After-Sundown Companions

"Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight
but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night."

—H.W. Longfellow

Night rides are a great escape from summer's heat and are always thrilling—especially all-night brevets, where reaching the dawn serves as reward for one's nocturnal toils. On brevets, many of us find by nightfall that our group has become stretched out so sparsely along the route that the ensuing nights often grow lonesome. Those quiet backroads, deep in the Carolina woodlands, can however be truly excellent company along with the moon, wind, trees and nocturnal wildlife. Deer, with their poor sense of roadway etiquette, have proven problematic to a few unlucky randonneurs (Hi Chet! Hello Cindy!) and even much smaller critters can challenge one's bike handling skills. Thankfully the bears seem to be more elusive, but I'll wager that the tandem could take down a small one if they earnestly put their minds to it, and replace those E-6s with infrared. Keep those hunting licenses up to date!

Three night creatures offering far more pleasant company come to mind. All three of them are night birds with distinctive songs that call out their own names loudly, clearly and persistently, allowing us to connect with them while keeping our eyes on the road. They are: the bob-white at dusk and the whip-poor-will and chuck-will's-widow on through the night. If we are enjoying a full moon, mocking birds may trill the night long too. Though they do not monotonously repeat their own names, you should be familiar with diagnostic triple repeating of extensive repertoire of mimicked songs.

J. J. Audubon says of the Chuck-Will's-Widow (The 'Widow and Whip' are both "Nighjars", aka "Goatsuckers"):

"The sounds of the Goatsucker, at all events, forbode a peaceful and calm night, and I have more than once thought, are conducive to lull the listener to repose…Their notes are seldom heard in cloudy weather, and never when it rains."

I'm told that the whip-poor-will always hatches ten days before the moon is full—how's that for proof of a creature's splendid connection to the night world?

Doubtless, many of you have learned to identify these birdsongs around the time you learned to form sentences, but others riding amongst us were raised in cities, or even places outside the eastern United States, and it occurs to me that they just may be missing out on the comfortable recognition of these guardian angels of night travelers, these unseen forest dwellers who seem to follow the weary traveler mile after mile and hour after hour with audible encouragement to keep our minds clear.

Despair not, you of such pitifully deprived upbringing, findsounds.com is here to enlighten you. I've grabbed three .wav files, converted to .mp3 and saved the bobwhite here, the whippoorwill here and chuck-will's-widow here that I might serve to further facilitate your education and night-cycling enjoyment. You will never ride alone in the woods again, at least not this side of the Mississippi.

Should you ever chance to pedal on down to the deep south, Louisiana and Mississippi are possessed of the loudest nocturnal insect choruses. The neighborhoods of insects create auditory waves that run back and forth through the wood lots. I have had no entomologist confirm it, but I’d bet these choruses are a prelude to reproduction. I will leave that to the insects, but in two weeks I will be investigating whether the cacophony of insect calling and the silent phosphorescent calls of lightning bugs, so prominent in my memory of Louisiana and Mississippi, also extend to Arkansas.

Now, dontcha wanna go for a ride tonight?

Time to park the car?

It looks like rising gas prices are starting to affect drivers' habits.

This is from today's New York Times:

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

Here's the full story .

Bike to Work / Verse 1

May is Bike To Work Month and our good friend Yo Adrian has prepared a little song to motivate would-be bicycle commuters.

Oh the weather outside's delightful
And your belly's looking frightful
Gas prices have gone berserk
Bike to work, bike to work, bike to work

My only question: How did he get a look at my belly? I've done my best to keep it under wraps.

Bicycles & The Gas Tax

We’ve all had our close calls. My buddy JoeRay had one this morning.

Returning home on his bike from a training ride, JoeRay said he signaled to make a legal left-hand turn into his neighborhood.

As he moved toward the center line, he was nearly clipped by a car that tried to pass him on the left. The woman driver slammed on brakes and skidded off the road into a ditch, narrowly missing JoeRay.

The woman was shaken but unhurt. Her car was not damaged.

“It’s as close as I’ve ever come to being hit by a car,” JoeRay told me a few minutes after the incident.

Then the fun began.

A motorist in a V-8 pick-up who'd witnessed the incident pulled over and began to berate JoeRay.

“This is your fault,” the motorist told him. “You don’t belong on the road.”

JoeRay found himself simultaneously calming the woman and defending his right to the state's public highways and byways.

“You need to take a look at the law,” JoeRay told the pick-up driver.

The driver responded, “I don’t give a damn about the law. You don’t pay any gas taxes.”

Ah…there we have it. The pick-up driver showed his hand a bit too early in the game.

