MITPressLog

A Bicycle Revolution & a CONTEST

Happy Friday! We've told you our bike stories all week and now we're turning the tables. Tell us your bike story for a chance to win a copy of John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition. Share your story in the comments section or on the MIT Press Facebook page and we'll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of the book. Please submit your stories by 5 pm Eastern on Monday, May 21st. 

And now, without further ado, James Lynch, Marketing Associate at the MIT Press, wraps up our Effective Cycling, seventh edition-inspired National Bike to Work Week series.

I’m a daily bike commuter, although perhaps I should say I’m a daily car door avoider. This past week (on bike to work week no less), I witnessed a biker get doored in front of me.  It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this occur, or, sadly, the last. Thankfully he walked away, but as I helped him up off the pavement and made sure he was okay, I noticed tears in his eyes. “This was only my second day riding a bike,” he muttered.

Bikers live in a dangerous world— a world where giant 1,000-lb creatures are constantly trying to maim and kill you. Forester’s Effective Cycling is a handy guide that helps us navigate these dangerous waters. While the book contains a lot of useful maintenance tips, the more important sections focus on how to properly share the road. Bike lanes are well and good; however, they often don’t avoid the dreaded “door-zone” (our biker friend from my previous paragraph was riding in a lane) and are often littered with obstacles. Forester teaches us to ride safely and to not let ourselves be regulated to the gutters.

I’ll end on a positive note. Every day I notice more and more people picking up the bike and putting down the keys. We are in the midst of a bicycle revolution and as our numbers and visibility grow, so does our safety. It’s important to remember that when all is said and done, biking is really fun!

 

A Happy Medium

Here's another post inspired by Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition for our National Bike to Work Week series! Doug Sery, Senior Acquisitions Editor, discusses the need for cyclists and automobile drivers to reach a happy medium when it comes to sharing the road.

As an avid cyclist, I can’t yet decide whether this is a book I’d wish I’d known about 20 years earlier or not. At that time, I was a bicycle messenger in Washington, D.C., and I can’t remember any of us using official bike lanes or, for that matter, whether there were even bike lanes. We ran stop signs and red lights, bunny-hopped curbs, split lanes and played tag with taxis. The more aggressive riders were known to use their u-locks or LifeHammers if they felt a car or bus was crowding them. There was definitely a philosophy of offensive biking for safety. Unlike Europeans, Americans, generally speaking, don’t know how to handle bikes in “their” automobile lanes and the best way to get people in cars to back off was to show them that you were present, obnoxiously so if it was warranted. At the same time, though, I did get “doored” more than once and threatened a number of times by drivers while attending Critical Mass events in San Francisco and Boston. There has to be some sort of happy medium, a medium that’s probably not going to be reached until America gets rid of its fixation on cars ruling the road. I live in Sweden now, just across from Copenhagen, and while there are still plenty of cars, there seem to be just as many bicycles, seemingly the preferred mode of transportation in the city. There are a plethora of bike lanes, but at the same time I can take my bike out onto the roads and feel completely safe knowing that the people in their cars have become acclimated to bikes. Perhaps, in reality, it’s the bicyclists that have become acclimated to the cars. Whatever your level of expertise might be -- beginner, riding centuries every weekend, or just commuting -- Effective Cycling is a superb resource to have next to your bike pump, tire levers and truing stand.

 

The Debate over Urban Bike Lanes

To continue our celebration of National Bike to Work Week with posts inspired by John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition, Justin Kehoe, another bicyclist and MIT Press staffer (acquisitions department), discusses the lively debate over bike lanes:

Today, the government program for bicycle transportation pretends to make cycling so easy, by bikeways, that cyclists no longer need to learn how to operate as drivers of vehicles.-–John Forester on “The Why and Wherefore of Traffic Law” in Effective Cycling

After 12 years of bicycling in Boston, the seemingly inevitable caught up with me last month: I was doored. It was silly: I was half a block out from a stop light, so I hadn’t really built up any significant speed; I was on a particularly narrow stretch of Broadway St. in Cambridge, and against my own better judgment (and that of author John Forester), was hugging the right hand side of the road. The driver carelessly flung his door open, and for both of us it was just the unlucky confluence of two otherwise isolated moments of inattention. This is exactly the kind of situation that John Forester fears is the unfortunate bi-product of bike lanes—a false sense of security for bicyclists who instead of having to deal with antsy drivers behind them, must now contend with motorists trying to edge past them on the left when they perhaps don’t really have the room, and doors flung open from parked vehicles on the right.

