Yesterday was cold and wet. Not the sharp cold that makes your sinuses hurt and your eyes tear up within 3 pedalstrokes. This was more a lethargic humidity that makes you briefly consider ditching class, before you reprimand yourself for how incredibly lame that would be. There was a good showing of rain too – just enough to make you hope you can avoid it if you sprinted fast enough, but not enough to make you just give up and get drenched – which made sure I was properly miserable [not to mention sweaty].

And in the middle of the day, a fog so thick it looked like Halloween outside. I wondered if I’d be able to get home; if those Knog lights would even work, or if I’d get crushed under the BC shuttle bus instead [those drivers are not kidding around]. I decided I didn’t really care, either way; my mind felt like a moldy piece of fruit, and anything more complicated than zoning out was proving to be a bit much.

Yeah, it was one of those days. You know, those “yeah, whatever” kind of days. Like “yeah, whatever, run my ass over, that’s cool,” or “yeah, whatever, pretend like you didn’t see me, that’s fine.”

Which is a terrible mentality when you’re on a bicycle. Halfway up Heartbreak Hill, it finally sort of registered and with bits of foliage blowing into my face, I managed to not fall into a pothole I knew was right there, or run into that pile of gravel that’s been over there for the past month. Not that I was scared of the impact of falling per se; but it would just be embarrassing.

Because that’s a total noob mistake. You know it, and I know it. Sure, shit happens, but biting it on a route I can navigate half-blind? Even that “well it was slippery and wet and my brakes weren’t working and this is Boston so potholes appear out of nowhere” excuse doesn’t cut it in that kind of situation. And with the NY Times article “Do More Bicyclists Lead to More Injuries?” fresh on my mind, I had no intention of making myself a neat little injury statistic to re-prove how Boston cannot give a flying fuck about cyclists.

By the time I got home, I sort of regretted reading that article; mostly because the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in the comments had driven me absolutely insane. But even slightly drenched, with bits of New England stuck to my face and leggings, and every bit cranky, I realized it’s been a while since I’ve even flipped the bird at a driver. At some point, you get used to unpredictability. You pick and choose your battles, and sometime earlier this year, I guess I simply decided that unless I got hit or swerved at, I wasn’t going to waste my time being a patronizing [m]asshole to drivers.

Bikes are for riding, not for being annoyingly righteous, right?

[Yeah, watch me get hit by a car tomorrow. That would sort of funny...if my health insurance coverage wasn't the equivalent of a box of bandaids. So let's hope this doesn't happen.]

I got the chance to be a passenger in a car a couple of days ago. Just riding around town, getting stuck in traffic. Not epic traffic, just normal Boston traffic. We were not in any kind of hurry, and the company was good so we were upbeat and enjoying the ride. However I have to say, wow…driving is slow. I am sure other smarter people have thought about this before, but here is what I noticed.

Because cars take up so much space, you can get a road pretty packed full with only 30-40 of them. Which is in most cases 30-40 people (people drive alone). Because cars have to accelerate and decelerate pretty slowly in stop and go traffic (they don’t have the room to really gun it without smashing into the car ahead of them), and because they take up so much space, interesting things happen at red lights.

If the road were empty except for one car, that car would stop at each red light only once (by which I mean it would only sit at that intersection through one red light cycle). We can call that an X1 red light. Put more cars on the road and eventually you reach a “critical mass”, so that a car at the end of the line has to wait at the same red light more than once (one green gets most of the people through, then the cars at the back wait for the next green to go). Add more cars and you end up waiting at a single red light 3…4… or more times. We can call them X2 lights, X3 lights, etc. Get enough cars on a street with a 5 or 6 physical red lights and is like that road has 10-20 virtual red lights on it because each person stops at each red light multiple times.

In essence traffic breeds more traffic. The more cars you have trying to fit through the same “pipe” the longer it takes for those cars to go through. You could solve this problem several ways. You could figure out how many cars it takes to reach the “critical mass” number for each street and not allow more than that number of cars on the street, London tried something like this with it’s “congestion charge”. You could put those 30 people on a bus, in essence putting everyone into one “car” then they would only have to stop at each red light once. You could also put them on a train, in essence removing all the cars from the road and making the red lights irrelevant.

I doubt that Boston is ready to implement a congestion charge, and because the city has no readily defined “core” it would be impracticable. The bus and train options are good, especially for morning and afternoon commute scenarios. You have a lot of people all going to the same place at the same time. Makes no sense to all be in separate vehicles. And as we see above, everyone suffers when everyone drives.

However what about when you are not commuting, what about Saturday, or middle of the day, or running errands. Erratic traffic, where you don’t want to go where the bus is going, or you have to go where the T stop isn’t? I would say that the best possible transportation option is then a bicycle. On a bicycle you are legally allowed to filter down the right hand side to the red light (you still have to stop at the red light). By filtering to the front you are removing the X red problem that cars have. You stop at each red light only once, it is as if you are a lone car on the road. Turning each X2 or X3 red into an X1 red. Because of this you will almost always go faster than each individual car (average speed and actual speed).

Ironically (as cars often think it is bikers slowing them down), you will also be helping the motorists go faster. Each person on a bike instead of in a car reduces the “critical mass” number by one. Remove enough cars and the X3 red light becomes an X2, remove even more cars and each car will be able to fully clear through at each red light. The remaining cars then experience the speed of having less cars on the road. The cyclist reaps the benefits of faster travel, cleaner air, less motorists (and thus less danger from them), a fatter wallet (bikes are cheap compared to cars/t-pass) a greener planet, and nicer calves. A classic Win/Win.