It’s an argument I’ve heard I thousand times. It boils down to this: Public roads are built using a tax on gasoline. Since bicycles don’t use gasoline, they shouldn’t be using the road.

Is our pick-up driver correct? Well, yes and no. He is correct that bicycles don’t use gasoline. However, bicycle riders pay for a portion of the public roads by other means, mainly property and other taxes.

Consider these numbers from a 2007 study by the Reason Foundation (which, by the way, is pushing a “pay-as-you-go” approach -- also known as toll roads -- in the face of declining gas tax revenues):

* $134 billion is spent each year to construct and operate roads, or $1,199 per U.S. household, representing about one dollar in 37 of median gross household income.

* Highway user fees composed of state and federal fuel taxes, registration and license fees, tolls and other charges levied as a consequence of using public roads, generate $104 billion a year or 77.5 percent of road spending. The remainder (mostly local roads) is financed by sales taxes, property taxes, and general fund appropriations.

* State and federal fuel taxes (on gasoline and diesel) are the largest single highway user fee at $53 billion per year, but they provide less than half of total road funding.

A blogger and cycling advocate named James in South Carolina recently addressed a letter from a Greenville motorist who argued cyclists weren’t paying their fair share, tax-wise. James’ response:

The first and most obvious point to bring up is that most cyclists are also drivers…. We pay the same taxes as other road users, with the exception of a little less in gas tax if we choose to replace some car trips with bicycle trips. For the sake of argument though, let’s look at the situation of a cyclist who does not own a car. That person still pays income, sales, and property taxes that heavily subsidize the construction and maintenance of the federal, state, and county road systems that we all use. Furthermore, the bicycle that he or she rides does not cause the damage to roadways that cars and large trucks do (when is that last time you saw a pothole caused by a bicycle?)….Please stop falsely accusing cyclists of getting a “free ride” on the roads.

Well said, James.

A central point that James makes is that road costs have been shifted to property owners. That’s in line with a May 15 article, “Property Taxes Help Fund Roads As Gas Tax Revenue Dwindles,” about that very trend in Minnesota:

"Dedicated roads funding from state and federal road-user sources such as fuel and vehicle taxes has been relatively stagnant for years. Meanwhile, local property levies for roads and bridges in Minnesota have doubled since the mid-1990s -- to an estimated $1.6 billion in 2006. The result, little noticed by most Minnesotans, is that property taxes have become the state's single largest funder of roads, nearly equal to all state and federal sources combined."

JoeRay’s run-in with the pick-up driver came on a day when the Raleigh News & Observer ran an article about a growing shortcoming with the gas tax.

Here are a few quotes from that article:

“North Carolinians are driving more miles every year, but they're buying less gas. Although better fuel economy sounds great for the pocketbook and good for the planet, it spells trouble for our long-term reliance on gas-tax money to finance transit and highway needs. After spending more than it takes in for several years, the federal Highway Trust Fund is expected to run out of money for road projects by 2009.”

“In the old days, when cars got 13 or 14 miles to a gallon, we were pretty flush with cash," said David J. Forkenbrock of the University of Iowa Public Policy Center. "But we’re already seeing major drops in the revenues coming in. We know it's going to get worse.”

One possible solution, according to the gas tax article: charge by the mile, not the gallon. Forkenbrock is overseeing a two-year, $16.5 million study in North Carolina and five other states on the feasibility of replacing the fuel tax with a mileage fee.

According to the article, volunteers’ cars will be rigged with computers and satellite gear to record where and how far they drive. “Each month, the volunteers will receive sample bills for how many miles they have driven. Their mileage fees will be compared to the per-gallon taxes they pay now,” the article states.

Researchers will also look at whether to vary the mileage fee according to the kind of vehicle driven and the time of day it’s operated. For instance:

* Heavy trucks could be charged a higher fee “to reflect their share of pavement wear and tear.”

* To relieve freeway congestion, a rush-hour premium could be charged.

* Lower fees might be charged for alternative-fuel and low-emission cars.

Well, now, there’s a plan I can get behind. As I cyclist, I’d welcome the opportunity to pay a true “road use” fee. Simply put, the more you use the road, the more you pay. The heavier your vehicle, the more you pay. Want to get a break on those user fees? Get an alternative-fuel or low-emission vehicle.

Bottom line under such a scheme: Bicycles would come out a big winner.

With the study results at least two years down the road, I’ve got a little advice for the guy in that pick-up truck, the guy who lectured my buddy JoeRay.

Next time you see someone in a fuel-efficient Prius, pull ‘em over and give ‘em a lecture: Don’t they know they’re not pulling their weight on the gas tax?