As I walked home with some friends from a Radiohead concert in 2006, I asked a girl what she thought of the show. “It was great!” she said, “I love live music.”

Her answer bothered me, and I never forgot it.

The concert was great, but I wondered if she would have said the same thing if we were walking back from a Matchbox 20 or Pussycat Dolls or Animal Collective concert. I had to wonder if she “got it.”

The next year I went to the SXSW music festival. I was walking down 6th street with my friends Paige and Kevin when we heard a hackneyed blues solo float from the windows of a nearby bar. It prompted me to exclaim “This is great! I love live music!” and we all had a good laugh. Paige and Kevin got the joke—they both have a deep understanding and appreciation for music, and they know that some of it is better than the rest.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made the “I love live music” joke since, and I’m writing this essay largely to explain that I don’t keep repeating it just to get some laughs (in case any members of my vast readership are getting bored with it). I keep pulling it out because it’s the safest way I’ve found to reveal my particular brand of snobbishness—that is: I admire quality, I believe that quality is rare, and I like it when people recognize quality. Inversely, I’m leery of people who don’t seem to care about quality, or even know it exists.

The joke is a litmus test that tells me if I’m talking to someone as snobby as myself. When people get it, I know I’m in good company. When people don’t, I’m simply embarrassed and slightly ashamed by my pretentiousness—it’s a small price to pay, but I think it’s worth it.

P.S. I acknowledge that taste in music is relative. I know and respect people for whom listening to Radiohead is a form of torture. I’m glad these people acknowledge a preference for something over something else. I’d be just as leery of a person who claimed to love movies, restaurants, or paintings, etc.

So I did some research. It turns out that I really like Carl, and no matter the results of his campaign, I’m eager to participate in the conversation he’s starting.

It is, of course, not a new conversation. Countless people are trying to influence the sea change affecting government domains across the country (a bunch of my colleagues are talking about it right now at Transparency Camp). However, what I like about Carl’s version of the conversation is, for lack of a better term, his style.

He’s a printer

He might not be a trained printer, but the fact that he’s running for National Printer indicates a healthy regard for the craft. As an amateur screen printer, I am obligated to recognize the value of a good printer: a person dedicated to a complicated craft, who does a job requiring exceptional attention to detail, who produces the media that educates, informs, and inspires us.

There is evidence of a printer’s touch on Carl’s various websites, all of them easy to read and elegantly laid-out. This isn’t trivial. I wish more websites were built with the care of a printer.

He gives librarians the props they deserve

The #2 issue that Carl wants to address in his campaign is librarians, saying that “librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge.” I almost fell on the floor when I read this. Ever since my tenure trying to wrangle the world’s event information at Eventful, I’ve been convinced that librarians hold the key to the future. There is no way the Internet, .gov or not, is going to reach its full potential without tapping into the long-term and profound thinking of librarians.

The rising generation of Internet librarians are the people who are going to guide the world through the necessary changes required to organize our data and make it useful. Adrian Holovaty gives an excellent explanation of what kinds of changes I’m talking about in his piece A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

He’s doing the right thing

Carl’s been publishing government information on the Internet for over 20 years, but he got some press recently by mobilizing a small army of volunteers to download roughly 19,856,160 of federal legal papers from the Federal Judiciary’s outdated Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system for him to repost for free at his site, Public.Resource.org. He didn’t do anything illegal by doing it, but it freaked out some people at the Judiciary and, more importantly, it got some press.

The solution on Public.Resource.org is not ideal (it raises some important privacy concerns), but his work highlights the fact that voters are beginning to expect a lot of the Internet, and the government needs to rise to meet those expectations. Imagine how much more he could do at the helm of the Government Printing Office!

What really has me convinced that Carl’s doing the right thing, however, is this quote: “If [appointed as Public Printer], I will certainly serve. But if not called, I will probably serve anyway.” I consider myself very lucky to be able to work as a pseudo-public servant (are consultants public servants?), but Carl’s work is an inspiring reminder that I can always serve no matter what.

Let’s get to work!

Nothing seemed to move in the sky. Then I looked up and saw the Metlife blimp. It appeared out of nowhere, like an apparition. It said “for the if in life.” It was disappointing to see an advertisement in the sky over the ocean on such a beautiful day, particularly an advertisement encouraging people to worry.

I buy insurance. I think it’s a good idea, and it’s paid off for me. It’s a way to buy peace of mind. There’s another way to buy peace of mind though, and that’s to have a peaceful mind. You can pay to not worry, but you can also just not worry so much.

I rode a wave all the way into the shore and walked up to the parking lot where I rinsed off my board in the outdoor showers. I walked up the hill to our apartment. Shannon wasn’t home, but the cats were just waking up from a nap when I walked in the door.

Our shredder is loud, and it somehow interferes with the speakers in my office, making them amplify its loudness by emitting a loud chunky static sound. Apparently, I find this sound so grating, that I’d rather do stupid things than have to endure it. I figured I could toss the papers in our little black Weber grill, light them up, put the cover on it, and be done with them (I’ll buy some carbon credits for the greenhouse gas emissions later). This is what I did.

