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cycling / friends / memories / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Mar 25

We saw Adam via Zoom

My old friend Adam joined our class via Zoom. He’s recently stepped down from a command of American Forces Network Europe, where he managed dozens of stations on two continents. It seemed a good perspective to add to our international media class. And he had a lot to offer, so I’m glad he took the time.

I was trying to remember, but we met in 2011. I wrote a piece about a distant cousin of his, a World War 2 hero, one of the Doolittle Raiders. Soon after we met in person, and became fast friends. He took a master’s degree and became one of my lovely bride’s students. We’ve toured Alaska and Ireland together.

We are close in age. His hometown is just one or two towns over from my grandparents. Once, we tried to decide if we’d ever been to some event as kids. We decided the most likely place would have been a steakhouse. My grandparents’ church dismissed earlier than his church, so it’s possible that he had to wait on us to leave so he could eat lunch.

I wrote a little bio of him for my students. It’s been an impressive, long career. Multiple deployments, some great experiences and some less than great. He’s now just a few months from retiring from the Army, an exceedingly happy family man, and studying to become a commercial pilot. We’re trying to talk him and his wife into moving close to us. I’m not sure if I’ve sold him on it yet, but you’ve seen the pictures around here. One of my angles is that it is a lot like home.

(Speaking of home … He knew where his ancestor who immigrated from England came from. Adam and I once visited that road in London.)

Speaking of pictures, I took these the other day and I’m cleaning up my phone.

As the weather warms up and the bikes go back on the roads, it is good to see these signs still out there reminding people about the rules of the road.

That one is relatively new. At least I don’t remember seeing it last year.

And here’s a man out there discing that dirt. That field, if it is all his, goes back some ways. He was probably doing that all afternoon.

That was Saturday, because you work every day on a farm. I wonder what they were doing there today. A lot more than me, I’m sure of it.

cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Mar 25

Reading about literacy

Catching up on grading today … seemingly an evergreen phrase … and I ran across a paper where a student wrote “We live through a crisis of critical thinking.”

I may wrap the class on that note — now, not at the end of the term — and spend all of my free time trying to remember the most direct route to get future classes to that same point. Some weeks ago I was trying to summarize our class conversation in the last few moments when I found, around the corner and down the hall, an opportunity to make just this point, and so I steered my riff that way. It was a great go home message, and it must have stuck with that student.

For this paper, I’d asked the class to look a few years into the future and try to project the problems of misinformation and disinformation that we’ll be dealing with, and how we might best cope with, and try to overcome it. Another student wrote, “Media literacy will also be an essential tool … As consumers, we can play a part by using critical thinking skills … Schools and universiti3es should also teach media literacy and teach students how to discern fake news from real news.”

It’s fun to read papers when the authors are trying to make these sorts of connections.

I went for a little bike ride this afternoon. I quickly realized that I need to rest up a little more. Sinuses, or whatever I get, don’t always make for a good experience when you get your heart rate up and start breathing hard. So it was a brief ride. I got in my 16 miles, just to spin the legs and see the sites. Like the irrigation system to infinity.

And the excavator at rest. I wonder what it gets used on around there. There’s not an obvious worksite, no scar in the earth. Just fields waiting to turn green.

If it’s active this year, I imagine it’ll be a sod crop. We’ll see.

Elsewhere, it’s just lovely pastureland, and these two paints enjoying a late lunch.

Now, I’m going to go back to reading the last of those papers.

adventures / cycling / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Mar 25

My PR pursuit

Helped clean the garage. We have a too-small garage. But, then I think that every garage should have about 20 more square feet. And laundry room. Almost every laundry room needs to be larger, but I digress.

We have a little punch out in our garage, allowing basement access. And in that area we also have two 7-foot-tall shelving units. But it was all in the way, according to my lovely bride. I’m not the best with conceptualizing spatial arrangements, but I didn’t think it would provide the space she thought. But it is spring break and it was her idea so that’s what she started and I joined her for that and, wouldn’t you know it she might be right.

