A Toy Vehicle Story.

THE CODIFIED ORDINANCES

311.03 TOY VEHICLES ON STREETS. (a) No person on roller skates or riding in or by means of any sled, toy vehicle, skateboard or similar device shall go upon any roadway except while crossing a street on a crosswalk and except on streets set aside as play streets.

(b) Whoever violates this section is guilty of a minor misdemeanor on a first offense; on a second offense within one year after the first offense, the person is guilty of a misdemeanor of the fourth degree; on each subsequent offense within one year after the first offense, the person is guilty of a misdemeanor of the third degree.

301.51 VEHICLE.

"Vehicle" means every device, including a motorized bicycle, in, upon or by which any person or property may be transported or drawn upon a street or highway, except that "vehicle" does not include any motorized wheelchair, any electric personal assistive mobility device, or any device, other than a bicycle, that is moved by human power. (ORC 4511.01(A))

301.04 BICYCLE.

(a) "Bicycle" means every device, other than a tricycle designed solely for use as a play vehicle by a child, propelled solely by human power, upon which any person may ride having either two tandem wheels or one wheel in the front and two wheels in the rear, any of which is more than fourteen inches in diameter. (ORC 4511.01(G))

This is a boilerplate municipal code. Odds are your town uses the exact (or nearly exact) wording in its transportation regulations.

When I was studying inline skate ordinances (making recommendations for their possible legal operation on public streets), I looked long and hard at the toy vehicles statutes. It became apparent to me how much the concept of "toy vehicle" has been applied to bicycles.

Far too often, Park and Recreation Departments had been charged with developing bike plans, and they were hiring Landscape Architects to develop them. Paths in the parks were being extended into streets to make connections. Traffic Engineers were called in to help make the parks essentially overflow into the streets. At first, the engineers resisted, wanting bicycles to behave like the vehicles they legally are. But the public and the politicians (and the landscape architects) began to hold sway, and separate play streets began to be developed. These were called bike lanes, but that's not how they were expected to function.

Bike lanes, from their earliest days in Germany before the war (2nd), are classified as control devices. Their design was to regulate and control bicycle traffic so as to not impede the dominate automobile flow (the German Reich Transit Ministry also had some notion about being sure to keep the through-lanes free of bicycles should there be an unexpected desire to vacation en mass in France via the Lowland Countries).

But where there was little bicycle traffic (not enough to impede automobile traffic), the bike lane as a traffic control device didn't make functional sense. What was it?

The bike lane became seen by traffic engineers essentially as a separate play street for bicycle toy vehicles. Rules could now be bent and/or broken to accommodate this non-vehicle vehicle. The engineers learned how to look the other way, because this was no longer serious transportation, but a recreational activity. Soon, many engineers began to view all bicycle traffic in this light.

Bicycle advocacy groups began representing the desires of toy vehicle operators (the Cyclist Inferiority position). The more "separate play streets" they built and striped, the more poorly trained cyclists expressed a desire for them, and the more they were 'enabled" to remain toy-vehicle operators. The basic engineering problems were dismissed as being no longer applicable. Why did these "advocacy" groups do this? Partly because they feared riding as a vehicle, partly because inferior position conditioning was setting in, but in some cases, because of where the money was coming from.

There are basically two kinds of advocacy groups: Grassroots and Astroturf.

From a distance, they look pretty much alike. Grassroots groups represent real people, and the old League of American Wheelmen (LAW) was a good example of a grassroots bicycle advocacy organization, a member-based group with full elected representation and accountability.

In the 1980s and 90s there was another bicycle advocacy group that seemed to represent cyclists, but really was a front for the bicycle industry. BikeFed was an Astroturf organization... a group that has the appearances of representing a user constituency, but really represented Industry interests, with no representation or accountability (except to those cutting the checks). It's more effective than a true grassroots organization, because it has fewer voices to answer to, and because it's often better funded.

In the late 1990s (IIRC) The League of American Wheelmen changed its name the to The League of American Bicyclists (LAB), and began morphing from a grassroots organization into an Astroturf one. There have been pluses and minuses to that, depending upon one's perspective. One of their focuses has become removing the objections of fear-based cyclists (and potential cyclists), in placating their concerns without addressing their problems. This short-sighted approach is symptomatic of American culture, and is the equivalent of applying a Band-Aid to a sucking chest wound (or placing a helmet upon a cyclist with a broken neck).

To achieve this change, LAB hired a veteran of two AstroTurf organizations – BikeFed and Rails-To-Trails – to lead them to the promised land... but at a cost.

But here's the problem. American cyclists are basically divided into two basic overlapping groups: Recreational Cyclists (Sport), and Utilitarian Cyclists (sometimes vehicular, but mostly just students and the immigrant poor). More than any other transportation mode, cyclists are almost impossible to segment and identify by operational characteristics, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

Because it's about marketing (to elected officials and government agencies, and to manufacturers and retailers), the Astroturf approach is almost always aimed at the most desirable (and marketable) subset. And so, recreational cyclists, who can't be bothered with learning the simplicity and versatility of vehicular cycling, became the target. Their every objection must now be met with pandering, not training.

Are the cars mean to you? Separate yourself from them (at taxpayer expense), rather than learn responsibility. Demand "victim status", and expect nothing less than compensation for it. I recently learned of an attempt to pass legislation to protect cyclists, pedestrians, and motorcyclists, called the "Vulnerable Transportation Users Act" (or something like that). I suggested exchanging "vulnerable" for "exposed", because "vulnerable" is word that connotes victim status. As a utilitarian/vehicular cyclist, I am not a victim.

So why does this matter? It matters because of freedom of mobility, and because of safety. The more we fall into the victim-hood trap of the toy vehicle syndrome, the more our personal mobility will be hampered, and the more danger we will be placed in. The more we abandon the logical Common Law based rules of free access and right-of-way, the more we will be relegated to where we may ride, and how. The more we reward fear and resistance to inconvenience, the more dangerous and difficult will become our enterprise.

That enterprise is the free and safe movement of the most efficient transportation device ever invented by man: the bicycle.