I thought I’d let them burn out before I tossed the ashes in our dumpster and forgot about them.

A few hours later, after dinner and cleaning up, Shannon took some trash down to the dumpster but came right back and said “bad news.” Apparently the dumpster was full of smoke.

We filled a pot and a large mixing bowl with water, grabbed my flashlight, and headed back down to the dumpster. I couldn’t believe how much smoke came out of that thing. Nothing was on fire, but some stray smoldering bits of paper had landed on some polyester clothes and made them smolder. Because the lids were closed, I’d created a smokehouse in our apartment’s dumpster.

We poured the water on the ashes. They kept smoldering. Shannon remembered that there’s a hose just inside the gate by the dumpster, but because we didn’t have our keys, I had to walk around to enter through the gate that we’d propped open when we came down with the water. As I made the loop, walking through the courtyard to the other gate, I noticed that the neighbor who lives closest to the gate with the hose was standing in the dim light outside of his apartment.

I thought I was busted. He’d noticed the smoke. Even if he didn’t, I’d have to explain why I was using the hose so late. Then I thought, why is he standing outside like this? I said hi. He said hi. Then, just as I noticed he was naked, he said “I’m naked.”

“No problem,” I said.

“I’m Ian.”

“I’m Jed.”

“Yeah, I’m naked. Sorry.”

“Not a problem.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said, as I continued past him to the hose.

“Well, I think I just set the dumpster on fire, so…”

“Yeah, we’ll call it even.”

Shan and I hosed down the dumpster until it stopped smoldering and called it a night.

My mind always contains a jumbled list of aspirations for better discipline when it comes to fitness, diet, reading, work, finances, gardening, cooking, writing, etc, but I don’t believe that codifying lists of tiny goals is very helpful. Last year I tried to come up with a short list of admirable behaviors that transcend everything I do and will hopefully (magically?) make me awesomer at life.

They are:

• Listen more
• No idle chatter
• Live in the moment

Listen more

This one’s easy.

This is how you learn. I’ve got a lot to learn, and I’ve got a lot of great people around me. If I listen to them, I’ll learn a lot of great things. Also, this is how you make friends.

No idle chatter

This is advice from the Buddha, taken from the idea of “right speech” which is a component of The Noble Eightfold Path. It’s also informed by Orwell’s assertion in “Politics and the English Language” that “[our language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Avoiding idle chatter means not just that I should curtail my own senseless ramblings, but also avoid the endless ocean of frivolity that I swim through on the Internet every day (anyone note the irony that I’m writing this on my own blog? *sigh*). It’s a matter of cutting out the noise, and it seems to become more essential every day.

I got a New Yorker cartoon daily calendar for Christmas, and the first cartoon seems uncannily in line with this resolution:

Live in the moment

This resolution dovetails quite a bit with “Listen more,” but speaks more to the belief that there’s always something to learn from the present, even if someone isn’t talking. And regardless of learning, I can’t enjoy the present if my mind is elsewhere. I need to free up my attention, both from my mind and my senses.

A cursory reading of Getting Things Done last year taught me that—paradoxically—allowing my brain to live in the moment requires a lot of planning. Once I can organize all of my tasks and goals somewhere outside of my head, I don’t have to spend my days thinking about what I have to do, I can simply think about doing it. Then I can get to the wonderful place described by Philip Glass in this month’s Esquire:

“When you’re really working, really playing tennis, lifting weights, playing basketball, or whatever it is—it happens in sports, it happens in music, it happens in everything—when you’re fully consumed with the act, the witness just disappears. And for that reason, when someone asks, ‘What was it like?’ you can’t remember, because the person inside of you who does the remembering was otherwise occupied.”

When it comes to freeing my senses, I often think of a conversation I had with Steve Boyer a few years ago about an art project that I’ve been working on. He shared his concerns about how people constantly separate themselves from their present setting by staring at screens rather than their surroundings. These screens are becoming ubiquitous: TVs in every room of the house, DVD players in cars, TVs at the gas pump, smartphones, etc. I don’t know if this is a bad thing per se, but I’ve developed an aversion to it—I can’t help but think that I’m slipping into the matrix. The goal here is to make sure that I’m not compulsively noodling on my iPhone when I should be playing with my cats, or eating sandwiches with Shannon, or actually looking where I’m going while I walk down the street.

That’s it. Here’s to 2009! Let’s kick it off with some Hafiz!

Every Movement

I rarely let the word “No” escape
From my mouth

Because it is so plain to my soul

That God has shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
To every luminous movement in Existence.

As a social media strategist, particularly as a government social media strategist, I am extremely impressed with this campaign. A few observations from this particular blog post and video:

The video is well-produced, but not overly polished.

The Change.gov team appear to have established some styling conventions that mesh nicely with the design of the rest of the site. Figuring out how to use presidential seals, colors, type-faces, opening and closing titles, etc ahead of time allow them consistently knock out good—and official—looking content (video or otherwise) without too much work.