We’ll find out in a few days of using the new configuration, I guess, but the first impression looks promising.

I gave it the first test today. The bikes are now parked where the shelves were. And I went on a little ride this evening, just to spin my legs. It was down the chipseal road past the winery, onto the little cut through that has some of the newest asphalt around, a downhill stretch of two-tenths of a mile of pure ribbon, and then back up by the local park and into town, where I let the traffic decide my route. I was going to turn around once, but had to take a right because of what was behind me. And I was going to turn left later, but had to go straight because of what was ahead of me.

The last five miles were about getting out of town and through two neighborhoods and back home.

There is a nearby Strava segment, and I have the second fastest time on it. I should have the fastest time on it. This year, I’m breaking the record, which was set in 2020.

In my first try of the year I was one second off my PR and 11 seconds off the record.

I left maybe three seconds out there from a wobble, not taking the left-hander perfectly and sitting up a little too soon.

Felt good, until the end.

Even if that’s close to right, I need to improve by a lot. But there will be plenty of opportunities to improve. There always are.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Mar 25

The miles ahead

One of the good and, at the same time, one of the bad things about the variability of the weather is that it dictates whether I go for a ride. And, today, it was just nice enough to take my second outdoor ride of the year.

Also, it was new glove day.

And when it takes more than one hand of fingerless gloves to count my outdoor rides, I’ll stop counting them. Maybe in another week or so. Because the weather forecasts are all over the place.

Anyway, I bought those gloves at a bike shop in Chicago. I went looking for helmets. While the store’s site had what I was interested in seeing, they did not have it on the floor. The shop was small enough that it would look awkward to go in, buy nothing and leave. So I walked around looking for that helmet and trying to think of what else I needed. What I needed was a new pair of gloves.

I don’t even remember when I bought my old ones, but they are old and crusty, even after washing them. The padding in the palms have lost their effectiveness. So it was time, I was at a bike shop, and the price at that bike shop was the same price I found online.

(I took out six paragraphs of observations and complaints about bike shops here. You’re welcome.)

And so I had a nice ride today, just 25 miles around the local roads.

It’s scenic and pastoral. Most of the roads are peaceful enough. But this is going to be the year where I go longer and seek out new roads routes. Gonna have to be.

Today, though, I got in just in time to see the sunset across the way.

Timing, they say, is … something.

adventures / cycling / Friday / Rowan — Comments Off
14
Mar 25

Presenting some cycling research

I gave a presentation of our research today at the Summit on Communication & Sport today. The session was titled Perception and Representation. One of our colleagues presented on topics titled “When Soccer Meets Streetwear: A Critical
Analysis of Soccer Shirts’ New Cool.” Another, a good friend presented on an interesting topic, “Interaction and Gamification – The Media Audience’s Perception of Reality and Virtuality in New Sports Formats. A Mixed-methods Study using the Example of the Baller League in Germany.” Another research team discussed “From Geek Kingdom to Non-Gendered Utopia? The Gendered
Representation of Esport on French Sports Media L’Equipe.fr.”

In between, I talked about the research The Yankee and I conducted last fall. We titled it “Doing this may Kill Me: A Mixed Method Approach to Perceptions of Cyclist Safety.”

Here are some of the slides.

On a beautiful evening in August 2024, two brothers were heading home on bikes when they were killed by an aggressive driver who, police say, had a BAL over the legal limit.

It happened by that power pole on the right.

They were local boys. Two guys done good. Both were hockey players, they became folk heroes at Boston College. Matthew, the younger one, had a short professional run on the ice before returning home to coach his high school team. His older brother Johnny was an NHL star. The family said they were always together. Shoulder-to-shoulder. They were together on that particular day to celebrate their sister’s wedding the next day.

Johnny had two children. He and his wife were expecting their third. Matthew and his wife were expecting their first child.

The driver of the vehicle hit them so hard that his Jeep Cherokee died a tenth of a mile away, as he tried to flee.