John Forester’s opposition to urban bike lanes has made him a polarizing figure in bicycle policy debates. It has put him at odds with many of the more notable bike advocacy groups, who tend to see mileage of urban bike lanes as one of the best measuring sticks for effective urban transportation policy. For instance, this week’s Boston Phoenix features an article on the resignation of Boston’s Bike Czar, Nicole Freedman, who, the article boasts, since 2007 has increased Boston’s bike lane mileage fifty-fold. Forester, on the other hand, believes that bicycling as a mode of transportation functions best when all vehicles behave the same. This means following the same rules, which would preclude the inclusion of separate lanes for bicycles. He advocates “lawful, competent bicycling” and most advocacy groups with any real voice in transportation policy debates would also stress lawful bicycling. However, for Forester, truly lawful bicycling requires that bicycles be treated as vehicles the same as automobiles. This means that they incur all the same rights and restrictions, rather than having their own bastardized sub-set of laws—laws which are, to Forester’s mind, an unworkable hodge-podge of pedestrian and motorist policies. But it is the issue of competency that raises the most ire. Where transportation policy is geared toward making it easier for anyone to get on a bike and get out on streets, Forester thinks that a base level of competency is necessary for the safety of all—and knowing the laws is only part of that competency. This is one of the reasons why Forester opposes bike lanes, and it is one of the things that has put him at odds with other advocacy groups.

Charges that emphasizing this level of competency amounts to a kind of bicycling elitism, along with his public defense of the automobile (he’s a member of the pro-auto group American Dream Coalition), have set him at odds with many of the most vocal and visible bike advocacy groups. At a time when advocacy groups are trying to get more people out on the road, Forester’s opposition to bike lanes has been disruptive to the current thrust of transportation policy, especially in urban environments. Yet the 46 page pamphlet Bicycling Street Smarts, which is one of the most widely distributed works of bicycle education in the U.S., is culled from an earlier version of Effective Cycling. And his arguments about the relationship between safety and competency, however unfashionable they are among urban transportation planners, are hard to dismiss. I for one, despite an occasional lapse (see getting doored above) try to keep Forester’s recommended distance of five feet between me and the cars parked to my right. If this is on a narrow stretch that invites motorists to pass me when they don’t really have the room, for my own safety I will take up my right of way in the middle of the road along with the other vehicles on the road. Dealing with the occasional irate honk from impatient motorists is trumped by the off-chance of being laid out on my tailbone by a fool who can’t be bothered to check his side-view mirror before opening his door. And while I myself, unlike Forester, am a fan of bike lanes, I think his opposition serves an important function in the debate about bicycle policy. Honest acknowledgment of the limitations and shortcomings of bike lanes is an important step in making bicyclists more aware of others as well as of their own visibility.

Don't Get Doored!

To kick off National Bike to Work Week (May 14-18), Anar Badalov (who bikes to the office every day and works in the MIT Press publicity department) shares some tips that he's learned from John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition, which is hot off the presses.

There are some heated debates surrounding cycling today. If you ask me, John Forester, whose ideas are at the center of many of the arguments, and who I’m learning is considered a radical thinker in some groups, is convincing in his campaign against poorly built cycling infrastructure and unsafe biking habits. Above all, in Effective Cycling he urges us not to be afraid to cycle in traffic, and to resist being shunted off into government-sponsored bike lanes (which are often more unsafe than riding in traffic).

A recent Boston Globe article cites the following statistics: in 2009, 2 percent of Boston’s commuters cycled to work and school; in Copenhagen, where bike lanes are designed to accommodate avid and weekend cyclists alike—they’re mostly separated from car lanes altogether—cyclists make up for 35 percent of commuters. 

Clearly, there is a lot of work to be done here and in other major US cities when it comes to building safe and practical lanes. But what are we supposed to do in the meantime? John Forester and other vehicular cycling advocates believe that cyclists and drivers should share space. Perhaps if Boston resembled Copenhagen or Amsterdam in its bicyclist infrastructure, this book wouldn’t be necessary—although it does also have some useful maintenance tips. Unfortunately, that’s not the case and it likely won’t be for many years. 

