Rules of the Road

and theory of mind

Last week I almost got flattened by a pick-up truck. I was biking a ten-mile route that I have biked many times, one that includes a fair bit of road with very little shoulder where the speed limit is 45 miles per hour. Like any sane person, I don’t relish being passed by cars going 45 mph on a road with no shoulder, so my route avoids as much of the high traffic sections as possible, while not being able to avoid all of them. “High traffic” may send the wrong message: I’m on an island that has only 9,000 year-round residents, although the population does swell considerably in the Summer. Still, I take back roads when possible, and the way back meanders more, being 13 miles rather than 10, largely on roads on which there are very few cars at all. I even get a bit of single track on my ride, a narrow dirt and gravel trail that winds through some of the most glorious scenery on the planet, looking over prairie that was created and managed by the Salish people, was later briefly inhabited by British and American soldiers before the untimely death of a pig started a war between the forces, and is now inhabited by foxes, deer and rabbits. Beyond the prairie is the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, with the Olympic mountains shimmering in the distance.

That’s not where I was when I almost got flattened by a pick-up truck last week, though. I was closing in on town, coming around a curve that can be confusing if you don’t know the roads. It’s Summer, so there are a lot of people around who likely don’t know the roads. The road itself curves dramatically to the right as you come down into town, and there are two other roads coming from the left, one from up on a hill. Right-of-way is clear—if you’re on the main road and are not turning you have right-of-way—but visibility isn’t perfect. You’ve got to keep your wits about you. Especially—always—if you’re on a bike.

I have been biking since I was a child. I used to bike around the neighborhood in west LA where I grew up, and later had a beach cruiser on which I sped around the campus and environs of UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara), which I attended for a couple of years right out of high school. Later, when attending UCSC (UC Santa Cruz which, despite having only one word different, is a wildly different university), I biked up the hill onto campus most days, and would fly down that same dedicated bike path at glorious speed at the end of the day. In those days I had a bike computer on my stem that displayed instantaneous speed, and I almost always made over 30 mph on that descent; often over 35. The thrill is unparalleled.

Also above campus at UCSC were an abundance of interweaving mountain bike trails. I was young then, and therefore immortal, and while I did wear my helmet when biking, I resented it a bit, until the day when I hit a root while bombing downhill and flew off my bike into the forest, narrowly missing a massive redwood tree with my head and landing, instead, in a lovely pile of soft moss. So soft. I never again rode without my helmet.

I have always loved the thrill of speed, and biking affords the opportunity to get going fast while in control of your environment. If, that is, at least three things are true.

First—you, the biker, need to know what you are doing.

Second—everyone else around you needs to know what they are doing as well.

Finally—and this is the impossible thing to manage—not only do you need skills and knowledge of the rules of the road, and also do the drivers around you need skills and knowledge of the rules of the road, but they need to know that you have skills and know the rules of the road, and you need to know the same about them, and you all need to have justified confidence that everyone will act accordingly. But how could you know such a thing about drivers you have never met? And how could they know such a thing about you, some stranger riding a contraption they have little sense of? Theory of mind is next to impossible when a windshield and a helmet and sunglasses, plus being in different vehicles moving at different speeds, separate the two beings who would benefit from understanding one another.

That understanding is made even more difficult by the dual facts that most drivers have never ridden a bicycle in traffic, so don’t know what the experience is like, and that many bicyclists either don’t know or act as if they don’t care about the rules of the road.

When the mid-sized pick-up truck made a left turn in front of me, directly into the oncoming traffic that comprised just me on my bike, I reacted quickly, skillfully, appropriately. Had I not had decades of experience on a bike, on roads and on trails, I doubt that I would have had the capacity to escape a head-on collision.

“Jesus Christ!” I yelled, surprising myself that I hadn’t let loose a torrent of swear words. I turned sharply, corrected, did not slide, stayed under power as I already had been on the slight downhill around the turn, turned left and pedaled quickly out of harm’s way. It was midday, the sky was blue, and the road was dry and free of grit. The conditions were perfect—both for me to escape a collision, but also for the driver of the truck not to have pulled in front of me in the first place.

There were probably six other vehicles nearby, bearing witnesses to what happened. I wonder what they saw. And I wonder what they think they saw. I’ll never know either thing, I suppose. I know that I was going under the speed limit (being on a bike where the speed is posted for cars) when a truck pulled in front of me with no warning, from around a bend in the road.

I didn’t panic. I didn’t freak out. I also didn’t stop or turn around. And adrenaline must have accelerated me, because I reached my destination far sooner than I expected.

On the road again

I had a student once¹, an excellent student, a young woman with both keen scientific insight and a beautiful artist’s eye and technique, whose scientific illustrations were exquisite beyond what I had seen before. I will call her Laura. She was the eldest child in her large family. Her mother was chronically ill and not competent to lead a family, and her father had been deployed in Iraq, off and on, for many years. While she was my student, her father came home on leave, safe for now. She loved her father dearly, and loved when he was home not just because he was a good father but also because, for this brief moment, she was not in charge. It was a relief.