They seem to have a few cameras and a good sound recording system, but they clearly didn’t build a studio for this video and they probably didn’t spend a ton of time editing it. You’ve got to be able to put things out fast if you want to engage in timely discussions with people. I imagine Obama’s campaign video guru, Arun Chaudhary, is behind this.

The video is conversational, and it’s about conversations.

They may have rehearsed it once or twice, but the tone of the video is chatty. Senator Daschle and Lauren talk to one another about comments they’ve received from people, naming the commenters where they can, highlighting compelling anecdotes, and thanking the commenters.

The video encourages more conversation.

Recognizing good comments, naming the commenters, and indicating that they’re taking comments under advisement are great ways to encourage other people to chime in on the issue. This blog post went live at around noon EST. As I write this, 9 hours later, it’s received 1,602 comments. Absolutely staggering. No better way to invite people to comment by showing the future senator for Health and Human Services reading comments from ordinary citizens.

The commenting system is actually a conversation system.

The gurus at Blue State Digital (the firm behind Change.gov) decided to use IntenseDebate to power the Change.gov blog’s commenting system. This is significant for a number of reasons:

1. It discourages anonymity by requiring people to log-in with an email address, thereby encouraging people to take responsibility for their posts. As an added bonus (for nerds like me), you can log in using OpenID.
2. It features a simple and intuitive one-click system to rate comments up or down, reminding people that they should think before they speak.
3. It highlights commenters whose comments receive a lot of positive ratings, further encouraging people to add constructive thoughts to the discussion while giving readers clues as to which of the 1,600+ comments are worth reading.
4. It allows threaded conversations, encouraging commenters to discuss issues and develop ideas with one another, rather than simply asking them to respond to the blog post.

The layout of IntenseDebate’s comments isn’t perfect, but visually making sense out of comments when one comes in every 20 seconds is nearly impossible. The rating system is the real champion of the system. Kudos to IntenseDebate for providing a much-needed addition to blogging, especially as the leaders of the free world start inviting these conversations.

I’m generally skeptical about inviting the whole world into grand policy discussions, but I feel good about this.

As I discussed with Pete Ashdown a few months ago, I worry that inviting legions of non-experts into discussions on policies will slow the policy making process even further. I don’t care what most people think about health policy, and I’d wager that most of the 1,600 comments on this particular blog post aren’t worth reading.

My concerns are assuaged (somewhat), by IntenseDebate’s technology. IntenseDebate’s system is a great example of a simple emergent system, that is, a system that leverages a lot of small interactions (i.e. comments and simple votes on comments) to highlight and promote remarkable ideas. This doesn’t ensure that bad ideas won’t be highlighted, but, by and large, it’s a great way to use social technology to separate (a lot of) the wheat from (most of) the chaff.

And, it bears repeating: nothing will encourage a thoughtful conversation more than knowing that Tom Daschle (or someone on his staff) is listening to comments. You can’t have a conversation unless someone’s listening.

Bonus observations:

• Daschle’s glasses are still totally awesome
• He tends to tilt when he’s in front of the camera (I do the same thing)

Nonetheless, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, quality is rare, and after all the reading and research is done, I find myself heading back to the beginning—trying to clarify in my mind exactly what I want to accomplish. As a marketer, I’m trying to figure out exactly what my (or my client’s) message is, who it’s for, and why they should care. That’s it. Without knowing these things, any additional effort is lost.

Of course, figuring these things out is deceptively simple. It’s immensely difficult, and takes a lot of time. What’s more, there are about a million marketers out there eager to distract their clients with lofty promises of the next big thing, without addressing the client’s primary needs. This struggle to distinguish between signal and noise reminds me of one of my favorite passages from The Code of the Samurai:

…if [samurais] cultivate the arts of war wrongly, they get conceited about their knowledge, looking down on others around them. Spouting high-flown but untrue theories, they mislead the youth and spoil their dispositions. Although they speak words beyond their own capacity that may seem correct and true, in their hearts they are very greedy, always calculating gain and loss. Gradually their character degenerates, and there ar those who even lose the mentality of warriorhood altogether. This is an error connected with the half-baked cultivation of military science.

If you are going to study military science, you should not stop halfway. You should practice until you reach the inner secrets, finally to return to original simplicity and live in peace. If, however, you spend your days in half-baked practice of military science, unable to reach the inner principles, thereby losing the way to return to original simplicity, thus remaining frustrated and demoralized, that is most regrettable.

In this context, returning to simplicity refers to a condition like your state of mind before having studied military science. Generally speaking, just as with bean paste that stinks of bean paste, since ancient times it has been traditionally said that when you meet a military scientist who stinks of military science, you cannot stand the smell.

From “Army Principles and Combat Principles” (emphasis mine)

Beware of marketers who stink of marketing.

Earlier this summer, I got caught in traffic behind a Prius with a San Diego Bicycle Coalition bumper sticker. I had to roll my eyes; “Honestly, you’re already driving a Prius, do you need to love bikes too?” Then I realized that I love my bike and I also drive a Prius, so I decided to call the phone number on the sticker. I was stuck in traffic, what else was I going to do?