I tried to photograph a small portion of the sole bike lane on my route home from MIT Press, but there were too many cars in it to get a good shot. Luckily there’s Google Maps:

 

 

 

Broadway and Hampshire

I’ve seen at least a handful of trusting cyclists who actually assumed traffic in the left lane would slow down and let them cross, and luckily none of them were seriously injured. There are dozens of others like this popping up all over the city, and rather than learning the rules of the road, new commuters are depending on the lanes to do the protecting for them.

More regularly, cyclists are hit by swinging car doors while they are riding in the designated bike lanes (according to Forester, this accounts for as much as 8 percent of total car-bike collisions)!

Hopefully Boston will become a bicycle-friendly city one day, but meanwhile we have to learn the rules of the road. Here are just a couple of pointers I picked up from Effective Cycling:

-Avoid getting doored! Door Zones are the areas where car doors can potentially hit you. Oftentimes, cyclists swerve into traffic to avoid getting hit, and this is how serious injuries can occur. Unfortunately, bicycle lanes are often painted in door zones, which is why Forester encourages us to ride just outside of the door zone. Always keep at least five feet of distance between you and the edge of parked cars. Don’t let this be you:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-13 percent of car-bike accidents occur when cyclists fail to yield when changing lanes! Learn your signals and use them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

-25 perecent of car-bike accidents occur when the cyclists fails to yield to crossing traffic. Don’t run lights!

-If the road narrows, take the entire lane after negotiating with the driver behind you—make sure the driver agrees to let you in by giving you room, slowing down or taking some other positive action.

I could go on, but it’s Monday morning and you probably just need a good laugh:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

 

 

How to Read the Landscape

Last week, MIT Press staff told us which titles they'd suggest as gifts.This week, Daniel Bouchard, a member of the MIT Press Journals Division, recommends A Landscape History of New England, edited by  Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd:

 

A Landscape History of New England  is an ideal primer for answering (and providing) a lot of questions about the common and uncommon landscapes all around as you travel through New England. It’s a resource, serving as a decoder of landscapes. Drawing on a long and scholarly tradition, it teaches you how to read the landscape. As an interested reader of many of the books cited throughout these 21 articles (by 23 authors), and a fan of many of those earlier authors (John Brinckerhoff Jackson, William Cronon, John Stilgoe, D.W. Meinig, and others, not least of whom, Thoreau), I found this collection a significant addition and worthy contribution to the literature. Now, as a pleasantly burdensome bonus, I have two handfuls of new (to me) authors on whom to keep an eye.

But what good is that to you? Well, imagine you and a friend are driving separate cars north out of New York City. You’ve got some time on your hands, opted for a road trip, and decided to “see” New England. It’s not the biggest territory in the States, but it’s still a lot of ground to cover. You pass over bridges, pause thru toll booths, and lean the wheel into the lanes under the big green highway signs boldly declaring “New England.”

Then you do something unique. Your car and the other car part ways to investigate different routes. You will meet up again somewhere way up north, let’s say at a diner in Brewer, Maine, in ten days. There, over lobster rolls and ale, you will discuss what you saw and compare notes. One car will “take a left” off Interstate 95 at New Haven and head north into Vermont. The other will continue along the coast up through Rhode Island, Boston and New Hampshire.

Is it a scavenger hunt for the eyes? What do we expect them to see? When they see the attractive old buildings in a town center painted white will they know those buildings are painted “a starker white paint than had been available to earlier generations”? (31) There is a lot to be gained by understanding such a thing. There’s a lot of history to consider beyond any plaques mounted nearby, and such plaques may indeed be more part of that history than they are a guide to it. Take the town Common: it may look postcard nice when our travelers pull up, but chances are good it was once held with the regard of any uncared for empty lot with junk on it, deep ruts from vehicles and stray animals. That condition wouldn’t be acceptable today, of course, and you can find out why it used to be.

