm sure by now you're thinking "Well he covered that in the last post." You'd be correct. But I covered it from the viewpoint of someone driving a tiny sportscar. You know, with 2300lbs of sheetmetal, crumple zones, seatbelts and airbags surrounding him? But what about cyclists? They have none of that. All you have is a styrofoam helmet and your wits to protect you from awful motorists but even worse, they also have to protect you from yourself!
"From myself?" you ask? Yes, from yourself. You see, now that I actually have commuted to work on a bicycle (its about 8.5mi each way for me) I can tell you for sure that the temptation to bend the rules of the road is there constantly. This is the bike that I commute on:
(2008 Schwinn Coffee 3spd w/ vintage Schwinn Accessories)
Unfortunately it really isn't cut out for commuting. With only 3 gears it can be a bit of a mule to pick speed back up on after coming to a complete stop, especially since I've never been able to get the chain tension just right and hard cranking pops it off the sprocket. So when I come up on an intersection that's going red or a stop sign, the temptation to run it is definitely there. That's something that no amount of legislation or infrastructure improvement will be able to fix.
Here's something that can be fixed though. Assuming cyclists were obeying all the motor traffic laws as they're meant to, there's still the matter of the inattentive, inconsiderate or just plain incompetent motorist. My route to work is a perfect example. Much of it is covered by bicycle lanes of one sort or another. Some are on grassy medians, completely separated from motor vehicle traffic. The longest stretch however is on shared pavement with 1 lane of 35mph traffic to my immediate left and parallel parking to my immediate right with only enough spare room to pass a slower cyclist if they let me.
As I mentioned in my last post, a common problem with bicycle lanes in New Orleans (because of how they are set up in the roadways) is that taxicabs use them as hack stands, pulling into them and idling while the pick up or drop off fares. Its bad enough to come up on one of these when you've seen it ahead from two blocks back but they do one worse, passing you in traffic and the pulling directly in front of you, cutting you off with less than a second to find an exit strategy. This would be fixable though the creation of hack stands on each block when a bicycle lane shares pavement with a single lane of traffic.
