Men on Bicycles

[groovedaddy]

A well-worn landscape like Long Island’s yields few surprises to the driver’s gaze. Shops cluster by size and species: pizza with bagels and nail salons, Home Depot with Old Navy. But one roadside incongruity that always unnerves me is the sight of a person outside the shell of a car on purpose — like a man pedaling slowly beside a highway on a bicycle.

Bicyclists and suburbs are an uneasy fit. I don’t mean the racing bikers who swarm like neon-colored beetles, hogging the middle of the road. I’m talking about the guys without helmets, on beat-up mountain bikes: restaurant workers wearing windbreakers over white dress shirts and ties; men in sweatshirts and baseball caps riding home from the store, plastic shopping bags hanging awkwardly off the handlebars.

Such sights are evidence of a valiant adaptation to a hostile environment. For immigrant workers, as with so many of us in the suburbs, life boils down to the job, the bed and the travel between. But when you live in a landscape designed for cars, and you are poor, and it is too far to walk to work, and there’s no bus to take you there, the only option is two wheels. This is what is cheap and effective. It can also be deadly.

On Christmas Day, a car going at least 80 miles per hour on Route 111 in Central Islip hit a bicyclist, Hector Rapalo. The driver sped off. Mr. Rapalo, a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant who worked at a pizza shop, died. Police said that the collision may or may not have been an accident, but that the driver surely knew that he or she had struck someone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11sun3.html?th&emc=th

[MADem]

1. It's scary to ride bikes in the US, even in the cities. Motorists are not used to them.

It would also help if bikes had better reflective qualities to them--if bikes were painted with reflective paint, and came equipped with more reflective gee-gaws, even if the cyclist wasn't wearing a vest or had lights on the bike, they'd be more visible at night.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. Very true. I rode for a number of years and it was often perilous BUT

I loved passing bogged down traffic during rush hour!

[Betsy Ross]

3. Two old folks here riding our bicycles around town.

The joy of living in a small, flat city. Today marks two months since we put gas in the car. Yes, I'm bragging, but for two 60-year-olds we're doing pretty good. We started biking recently. Car drivers are the worst part of bike riding. No matter how much we go out of our way to accommodate the cars, too many drivers don't know how to deal with bikes.

[Tutankhamun]

4. Keep it up!

[Captain Hilts]

5. Hispanics ride bikes to work a LOT, more often than not, when it is dark....

Scary.

[Alcibiades]

6. I loved riding my bike in Germany

Back when I was a teenaged army brat in Berlin. They had bike paths--Radwege--made from red paving brick on just about every sidewalk. This still leaves the problem of intersections, pedestrians, and driveways, but it's better than what we have here, especially in the suburbs.

Of course, some are badly planned, as in the example below.