When we went to visit my mom for spring break, we brought our rain gear. It rains a lot in Seattle. Unfortunately I lost my rain pants while I was there. That was a bummer—they’re great rain pants—but not a short-term crisis. It rarely rains in San Francisco after February, and never after March. And this is a drought year anyway. I figured that if they didn’t show up by October or so, I’d have to buy new gear, because an El Nino year is on the way. And I had already promised myself that next rainy season, I’d try a Cleverhood, but it wasn’t exactly on the top of my to-do list.
I also assumed that California’s weather system had better things to do than punk me, like empty out the state’s reservoirs. I was wrong.
This morning we woke up to rain. Of course it is welcome, because of the drought, but I was vaguely annoyed about my missing rain pants. Rain in San Francisco is like hills in San Francisco: hard and intense, although it comes and goes. But how bad could it be? I thought, with the casual ignorance of someone who has not gone outside in suspicious weather without wearing full rain gear since 2011.
Really, really bad, it turns out. By the time we’d gone a few blocks, my pants were soaked. By the time we hit the Panhandle, they had dripped an inch of water into each of my rain boots. And because the boots are waterproof, all that water just stayed there. By the time we dropped off our son, I was shivering. When I finally got to work, I had to empty my boots into the kitchen sink.
There will be no pictures with this post. I look like I was fished from a pond, and I’m walking around the office barefoot. I am just grateful that typically only one other person works in the office on Fridays.
When people say there is no bad weather, only bad gear, they are basically right. Until today I’ve loved riding in the rain. Super-cautious drivers, empty streets, respect or actual awe from my coworkers: what’s not to like? Having good gear is like having the right bike. It makes everything easier. With the Bullitt’s rain cover, the kids have never had complaints about riding in the rain either.
But without it, misery is never far away. This morning as I was sloshing through the halls, I thought, “This sucks. Maybe we should buy a golf cart.” This is the route to madness! I should buy some new rain gear. Preferably before 5pm. If only Instacart delivered clothing.
We were hit at the intersection here, in front of the Conservatory of Flowers.
Today is the one year anniversary of the Sunday that a driver hit us while we were riding in Golden Gate Park. Last Thursday, Matt took our son to court to get a settlement from the driver’s insurance company for his injuries. It wasn’t much money, roughly equivalent to the cost of the ambulance ride to San Francisco General. We pursued the claim on principle, because higher insurance rates are the only consequence that the driver, Michael O’Rourke, is ever likely to face.
Last August, a bike commuter was mowed down by a truck in SOMA. Afterward Sergeant Richard Ernst of the SFPD showed up at her street-side memorial to claim that according to the police report, her death was her own fault. How he could possibly have known that is a mystery, because SFPD also claimed that there was no video of the event. He did this after parking his car in the bike lane and demanding that the people at the memorial, including her family members, admit that her death was her own fault. If they didn’t, well, the cyclists who’d been forced by his parking in the bike lane into the kind of traffic that had just killed someone were just going to have to suffer.
His claim, however, turned out to be wrong. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition canvassed local businesses, only to find that not only had SFPD not bothered to ask for video, but that a local business with a street camera had a video of the truck mowing her down. Then, belatedly and as far as I know without apology, SFPD decided that the truck driver was in fact at fault. Activism like this is why we have doubled our membership contribution to SFBC every year. I wish we could afford to give them millions.
I digress. As someone who was run over from behind by a driver in front of a stop sign, this news doesn’t particularly surprise me. Drivers run stop signs and threaten pedestrians and cyclists all the time. They don’t even feel guilty about it. The driver who hit us said, as every driver in his situation seems to, that he “never even saw us.” Even though a statement like that offers evidence that he should immediately have his license suspended—if you can’t see what’s on the road in front of you, then you’re not competent to drive—he viewed this as a completely reasonable justification for hitting people. And he viewed it that way because the police in San Francisco, and many other places as well, are looking to make excuses for drivers when they hurt people.
Before I was hit, I was not so cynical. I was raised to believe that the police were there to help people and protect the innocent. The collision changed me. When my son and I had our injuries assessed, the paramedics took off our helmets (and cut off the rest of my clothes as well). For the next half hour that we were in the ambulance as the police took the report, I was asked repeatedly whether we had been wearing helmets. “Were you sure you were wearing helmets? You’re not wearing helmets now. If you were really wearing helmets, where are they? Were you really wearing a helmet?” Then they asked my son whether we were really wearing helmets. My husband showed them our helmets. “Were they wearing those helmets when they were hit?” The paramedics said we were wearing helmets, that they had taken off our helmets. “Did you see the helmets on them?” They asked the (many, many) witnesses, “Were they wearing helmets?” They said yes. “Are you sure?” As an aside, we did not have head injuries. Our heads never touched the ground. If only I had had a leg helmet!
In the meantime, they told Michael O’Rourke to go ahead and drive home. He was never charged.