Think about what you would see if you bought someone a coffee-table book “about” New England, one of those over-size picture books (which A Landscape History of New England definitely is not). No doubt, in that book there would be a lot of superb photographs of historic town centers with colonial and Federal style housing on streets radiating out from rising white steeples. In the rural section there would be old farmhouses and barns and piles of pumpkins gathered in the fall. On the coast there would be pictures of beaches and waterfronts, and fishermen on small boats coming in or out of the harbor. There may be pictures of quahogs, oysters or lobsters. There are few better pictorial representations of New England than a close up of a bivalve or crustacean in the hands of an old salt donning rubber overalls. For representations of the city you would see some nicely framed vantages of historic houses like those on Beacon Hill (Boston) or College Hill (Providence) and an aerial shot of Faneuil Hall and Fenway Park and so on. And in the mountains some photos of the colorful fall foliage with more farms and attractive town centers nearby. But what do any of the pictures tell us about New England? They only show us what we already know is there. And it is pretty.  

In both cars the challenge for the groups (yes, I’ve populated the front and back seats of the two cars—it’s more fun) is the same as they speed across the highways. They have the option to take any exit and explore whatever towns they come into and also the back roads between the towns as well as the large and small cities. The car along the coast exits and heads toward the water. They want to see some little town where there are fishing boats and a decent seafood restaurant. They will get out and take some pictures before they eat. The other car off-ramps in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. They admire the farms and meadows they pass and soon they come to the white steeple of a church and an old town hall and then the car pulls over by a small bridge where a handsome brick factory sits next to the water. The travelers get out, stretch, take some pictures and then go find something to eat.

If we have been in New England we have an idea of what others may expect to see in it. Now the questions turn to what can we understand about what we see all around us on the trip. The roads everywhere are lined with old stone walls. Sometimes, from the highway, you see the same stone walls rising up off the roadside and heading up over a hill covered with trees. Who put them there? The harbor atmosphere in a seaside tourist destination tries hard to evoke an earlier time. Why? Is the past more authentic? It is common knowledge that New England is the place to view autumn foliage but were those beautiful autumn views always highly valued?

Anyone can give you a dozen good reasons to visit Cape Cod. With this book you begin to see it from the eyes of a geographer. People on the Cape work hard to make a living from the land and sea. They always have. But after the First World War the economy shifted from working the land’s natural resources to working the industries and services that comprise a tourist seasonal-resident destination. The Cumbler chapter traces those changes with a cautionary note on the Cape as a “fragile ecosystem.”

So as our travelers compare notes they realize that they can now list dozens of towns all founded in the mid-18^th century, from each state. Some look like they are still in that time period with sprawling old farms and pastoral views—beautiful. Some simply look ravaged. Some look like revived mill towns, with humming, retro-fitted brick factories. And some mill towns look simply dilapidated with no help on the way. Some towns, after 250 years, appear to be just two highways crossing by a gas station and some, maybe a town or two away, are congested with upscale housing and fancy shops. Are the current economic winners also the past economic losers, thus preserving the things now highly valued as “New England”? Read the Wood chapter to find out.

This book informs like a startling tour guide. What it can’t answer directly it points you in the direction to find out for yourself. Did you know that three-quarters of New England was deforested by the mid-19^th century? Today it is three-quarters forested, and it reverted to its forested state “even more rapidly” than it was stripped (41). A Landscape History of New England offers everything our travelers need except restaurant recommendations. It offers everything they need to really see, the forest and the trees. After reading this book your trip on the Mass. Pike or the Merritt Parkway or the Spaulding Turnpike or through the Northeast Kingdom or the road to Mount Katahdin (after you finish your ice cream in the Bremen diner) or on what Jack Kerouac called “one long red line called Route 6” from the tip of Cape Cod to where it leaves Connecticut west of Danbury will never be the same. 

 

9/11: Architectural Criticism?

Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA (semiotext(e)) offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism?  Here's an excerpt that addresses this question.

He gathers his luggage, makes his way through customs, presents his passport. His visa is in a new name. MOHAMED ATTA. He walks out of the terminal and finds a commuter bus. He travels on a highway towards the city. New York’s skyline rises in the distance. A unique horror. Direct in line of sight is the Empire State Building, an Art Deco stab at the sky. To the right, smaller buildings surround the Towers like acolytes encircle a false messiah.

The bus dives into a tunnel and leaves him on the street beside Grand Central Terminal. He enters the building, walks to its main course. The rush of people amuses him, reminds him of home. He stares at the ceiling, yellow astrological idols of Greek origin against teal background. So many false gods in America.