We conducted a survey of local cyclists. Using snowball sampling, we aimed at people in the tri-county area, but our instrument quickly reached into the tri-state area. We wrapped it with 1,296 respondents.

Here are a few numbers from the survey …

Of those 1,296 respondents, all cyclists, 66 percent reported near misses with other vehicles on their bike rides. Eighteen percent said they’ve had bike crashes involving vehicles. Nine percent have had more than one accident involving vehicles.

That’s something like 116 people!

Sixty-one percent reported that drivers pass too closely more than half the time. This is, admittedly, a tricky question. As a cyclist, I recall the dangerous passes far more clearly than the safer interactions. (Boy do I!) But … this gets to perception, and the intrinsic motivation involved in Self Determination Theory.

Our survey asked about aggressive drivers, and 13 percent said they have to deal with them on more than half their rides.

Also in this survey, 67 percent of cyclists say they fear they’ll be in an accident when they ride their bikes. And two-thirds of them also told us the infrastructure at their disposal for road riding is inadequate. (The implications here are fascinating.)

Of the 1,296 people who took our survey, 83 percent reported that they feel unsafe riding by some combination of drivers and poor infrastructure. We didn’t break that down further, but it’s there for future study.

When we asked cyclists about their perceptions of law enforcement, the numbers were not good; 64 percent perceived the utility of law enforcement toward helping to ensure their safety was “terrible.”

We’ll unpack this in a moment.

This is not a percentage, but a real figure. A third of our respondents, 453 cyclists who took our survey said the risk was so great they have stopped, or would not, ride on the road.

Here’s some other data. The various state departments of transportation use the term “vulnerable road users.” That’s how they define cyclists, pedestrians, or anyone else not in a car, truck, or SUV.

This, so you know, is the state law on passing vulnerable road users. National advocates who monitor these things say this is one of the best in the country. One of the best laws in the land means you have to give me four whole feet when you pass me. But you have to know that law, honor it, and understand distance and vehicles at different speeds (and a lot of you don’t). So, just think on this for a second. Four feet.

Four themes emerged in our qualitative work. In the first theme, people discuss how road systems are set up, first or exclusively, for motorists. That’s problematic. The US Census says 870,000 people commute by bike. People for Bikes, in their most recent research, says 112 million Americans rode a bike last year. The discourse is due a change.

We saw a great deal of frustration within the law and law enforcement theme. Cyclists complain of law enforcement officers who don’t know the laws or aren’t interested in policing them. They’ve been told that without video evidence there’s not much that can be done. Sometimes that’s difficult even with video.

Infrastructure is a recurring theme in our survey, advocacy, and in national conversations. Cyclists and other vulnerable road users frequently complain about it.

Boil it down to money, political will, and time. Most places are several lacking quality infrastructure for all road users. (Again, not just motorists.) There’s also an urgency problem.

Our final theme, I just called it personal. Hands go to chests when I talk about the bike shop owner who fixed a customer’s flat, and, minutes later, the cyclist was killed by a motorist.

“What if I’d told him I couldn’t do it then? What if I repaired it slower? Or faster?”

He lives with that.

It’s not his only story of that sort.

Let’s talk about impact. The Yankee and I were invited to share the initial version of this research with the local community soon after the Gaudreaus were killed. The crash, and this data, helped inspire the creation of a local safety committee. They are now doing advocacy. That group’s work has them in front of youth organizations. Bike safety and road awareness are key for everyone. They are also taking part in a county safety committee as well.

We’ve also shared the data with the state DOT and talked messaging with a variety of organizations. This research also caught the ear of a state lawmaker, who ran with it. And with good reason!

One criticism we saw a lot is that not everyone knows about the state’s relatively new Safe Passing law. The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact. We take the title to heart. This is research with real impact. In part because of our research, the Safe Passing law will now be taught in Driver’s Ed and appear on the driver’s license exam.

Please be careful on the roads. We’re all just trying to get somewhere and safety is the goal.