Kathy Keehan, Executive Director, picked up the phone and I talked to her briefly about what the coalition does and how I could help make San Diego more bikeable. I don’t remember the details of the conversation now, but I came away thinking that I wanted to talk to her more in depth and share it with the Internet.

So I did.

The short story is that if you want to help cyclists in San Diego, you can sign up to Bike the Bay on September 7th (it’s the first time in 20 years that people will have been allowed to bike over the Coronado bridge) and/or spend $25 to become a member of the coalition. If you’re too broke to join, but want to help anyway, there are monthly volunteer opportunities as well..

Read on if you want an excellent primer in national and local bike advocacy, a few safety tips, and to find out why on earth a lot of kids in San Diego are prohibited from riding their bikes to school.

Kathy Keehan. Photograph from the Voice of San Diego

So, how long has the San Diego Bicycle Coalition been around?#

Kathy Keehan: 20 years, it’s our 20-year anniversary this year.

Any parties?#

We are planning a big fund-raising gala celebration in October. I don’t have the date exactly yet. We’re looking at October 23rd, but it’s not set yet.

I’ll look out for that. And we already talked about this on the phone, but what do you do?#

I’m the Executive Director, so I do all the staff work that needs to get done, everything from answering the phones to going to meetings. The coalition, itself, is involved in a lot of different advocacy efforts for bicyclists in San Diego. We do everything. We have an education program, called “Bike For Life,” where we do adult and children cycling education classes. We go out to employers and do brown bag seminars during lunchtime, help people get started biking or answer questions. We also do a lot of advocacy work around facilities. We go to SANDAG, the city and the county, and make sure there’s a voice for bicyclists when the decisions are getting made about how are we going to spend the billions of dollars we’re spending for transportation infrastructure? Some of that money needs to get spent for bicycles and pedestrians. So, we go to a lot of boring government meetings.

If cyclists are involved in a crash, we help them find legal advice and help them with their insurance. We do outreach and community activities. We’re holding a big event, a big fund-raiser for us, called “Bike The Bay,” and that’s going to be on September 7th. We actually got Cal Trans to close down the Coronado Bay Bridge, and we’re going to ride over the bridge and around the bike way. So, we’re really excited about that. Take a flyer, tell your friends.

Where do you get your funding?#

Almost all of our funding is memberships. We’re a 501-C3 non-profit organization, so we don’t typically get town money or city money, tax dollars, any of those sorts of things. We’re all membership-driven. We do have a grant right now through the SANDAG and the City of San Diego, to teach our bicyclists education programs, but that will be ending the end of this year.

Pressure’s on!#

Yeah, that’s a little scary.

Could that be renewed or can you get grants from other organizations?#

We’re trying to get funding from some different funding sources for those programs. We’re looking at making them self-sufficient, to start having students pay for the classes or figuring out a way that we can leverage some traffic safety kind of dollars, stuff like that.

I had made the point in my blog post about Ride Your Bike to Work Day that walking shoe companies and bike companies don’t have a strong lobby or political action committee to basically encourage lawmakers to pay attention to making a walkable, bikeable community. I guess the existence of the Bicycle Coalition proves, thankfully, that I was wrong.#

There are a lot of things going on right now, particularly at the Federal level. Every about four or five years, the Federal government does the Federal Highway Bill. So, every time they do that, there’s an opportunity for us to be loud about the needs for bicyclists and pedestrians. We anticipate that this next one coming up will be the best yet for bicyclists and pedestrians. The Chair of the Transportation Committee, Congressman Oberstar, from Minnesota, has been consistently very much supportive of walking and bicycling, and making sure that those modes are represented.

There are organizations like the League Of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong, which is the bike industry lobbying group and Complete Streets Coalition, which is a group of local organizations, that have come together to make sure in that Highway bill, there’s policy statements that talk about you can’t just build a road and not put sidewalks or bike lanes, the appropriate bike and pedestrian infrastructure. If you’re going to spend those Federal dollars, you have to make sure you’re spending them to benefit everyone, not just the people in cars. So, they’re working on that.

The Safe Routes To School groups have been very active, and I think have gotten a lot of attraction in Washington, D.C. It’s one thing to talk about overall infrastructure, but when you’re talking about kids getting back and forth to school, there is just that much more of a need to be able to make sure they can walk, they can bike, they can be active, rather than creating these huge traffic jams at our schools because all the moms are driving their kids to school every morning. So, all of those folks are fitting together.

We’re actually working with the Rails To Trails folks. There is a push in this next Federal authorization for something called the Active Transportation Campaign. Last time around, there was a pilot program. It was called the Pilot Non-Motorized Transportation Program. And what they did, they gave four communities all over the United States 25 million bucks each, and said, “Do what you have to do to get people out of their cars, onto their bikes, and walking around.” Rails To Trails looked at that and said, “Wow, what a great program.”

