"It reinforced how badly we of the Underwear Tribe are in desperate need of education."
Seth Davidson's Rare Bird - Restoring Sensible Cycling Series X of ?
Note on the Restoring Sensible Cycling Advocacy Series:
Platitude-driven and Cluster B(ike) activists have largely taken over sensible, principled cycling advocacy. Non-bicyclists tend to only see these individuals or their work and react swiftly to dislike many, if not most anything to do with cycling right off the bat. Actual cyclists, especially younger ones have been groomed by the propaganda and misinformation of platitude-driven dogma which is now supported by the parasitic Bicycle Infrastructure Industrial Complex. History is even easier to forget when it’s obstructed or revised to fit a new narrative. This series seeks to repost and revisit some of the long lost or difficult to find writings made before the current activists parasitized the movement.
Seth Davidson, a Southern California based bicyclist and attorney once maintained a blog called Cycling in the South Bay where he wrote religiously almost daily starting in 2011. Seth’s posts varied from local ride suggestions, ride reports, bicycling advocacy issues, and politics all hit with a heavy dose of sarcasm and humor including heavy doses of self-mockery. Unfortunately his entire archive of posts disappeared from the internet with the exception of what was scraped into the Internet Archive. His law firm lives on though, with his daughter having taken over the operation.
Seth was (is?) a member of Big Orange, a major cycling racing club in the area, and over the course of the years posting to Cycling in the South Bay went from a passive victim of militant motorists to one more active and understanding. It wasn’t always the motorists, notorious for their poor behavior in the Los Angeles area that changed, it was Seth and his approach to bicycling safety.
That change was thanks to Cycling Savvy instructor Gary Cziko, who one day approached the riders of Big Orange, who’d had issues with motorists, including collisions and fatalities in some part due to passive “edge riding” and other risky behavior that causes problems for bicyclists. Cziko’s response was “drive your bike,” to which most of the club members thought he’d escaped an asylum with such suggestions as “control the lane,” “steer from the rear,” and overall a more active approach to cycling with motor traffic which included, yes, stop at traffic devices. While it was an uphill battle to go into a group of highly skilled bicyclists in the bike handling and racing front, which seldom equates to competent cycling in traffic, Cziko slowly won over some of the leadership in Big Orange and eventually the club, likely one of the only in the country learned actual cycling safety techniques by requiring their ride leaders to attend one of Cycling Savvy’s courses.
Seth wrote several blog posts about his and Big Orange’s introduction to Cycling Savvy including this one, which still lurks in the archives called Rare Bird.
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Rare Bird by Seth Davidson (archived here)
After many a ride Filds and I would recap the myriad stupidities of the day, and he’d always conclude, “Yeah, common sense. It just ain’t that common.”
As much as it pains me to say nice things about my friends, Gary Cziko and Pete van Nuys put on a seminar last night for our club, Big Orange. They are instructors for Cycling Savvy, a bike educational program for dorks.
In this case, however, the dorks aren’t the usual objects of contempt. They aren’t the people with panniers, recumbents, floppy dickhider shorts, helmet mirrors, sandals, and fourteen daytime lights. The dorks targeted by Cycling Savvy include everyone who doesn’t understand proper lane positioning. This means you.
Most of what Cycling Savvy refers politely to as “the lycra crowd” and I impolitely refer to as “delusional underwear pedalers,” considers itself expert at cycling safety. The reasoning goes like this:
I wear my underwear on my bike and pedal fast.
I enter one crit a year to get free crap from my team so I can call myself a bike racer.
I have twelve top-10’s on the Strava leaderboard for 45+ men over 250 lbs.
My bike is expensive.
I ride in big groups.
I’ve never been killed.
Of course if you ride with the lycra crowd long enough you realize that in addition to being delusional, many of them are wholly incompetent at bicycle riding, even many riders who climb well, sprunt well, and time trail well. What’s worse than their incompetence is that their insistence on bad positioning is built on an amazing resistance to criticism, let alone change.
After all, they’re wearing their underwear and have never been killed plus they got 10 kudos yesterday so they know what they’re doing, right?
Cycling Savvy’s curriculum politely but firmly begins with the premise that no, just because you ride a bicycle you don’t necessarily know what you’re doing. In fact, given the ignorance of law enforcement, the prejudice of cagers, and the lack of formalized cycling instruction, the chance that you know what you’re doing is quite small, because all savvy cycling begins with lane positioning, and a casual glance at any cyclist on any road reveals that most cyclists hug the gutter or the door zone.
It was fascinating to watch the Big Orange board get educated, a board that is comprised of people who have 12 zillion miles under their belt, who are already pretty expert at lane positioning, and who have extraordinary experience navigating large groups of idiots through the congested streets of L.A. It reinforced how badly we of the Underwear Tribe are in desperate need of education.
Unfortunately, the course is three hours long, which means your ass will be bleeding by the time it wraps up, and that doesn’t include the parking lot and on-the-road components of the class. The curriculum also contains too much information for the typical bonehead who has been roped into the session hoping to get a tip or two about how not to get killed.
Yet Cziko and van Nuys did a phenomenal job of introducing us to the law, the science, the logic, and the practice of controlling the fuggin’ lane, in addition to re-emphasizing the fact that if you put twelve boxes of Cheez-its in front of five cyclists they will devour everything down to the crumbs even when they’re no longer hungry.
I just wish they’d call the course “Control the Fuggin’ Lane, Dumbass!” and I wish more people would get educated. The rear-and-fore-facing videos showing how traffic responds to proper lane control are viscerally demonstrative of Cycling Savvy’s other premise: The life you save will be YOURS. Learning all this from people who themselves have been cycling longer than most of us have been alive, and who are professional, educated, and smart, was an added bonus.
Ultimately, if you think you know how to ride on the road, the chances are good you don’t. Because common sense just ain’t that common.
END