Atta leaves Grand Central, walks south on Park Avenue. On 40th Street, he realizes that he moves in the wrong direction. He turns right, navigates west. Each and every building is enormous, of unthinkable size. Skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper.

He reaches 6th Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. He looks south. The Towers dwarf the city. New York is a land of giants until you encounter its titans. Solid rectangle erections of architectural arrogance, total modernist faith in the ability of buildings to shape lives, of the architect’s belief that he can control his vision and utilize it towards good.

 

The Trouble with Titles

“Getting a title is a lot like drawing cards in a poker game. You keep on drawing and they’re all worthless but if you can last at it long enough you always get a good hand finally.”

--Ernest Hemingway

Titles. We talk about them a lot around the press. Well, we mostly discuss troublesome titles: those that refuse to be clear, concise, and clever (or the 3 c's of successful titles). Titles (which I made up)like All about Monkeys and Tall Chicks would stand out as particularly egregious, especially for a university press. What becomes difficult is when an author feels married to his or her Frankenstein of a title. All about Monkeys is clear and concise, but not very clever. Tall Chicks is clever and concise, but not that clear. Is the book really about tall chicks?

Some of the best non-fiction titles (Freakonomics, The End of Food, Loneliness as a Way of Life,and Hamlet on the Holodeck ) all follow the 3C rule. What Hemingway, in the quote above, alludes to is the process of title making. It is widely recognized that some of Hemingway’s best titles came from his combing the Bible and other old English hymns. But the single characteristic of a winning title is that the author (or publisher) stayed at the poker table long enough to draw “a good hand finally.”

The New York Times recently ran an article about books feeding off of popular titles. I sure hope the Freakonomics cannibalization stops soon. 

What are some of your favorite MIT Press titles?

Opening Up Education

Today's the pub date for a book that's important not only for its scholarship but for how that scholarship is being delivered to the reader. Opening Up Education is a collection of papers by scholars that explore how open access - the free, online availability of materials - can transform education. The book - a copublication with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describe the challenges and benefits of a whole range of initiatives that marshal open access tools, resources, and knowledge.

Fittingly, in addition to making the book available in standard hard copy form - for a very reasonable price, might we add - we're also making the book itself and open access resource. You can go here and either download a PDF version or read a very attractive iPaper edition.

Sound Unbound on BoingBoing

Cory Doctorow gave a shout out to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, collected by our resident "cool dude" Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid on BoingBoing today.

Check it out.

Inventing the West

In today’s New York Times, critic Edward Rothstein asks how Western civilization emerged “out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures” and discusses Robert Friedel’s new book A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Rothstein remarks that Freidel’s book “is a rare, detailed, nontheoretical survey that exposes the veins of invention that run through Western culture, creating an astonishing picture of achievement through its careful accumulation of small details.” Here is an excerpt from the review:

Mr. Friedel surveys the kinds of inventions and technologies that developed in the West over centuries, compiling a roster of innovation that encompasses everything from textiles to time telling. Under his firm touch it begins to be possible to feel something like the primal pulse of this culture.

Consider, for example, the earliest examples of mechanical clocks in the 14th century. Somehow they had to use a continuous mechanical force — the pull of a suspended weight slowly falling — to measure discrete intervals of time. This was done through an “escapement,” which Mr. Friedel argues, could be “the single most important mechanical invention to emerge from the Middle Ages.” An escapement was originally a toothed wheel turned by the slowly dropping weight. The evenly spaced notches on the wheel were used to spur evenly timed mechanical movements: Divided space is turned into divided time. The turning wheels of a clock could also trace different measures of time, including the motions of the moon and the planets, as if its mechanism were a model of the heavens.

By the 16th century it was clear that this achievement was the reflection of certain beliefs about the world. The principles applied to the turning of a wheel in a clock were seen as mirroring, in some way, the workings of cosmic spheres. There was a faith that the world was governed by the same laws that governed the smallest of human inventions. This also reflected confidence in human ability to comprehend that world and replicate its organization. This is the faith of the scientific enterprise itself: Human ability is honored as much as universal principles.

At the same time the development of such mechanical clocks permitted the formation of certain kinds of organized human community. Mr. Friedel suggests the clocks may have evolved out of the need in monasteries to create reliable schedules for prayers. The clock created a standard for time keeping, a public accounting that could not be reliably achieved with hourglasses or sundials. Clocks created community.

Read the whole review here.