It’s working in those four communities. They’re really making a difference and getting people out of their cars. So this time around, we’re going to try for a much bigger program, two billion dollars, all together, 40 cities or communities, 50 million dollars each, which sounds like a lot of money. But then, when you talk about in San Diego, it costs between two, and our most expensive bike path project, two to four million dollars a mile to build a bike path. It is not cheap to build those facilities. 50 million dollars will go a ways. There’s already bike and pedestrian money in the county that we have earmarked for those projects, and we’ll be able to do more with that money. It’s still got to get through the whole Federal process, though, which is scary.

What do you think is driving all this activity? Do gas prices have something to do with it?#

There are so many things that are coming together right now. I think there’s almost a perfect storm of things happening that are really promoting walking and bicycling. Gas prices are certainly a huge piece of it. We’re seeing so many more people riding their bikes and walking and taking transit because gas prices are so high, and they don’t look like they’re going to fall. So, we’re kind of in a permanent state of thinking about how we’re getting around.

The obesity epidemic and the diabetes epidemic have been a huge impetus for people to try and figure out how to incorporate activity into their daily lives. And their commute or their errands, or getting their kids to school can be a solution to that problem, too. If you’re walking to get someplace, you’re combining that exercise and that transportation. You get two for one.

So, there’s those two big things pushing it. But also, you have to give credit, I think, to those national advocacy organizations, who have been working behind the scenes for about 10 years now, to really push the bicycle and pedestrian agenda, so that now, we have legislators, who understand the issues, and who are willing to go to bat for us, who are willing to risk a little political capital to say bicycling is not just this crazy, strange thing. It’s an important piece of our transportation infrastructure, and we need to be spending some money to make sure people can do it. We haven’t for a really long time.

Safe Routes To School, the first thing I think of is that you’re learning to speak lawmakers’ language, in terms that affect their constituents. It helps if they can run for reelection and say, “I’m making the streets safer for your kids.”#

Absolutely.

Whereas, “I’m making the streets safer for those annoying bike pedestrians that you hate driving with” doesn’t resonate with a lot of people. It’s still important, but the phrasing of the argument is essential.#

Well, you have to phrase the language. The difficulty with bicycle advocacy is we have such a broad spectrum of people that we need to serve, everybody from those kindergartners, with their training wheels, riding to kindergarten, to the folks who are doing it for transportation, to the folks who are out there, riding on the weekends because they want to get fit and healthy. Or they’re racing or they just enjoy bicycling. Bicycle tourism is a huge piece of it. Everybody from five to 95 is out there on their bikes.

It’s not a one size fits all solution. You don’t want those fast riders, necessarily, on those bike paths, where you’ve got kids, dogs, strollers and people walking around. We need to provide facilities for those fast bicyclists, who are capable and want to be out in traffic because that’s the fastest, easiest way to get to their destination. But, you also have to provide facilities that are going to work for folks who are either not able or willing to go in traffic. So, there’s this huge range.

And Safe Routes To School, I think, is really a pretty smart, politically clever way of getting the issue into the spotlight. Somewhere in the 1970’s, we made a wrong turn, and we started putting schools on big arterials. We started discouraging kids from riding their bikes to school. In my children’s school districts, you were not allowed to ride your bike to school until you were at least in third grade. My kids were capable of riding their bikes to school when they were kindergarten, first, second-graders. They were forbidden from doing so, even if I was with them, by the school district. So, there are policies and decisions that have been made along the way that seemed like a good idea at the time. We don’t want those kids to get hit, we don’t want anybody to get hurt, so we’re going to tell you not to ride to school. Well now, we have all these little fat kids because they’re riding around in the car all the time, and we didn’t think about that when those policies and rules got implemented.

So, Safe Routes To School, I think, is really an exciting program to attack a bunch of things all at the same time. If you can get those kids out, I mean, it’s about traffic safety and obesity, but it’s about community building. It’s a whole different environment in your neighborhood when kids are walking and biking to school than it is when everybody’s driving everywhere. You don’t really have the opportunity to talk to people very much when you’re all sitting in your car packed on the street, where if you’re walking or biking together, there’s much more community interaction. So, that makes a big difference.

There’re two safety issues for kids getting to school. One is the traffic safety issue. Parents are afraid of the other parents, who are driving. “I don’t want my kids to walk by that other crazy mom’s house, she drives like a maniac and she’s going to hit my kids.” There’s also the stranger danger fear that some crazy person is going to drive up and snag my kid, they’re going to be kidnapped, and horrible things are going to happen to them because they’re the only kid on the streets. If there were 100 kids walking home from school, there are a lot of eyes on the street, then that criminal stuff doesn’t happen. But, you have to get over that hump of getting enough people out there where it starts to become a deterrent.

I’m sure you’re aware of the San Diego Critical Mass bike rides?#

Yes.

Are you affiliated with that at all?#

We’re not. I really applaud their goals and think it’s an exciting development. In San Diego, it’s grown tremendously. Back just even a few years ago, it was a big thing when you got 50 people out on a Critical Mass ride. Last month, in June, they had 750 riders on Critical Mass. It’s huge.