It is pretty hard to excuse a driver for ramming into someone from behind. But even though the police finally decided that he was technically at fault for hitting us from behind in front of a stop sign while driving 15 miles per hour, they had to get their digs in. The police report says that I “moved left too soon” when I got out of the protected bike lane to make my left turn. However there is only one place to get over before making that left turn, because the protected bike lane is protected by parked cars. As I lack the ability to transmute my bicycle through two tons of metal, I moved left before I reached the row of parked cars directly in front of the stop sign. Not that it matters, as there is no such thing as taking the lane “too soon” under the California Vehicle Code. Nor should anyone be moving at 15 miles per hour a few feet from a stop sign, even if there weren’t two people on a bicycle in front or a half-dozen people in the crosswalk. Nonetheless, the police report says that I moved left “too soon.” That’s pretty much saying that they thought it was our fault we were hit.
At the beginning of this year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to pursue Vision Zero for San Francisco, a program to eliminate traffic deaths pioneered in Sweden in 1997. Versions of Vision Zero seek to limit speeds, redesign streets and change legal penalties so that driving causes less carnage. Although it’s been successful in other countries, I am somewhat pessimistic about this effort in San Francisco, given how little the SFMTA spends on infrastructure for safe streets, and how limited its ambitions are for the future. However San Francisco’s police culture would cripple safe streets no matter how much the SFMTA agreed to spend. As long as the people sworn to uphold the law choose to blame victims and excuse perpetrators instead of protecting the innocent, change is virtually impossible.
Last week was our spring break, and the kids and I headed north to visit my mom while Matt flew to Australia for work. This kind of thing is why I make no pretense that our car-free, zero waste schtick is carbon neutral. That said most of our travel is for business, and I believe I speak for both of us when I say that a tax on business travel that would ensure we did far less of it would be pretty awesome.
Anyway, we took the Brompton, which in circus-mode can carry both me and the kids. Flying with the Brompton was an unrelieved nightmare, due to Allegiant Airlines. They are dead to me. Their motto should be: “We will terrify your children.”
Madi demonstrates the two-kids-on-a-Brompton option.
Nonetheless it was nice to have the bike once we got to Seattle. However I was surprised to find that despite the photos I have posted, even people who know family biking were impressed that it is possible to carry two kids on the Brompton. It’s fun, although not something I would do regularly on long rides. And I asked my son to run up the hills because I’m not the rider I used to be. And this brings me to: hills. Seattle is a hilly city, but hills in Seattle are different than hills in San Francisco.
A lot of San Francisco was built on landfill, which means that there are large chunks of the city (e.g. the Marina, the Financial District) that are perfectly flat. San Francisco doesn’t have a fixie culture because everyone is a masochist. It has a fixie culture because it’s possible to live without ever leaving the Mission. However once you want to go somewhere else, it gets tricky. The hills loom like walls, and although it’s possible to thread the needle sometimes using routes like the Wiggle, eventually people like us who go to work in offices (in Laurel Heights) and have kids in school (on the other side of Lone Mountain) have to start climbing. And San Francisco hills take no prisoners. Once we load 1-2 kids on deck, even with an assist we’re working hard. So riding in San Francisco is often: la-la-la-la-OMFG-OMFG-OMFG-wheeee!-la-la-la, etc.
Seattle is hilly in a more consistent way. In comparison to the totally-in-your-face hills of San Francisco, Seattle’s hills feel almost passive-aggressive. They meander up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. I kept wondering where the steep hills were, because from my perspective there weren’t any. However the relentless low-key up and down is not the kind of terrain I’m used to riding and it wore me out (this has happened before—I got smoked by Madi from Family Ride on a deceptively mild-looking but seemingly endless hill in August 2012, while being fried by the equally foreign 80+F temperatures).
Bullitt-surfing is understandably more of a San Francisco thing.
From the hill perspective, if riding in San Francisco is like occasionally ripping off a band-aid and screaming in agony, then riding in Seattle is like slowly peeling band-aids off by the dozen while feeling the adhesive tug on every single hair. Except that riding bikes is way more fun than that, of course. There’s nothing wrong with having to make an effort, it proves I’m alive and makes me stronger. I’m sure that if we lived in Seattle I would get used to Seattle hills and find them normal. Admittedly sweating on the way to work is a non-starter in my life, but this is why the universe has provided electric assists.
And speaking of assists, on this trip we stopped by the newly-opened G&O Family Cyclery, which had the Holy Grail of assist comparisons available for test rides: a Stokemonkeyed EdgeRunner and a BionX EdgeRunner. I love EdgeRunners (I-will-not-buy-another-bike-I-will-not-buy-another-bike-I-will-not-buy-another-bike) but had never tried an assisted version before. They are even better than the unassisted versions. We took the stoked and BionX EdgeRunners up and down the hills of Seattle, and if it wasn’t the same kind of challenge we face in San Francisco, it was still a fascinating experience.
My dissertation advisor had five mottos. One of them was, “Whenever you go away on a week of vacation, there’s always two weeks of work waiting for you when you come back.” Alas, this is painfully true, so coming soon: BionX v. Stokemonkey.
Hum of the city 