One day while Laura’s father was home on leave, he went out for a long leisurely bike ride on roads he knew well, and a young woman not much older than Laura struck him from behind in her SUV. The driver was texting at the time. He died on the scene.

Laura had grown up too early, with too much weight on her shoulders, never able to be a child, or to be frivolous. Never allowed to get angry.

Now she got angry. She hated the woman who had killed her father with a passion. She wanted her imprisoned. She wanted her wiped off the face of the Earth. It was the only place that Laura could direct her hot fury at the universe, at any universe that would take her beloved father from her.

As I biked away from my own near miss last week, I thought of Laura, and her father, now buried in Arlington Cemetery. Laura had contacted me from D.C., the day before the funeral. She had wanted feedback on her research paper. It was on the social systems of new world primates—of squirrel monkeys and woolly monkeys and marmosets. It was excellent. I wanted to tell her that her research didn’t matter right now. But that would have been the wrong thing to say. Her life wasn’t over. Sometimes she was engulfed in grief, and there was nothing else in the whole wide world then, but at other times she needed to escape from it. When her grief loosened its grip on her, she needed to be able to be herself, her aspirational, ambitious, driven, sharp and creative self. She didn’t need me to let her off the hook, to give her a break. She wanted her feet held to the fire. She wanted to be pushed. So should we all.

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Bicyclists are often obnoxious on the road. Everyone else is too. One distinction is that while nearly every bicyclist is also a driver, the vast majority of drivers are not bicyclists. While every driver of a car has experienced driving next to a big rig and feeling a bit out of their depth, those drivers are still in a car. Most drivers don’t know what it feels like to be unsheathed on a road on which vehicles far larger, faster, and better protected than themselves are racing by. Nor, often, do most drivers know what the rules of the road are for bicyclists.

I have been yelled at by drivers for biking in the street. “Get on the sidewalk!” No. That’s illegal. Bikes don’t belong on the sidewalk.

I have had cars speed up in anticipation of passing me, while simultaneously coming closer to the shoulder where I am biking, as if drawn to the very object they are trying to avoid. Please don’t do that. Wait until it is safe, and pull out into the other lane, away from the bicyclist. Not towards.

I have also, more times than I can count, had cars who have right-of-way stop and wave me forward. Also no. I do not want the rules broken for me, and it’s not because I’m nice. It’s because when we start breaking rules for those whom we think are less capable or powerful than ourselves, the entire system breaks down, and now nobody can predict who will follow what rules, ever.

It is critical that we all follow the rules of the road when there is anyone else around because then we can all predict what the other people and vehicles will do. If you let me in when it’s not my turn, and I accept, how can anyone else predict what will happen next? It’s not clear what the next act should be once a rule is broken. Bicyclists need to level up, and bike carefully, and clearly. Signal far in advance when they’re going to turn. Thank drivers who give them a wide berth. Do not bike in the middle of the damned road. Drivers need to share the road, which means slowing down around bicyclists, and giving them space. And everyone needs to follow the rules of the road².

The driver who turned left directly in front of me was clearly in the wrong. I don’t know if she somehow didn’t see me. The situation was so clear. It was mid-afternoon, without any glare. It was her responsibility to see me, but also, how could she not have seen me?

Later that day I went back to the same place, and approached it from the other direction. I had driven and biked this road before, many times, but now I was paying closer attention. What could you see, and what couldn’t you see? Visibility in the direction that the truck had been coming from was less optimal than I had thought. Maybe she really didn’t see me. Yes, I was in the right. Yes, I had right-of-way. The driver made what could have been a fatal mistake. But my theory of mind had failed, too. I was reading the road, and my own visibility, almost entirely from my own perspective.

We all need to step outside of ourselves, regularly, and imagine life as the people around us. It is one of the most human things that we can do.

Stopping for flowers by the side of the road is one of the many joys of biking. (Figuring out how to carry the flowers in a handlebar bag or panier without soaking the other contents of your bag is a slightly more fraught conundrum.)

1. I have changed some details to protect the anonymity of the family.

2. There is a lot more to say here, of course, but I will tell this one story for now, an exception to my rule above, a caveat: There is one intersection that I come to frequently, a four-way stop with clear visibility out to all four approaches. My approach to the intersection is flat, but I turn left at the intersection directly onto a fairly steep but short hill. That hill is far more pleasant to bike if I attack it with some speed. I am usually alone at that intersection, and when I am, I signal long in advance even though I am alone, slow slightly as I approach the stop sign to make sure that the conditions haven’t changed, and then turn hard and fast to keep some speed as I ascend the hill. Sometimes, however, I can see a car approaching from another direction. I gauge if I will get to the stop sign before it will. If I will not, I slow down and hope that it does what it should do, and gets through the intersection while I still have some speed, so that I can accelerate before my turn. And if I assess that I will, at present or slightly faster speed, reach the intersection before the other car does, I signal—left arm straight out to the side—and pedal hard, making eye contact with the driver if possible, and go through the intersection without causing any other vehicle to slow or alter its progress in any way. This, however, is clearly not following the rules of the road.