It’s an interesting dynamic.

The Bike Coalition is about safe and legal riding, so there’s some behaviors on the Critical Mass that we can’t really support. There’s some alcohol use we’d probably like to not see happen. In order to keep a group that big together, a lot of times, you end up corking intersections and jamming up traffic for the other road users, which is great as a statement. I like that whole idea that we’re out there, and we need the space on the road. Imagine if it was like this every day. But, at the same time, the Bike Coalition is really strongly encouraging bicyclists to stop at red lights and stop signs, ride the right way, and lights at night. So, it’s tough for me to go to Critical Mass, but I have gone, I have ridden it, and it’s a great, joyful, wonderful experience. You should do it.

That brings me to a point, and I think you mentioned this on the phone about cops ticketing cyclists. I don’t believe that cyclists should be legally bound to the same rules that cars are. I don’t know if there’s any official thought on this.#

There is. The Vehicle Code says we have to follow all the same rules, we have all the same responsibility as automobile drivers.

I was pulled over on my bike for making a right turn at a red light, where there’s a no right turn on red, which I thought was ludicrous because all I had to do was walk onto the sidewalk, turn 90 degrees, and step back off the sidewalk, and I would have been legit.#

Yeah, but you could have just waited for the green. I think that you’re right. There are a lot of laws that have been created because of the hazards of automobiles that if the only vehicles out there were bicyclists, the laws would be different because you’re not driving a deadly weapon when you’re driving a bike. On the other hand, from the advocacy point of view, I need bicyclists to follow all the laws because there has been a push from the 70’s until today to not encourage bicycling, but to actively discourage bicyclists from being able to use the roads. There’s a strong sentiment in the public’s fear that bicyclists shouldn’t be allowed on the roads at all because they can’t be trusted to follow the rules, and so, they get everybody into
trouble.

Invariably, it’s a little frustrating to me because I’ll go to a meeting, go to SANDAG and talk about we need to put bike lanes on the street, we need to spend a couple million dollars on this bike facility. And every single time, someone will say to me, “Why should we spend any money on bicyclists? They don’t follow any of the rules, they don’t respect the laws that are out there. If they want to be on the road, they need to respect the rules as they are, and work within the system to change them.”

Idaho, for example, has kind of come to terms with the idea that bicyclists and motorists may need to behave differently at stop signs. In Idaho, the law for bicyclists is you can roll through a stop sign if you’re doing it at a speed, where you can yield if appropriate to do so. You’re not required to come to a complete stop at every stop sign, which is kind of what bicyclists often do now because they understand the yielding rules and do it appropriately. But, California doesn’t have that law. California, you’re supposed to stop.
So, it becomes an interesting dilemma for us. We only have so many resources. Do we pursue a stop sign kind of exemption for bicyclists, or do we work on something else? And what are the political costs for us institutionalizing what was, before, illegal behavior and now, suddenly, for bicyclists, it’s legal. It’s a tricky thing. I think most bicyclists who are out there on the road, who are blowing through the stop signs don’t ever get feedback from people that what they’re doing is an issue. What happens is the motorists who get pissed off don’t find the original bicyclist who did it. They either pick up the phone and call me and tell me how responsible we are, or they take it out on the next bicyclist that they see. So, that is not good for the bicycling community, overall. But, I can understand the impulse. A lot of times, it doesn’t make sense to sit there, and OK, there’s no one for miles.

I’m concerned if I stop at an intersection with a bunch of cars, I might become invisible to them, whereas if I’m set apart, if I just go ahead and break the law, when that pack of cars comes up on me again, I’m going to be clearly out in front them and I’ve basically distanced myself from the cars for a while. When the light turns green and everybody just goes, I’m there with a bunch of people who are flooring it. It just seems to be a more dangerous setting for me to be lined up with all those cars.#

It depends on where you are in an intersection. One of the things we work really hard on in our Road 1 class, is dealing with just those kind of situations, where should you be at an intersection where you’re going to be most visible, most predictable, where you and motorists are going to understand what each other are trying to do. We really encourage folks, if you’re sitting at that intersection, not to be too far to the right, for example. You’re going straight, but the motorist coming up behind you is turning right, so you get right hooked. You are kind of out of what we call the cone of vision for those drivers. If you’re out front and center in the middle of that lane because you’re going straight through the intersection, they’re going to see you. People who are driving see what’s in front of them. They don’t see what’s off to the side very often. When you’re in front, more often than not, they’re going to see you and understand what’s going on.

It depends so much on the geometry of the route. For example, if you’ve got a bike lane up ahead, there’s room for them to get past you if you squeeze up to the front and jump ahead in line. You get across that intersection, you’ve got a little gap. There’s room for them to pass you. I really wouldn’t encourage you to do it in a spot like on Pennsylvania, for example, up in Hillcrest. The road’s very narrow, there’s parking on both sides. You’re going to get in front of those cars, and then, they’re trapped behind you. And now, they’re really irritated that you jumped ahead, and now, you’re delaying everybody. It’s really a dance, I think, for bicyclists to be interacting with motorists, and it’s not something that’s necessarily easy or intuitive for people.

That’s why we teach the class because there’s nothing like, A, knowing what the rules are, and B, going out and doing it under the guidance of an instructor, who knows what the rules are and how to do it and can demonstrate it for you, and you can do it in kind of a little more controlled environment. It makes a huge difference for people, but it takes time. Our Road 1 class is nine hours, all together, half in the classroom, half on the bike. And so, we go out and we do it. One of our best instructors, Jim Bross [SP] teaches out of Normal Heights. His Road 1 class is out there on Adams Avenue. They’re on El Cajon Boulevard. They’re making left turns, merging over, using left turn pockets and turning left on El Cajon Boulevard, which, for most cyclists, is something they would be really thinking hard about doing. How would I do that? Do I want to do that? Why should I do that?

But then, when you go and you’re trained and you do it, you realize, hey, this works. I can be a part of traffic, not hold people up too much. And people understand what I’m trying to do, how I’m doing it, and they’re not going to hit me. It works really well, but again, it’s not something that is necessarily easy. And it’s one thing for me to say, “Oh, yeah, just use the left turn pocket, go over there and turn left on the left turn pocket.” It’s way different for me to say that than for you to go do it.

Everything you’re saying actually does make sense to me, but I still don’t like waiting at red lights.#

Well, nobody does!

Nobody does. That sort of behavior just isn’t intuitive to people, especially when they’re starting out. They’re intimidated, and their instinct might be to get over to the side and get out of the way, when it’s not the safest thing to do.#

For a lot of people, it is. It’s unfortunate that we haven’t done a better job, training people to ride because the instinctive thing for them to do sets them up for so many more crashes because everybody’s afraid of what’s happening behind them. People behind you will see you if you’re out there. What they won’t see is if you’re coming up to intersections and you’re too far to the right, you’re kind of hidden by other traffic and you end up kind of popping out into the intersection, where people are not prepared for you or know what you’re going to do, driveways, in particular.

Only 18 percent of bicyclist injuries are car/bike crashes. 45 percent of bicyclist injuries are bicyclist single vehicle crashes, where the bicyclist falls down. And a lot of that is seams on the side of the road, sand, debris that will either cause you to flat or cause you to fall down. And those are the places where people get hurt, but they don’t think about that when they’re out riding in the gutter. They’re thinking those cars behind me aren’t going to hit me. Well, yeah, but the car that’s coming out of the driveway is, and you’re going to catch your tire on that seam between the gutter and the road, or where they’ve done the trenching along the side of the street, and there’s that little dip for 100 yards. That’s going to catch you and make you fall down and you’re going to get hurt.

It’s fun, the more we can kind of give people hints about how to be safer out there and how to make it more enjoyable. I think a lot of those same people who are hovering over to the right are scared the whole time they’re out there.

Yeah, it’s sort of stressful.#

It is, and if you can get some skills and understand what’s going on, it becomes a much less stressful experience to be on the bike in traffic, at least from my own experience. I started out at the Bike Coalition knowing nothing about riding. I mean, I knew how to pedal and steer. And for most people, that’s the extent of their bicycling knowledge. But when I learned what to do, it opened up a whole world of riding for me because now, I can ride everywhere. I don’t always like it. I mean, there are still some places that are scary or intimidating, not the friendliest places. But, I know how to get through them in the safest way, and so, I’m much less intimidated about I wanted to go on that ride, but I have to go through that freeway interchange. OK, now I know how to do that and I’m not going to let that stop me. It’s not my favorite part of the ride.

You might even avoid it.#

I definitely would avoid it. I don’t like high-speed interchanges. I’m not a big fan, personally, of bike lanes on the big arterials. Riding there still, even though I know I’m safe and I’m not going to get hit, it’s just noisy, polluted and unpleasant. It’s not my favorite kind of riding. But, if I need to get from point A to point B, I’ll be able to do that and I’m not going to be freaked out by having to go on that big arterial, anymore.

Bike The Bay, it’s our big fundraiser. We’re so excited about it. 20 years ago, maybe more, there was a ride, called the Five Cities Ride, which was done by the American Youth Hostel Association here in town. They had access to the bridge and they did it for a few years. Cal Tran said, “We don’t want you on the bridge, anymore.” And so, it kind of died. It’s been hanging there for so long, we want to ride on the bridge, we never get to ride on the bridge. And so, we’re really excited about being able to do that. We’re hoping that a lot of people will show up. They’re letting us have 2,500 riders, and that’s it. So, we’re encouraging people to sign up and get registered because you don’t want to get left out. We’re excited about it.

There’s great stuff happening in Oceanside. Probably a different conversation from today, but Oceanside has decided they want to be one of the leading bicycle friend communities. And so, they’re doing some infrastructure improvements, they’re starting education programs, they’ve got the city council on board. They’re talking about trying to get Tour of California to come down and have Oceanside be one of the start and end points for that. There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there.

The League of American Bicyclists has a program, called The Bicycle-Friendly Communities Program. And what it does is it looks at a community and says what has this community done to support and encourage bicycling? So, it’s everything from what facilities are available, how many miles of bike lane, how many miles of bike path? What kind of educational programs are in place, are they teaching kids to ride, are there opportunities for adults to learn? Are they working with the enforcement community? Are people getting ticketed for the right things and not being harassed for things they shouldn’t be harassed for? Are they doing encouragement programs like Bike To Work Day or fun rides, or getting people out on bikes? So, they kind of combine all of that stuff together and then, award communities that are doing a great job. So, places like Portland, Davis, Seattle, Denver and Chicago.

And what about San Diego?#

San Diego is not on the list.

Nooo! I read something about how we have the most bike trails. href="#q21">#

We’ve got about 1,000 miles of bike facility in San Diego County. Most of that are bike lanes. There is, I think, 75, maybe 80 miles of bike path in San Diego, mostly in little chunks. We’d like to knit those all together. But, what I think San Diego is still lacking is the education piece of it, the enforcement piece. We do some encouragement. Bike To Work Day is a big deal in San Diego every year in the bicycling community. We have some great fun rides that happen in San Diego. But, we haven’t reached the level of commitment that some of these other communities have, and we’re still working on that. And the City of San Diego, itself, has been kind of distracted. They’ve had some financial issues. But, I think things are calming down at the city, and there’s going to be some opportunities for some real improvement, I hope. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time.

How long have you been doing this job?#

Since 2000.

And how did you get into this?#

I totally fell into it. My dad’s a big bike rider, and I moved to San Diego with my husband and two kids. We moved here from the suburbs of Chicago. He sent me a bike, and he said, “You no longer have any excuse not to ride. It’s San Diego, it’s sunny 360 days of the year. Your kids are a little older. No excuse, get out there and ride.” He rides the Death Ride every year. He’s really a strong rider. So, I said, “OK, I’ll ride.” I mean, I always liked bike riding, but it wasn’t a big focus in my life.

But, I didn’t have any place to ride, and I didn’t know what to do. There used to be a publication in town called Bicycling In San Diego. There was a club ride calendar and a bunch of different stuff. And it had want ads in the back. There was a little want ad for the Bike Coalition. They were hiring an executive director. So, I submitted my resume. And they said, “Wow, we really like you, but we already found somebody.” And I said, “That’s fine, I wasn’t really looking for something big right now, but I’d still like to volunteer.” And at the end of the meeting, the fellow that they had hired came up to me and said, “Are you serious about wanting the job because if I take it, my wife will kill me?” So, I said, “Well, yeah, OK, I’d like to do it.”

And I have to say that the board of the Bicycle Coalition has been terrific. This is the best job I’ve ever had. It doesn’t pay much, but I started when my youngest daughter was in kindergarten. So, I was working 10, 15 hours a week answering the phone, writing a newsletter, officey kind of stuff. And they let me work from home, really flexible hours. But, the one thing that they did say before they kind of turned me loose as executive director, “You don’t know anything about bicycling. You know how to ride, but you don’t know how to ride in traffic, you don’t know anything about bicycle advocacy, so you don’t get to say anything.” I didn’t get to say anything for about the first year until they kind of got me up to speed on the ins and outs of bicycle advocacy.

Often I say to people I work for a bike advocacy organization. They say, “Oh, you do bike paths.” And it’s so much more than that. It’s so much more than building facilities. It’s about creating a culture that allows and welcomes people bicycling. Way bigger than building a bike path. I’ve been really lucky.

Somewhat ironically, reading the book has motivated me to read far fewer blogs. I’ve spent much of the past year reading dozens of marketing blogs in an effort to stay on top of my game, but time and time again I find myself drawn back to books (I’m amazed at how often I look to Ogilvy on Advertising for inspiration – it’s 23 years old!). Books require me to step away from the computer (and IM and email) and immerse myself in a subject. Reading Groundswell on my commutes taught me more than any blog has, and it did so much more efficiently.

Don’t get me wrong, blogs still have a place (I’m writing one), but as an educational tool, I feel like they work best as compliments to more vetted media. The (largely self-imposed) pressure that bloggers feel to publish frequently requires them to spout ideas quickly, or riff on others’ ideas. This is great for conversations, and the relationships they help build are priceless—this is, essentially, the thesis of Groundswell. However, I’m convinced that a rich and high-impact education begins by taking in books, stories, papers, articles, lectures, films, and documentaries that have been extensively worked on, reviewed, edited, and re-edited.

Quality is rare. Quality requires effort, and it takes time to emerge. Don’t expect it to fill your feed reader every morning.

Despite all these new things, I was really stressed out on Wednesday. Shan and I had just returned from a trip to Maine on Tuesday night and I faced a short week densely packed with work and catching up. Today I’m not so stressed because a few other things (that can’t be bought) came to the rescue:

• My wife
• Music
• Friends
• Riding bikes at night
• Walking home from surfing in the dark, barefoot under orange streetlights, crickets chirping under palms