Month: March 2018

Opening Day for Baseball and Bicycling

Hank Garfield

Opening Day is upon us, and my friend and colleague Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski, who wrote an annual baseball column for several small California newspapers in the 1980s and 90s, is once again picking the Red Sox to win the World Series come October. A man ahead of his time, Moondog has been right three times so far this century, and I have no reason not to get back on the bandwagon this year.

More importantly, the sun has crossed the celestial equator, the clocks have sprung forward, and my bicycle awaits its spring tune-up in anticipation of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race.

On the first warm day after the time change, I donned my cross-country skis for what may have been the season’s final outing on the trails behind the University of Maine. Hatless, I skied a long loop over packed snow melting into mini-rivers in the low spots. Later, as I sipped a beer in a local watering hole, one of my students came in with a baseball and two gloves, looking for someone to play catch. Both gloves were right-handed, unfortunately, and though it was warm enough to ride the bicycle home, it wasn’t ready. But: skiing, baseball, and bicycling in the same day strikes me as the essence of spring in Maine.

In my last post, I wrote that walking, bicycling, driving, and flying embody separate orders of magnitude, in terms of speed and perception. As orders of magnitude rise linearly, the difference between them escalates exponentially. Driving is four times faster than bicycling, but sixteen times faster than walking. Driving is also much more regulated, as it should be. Most of us are licensed to drive a car. You can apply for a pilot’s license, but I imagine that the process is an order of magnitude more difficult.

This concept also applies to baseball. Anyone can play in Little League, but by high school the competition gets a bit more serious. The curve steepens through semi-pro leagues, college ball, and the minors. At the major-league level there are fewer than a thousand jobs for the best ballplayers in the world. As Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four: “The biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.”

The jump between bicycling and driving a car is just as dramatic. Bicycling is closer to walking than it is to driving. No one blamed Stephen King for the accident that nearly killed him. He was walking along the side of a road reading a book, minding his own business, completely within his rights. Nobody said that King should have been paying more attention. Yet the victim is often blamed when a driver, distracted or otherwise, runs down a bicyclist.
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As a bicyclist, it is my responsibility not to run down pedestrians. They are an order of magnitude slower and more vulnerable. I’m subject to more rules than they are, but to far fewer rules than the driver of an automobile. Again, this is as it should be.

The letter of the law says I’m supposed to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light. Nobody rides a bike that way, but the “Idaho stop” (allowing a bicyclist to yield, rather than stop) is illegal in most states. Yet some people want to go even further, requiring bicyclists to get licensed and pay excise tax, as if bicyclists were a danger to drivers, and not the reverse.

Since cars are an order of magnitude more powerful than bicycles, it stands to reason that the onus for safety falls primarily on the driver of the car. This does not give bicyclists carte blanche to ride any way that want to, but it does mean, for example, that drivers need to respect the three-foot rule and a bicyclist’s right to control a lane of traffic when necessary. Bicyclists aren’t absent of responsibility. It’s a good idea to wear bright-colored clothing, and it’s the law to use proper lighting at night.

But I balk at the suggestion that bicyclists be licensed and taxed, and so should the parents of every ten-year-old who wants to ride to the ice cream stand on a warm summer evening.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: it takes seconds, not minutes, out of a driver’s day to slow down for a bicyclist or a group of bicyclists, to wait for a safe place to pass. Given the order-of-magnitude inequalities involved, thinking up new rules for bicyclists is like invoking the infield fly rule in a picnic softball game. It misses the point.

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We walk, bicycle, drive, and fly by orders of magnitude

Hank Garfield

One of the things that happened when I gave up car ownership was that I began to see my surroundings in a different way. I walked more, and on the street you see faces and encounter other human beings at close range in real time. You can even stop and have a conversation. You can certainly stop and smell the roses, or look in a store window, or anything else.

Walking is slower than bicycling, which is slower than a bus, which is slower than a car, and so on. But each successive system of propulsion gives up in intimacy what it gains in speed.

On foot, you are one with the land. You can see and hear and touch it. On a bicycle, you’re faster but a little less connected. In a car, you’re in your own private room that you can direct, and on a train, you’re in a public room you can’t. In an airplane, of course, you’re not on the land at all.

You’ve probably seen a variation of the video that zooms out from a woman’s hand into the Universe and then zooms back in, all the way to sub-atomic particles in the cells of her skin. The size of the picture increases or decreases by a factor of ten, an order of magnitude.

This is a phrase often misused by math-indifferent writers, and a concept often misunderstood. An order of magnitude is a step in an exponential series: 10, 100, 1,000. Exponential growth starts slowly but gets huge in a hurry. When you read that traffic has “increased exponentially,” smile and be thankful that it hasn’t. No one would be able to move.

I first learned of magnitude from the stars. The system is an overlay of modern astronomy on a framework devised by the ancient Greeks, who classified stars by brightness. Stellar magnitudes run in reverse: the lower the number, the brighter the star. Prominent stars are first-magnitude stars. A few very bright stars have negative magnitudes. The faintest stars on the edge of visibility are magnitude 6. Anything fainter requires a telescope. Each magnitude is approximately 2.512 times brighter than the one below it.*

Have I lost you yet? What do orders of magnitude have to do with cars and transportation?

Well, I was just thinking…

The base doesn’t have to be ten. Average human walking speed is about four miles per hour. Some people walk faster or slower, of course. But that’s what we’re built with: four miles an hour.
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Multiply that by four, and you get the approximate speed of a bicycle: 16 mph. It’s possible to go much faster, but hills and age and obstacles will take a big bite out of your average speed.

At 16 mph you’ll miss things you would have noticed on foot. You’ll wave at the friend on the sidewalk instead of stopping for a word or two. Traffic demands more of your attention because you are on the road instead of alongside it. You can still stop and revert to walking any time you want. But it’s an order-of-magnitude distance – small, because the numbers are still low.

But multiply by four again, and you get the speed of a car on an unencumbered roadway: 64 mph, or nine miles an hour over the speed limit, a typical operating speed for a car.

It’s another order-of-magnitude step, but a much steeper one. You’re fortified in your own private bubble, and you consider it your private space even as you move it about in public. You’re restricted to the roads and parking lots, subject to many more rules. Your interaction with the land and the people on it is limited to the places you choose to stop. You communicate with your fellow drivers through gestures, some of them friendly.

Four times 64 equals 256, or 44. Both China and Japan have developed high-speed trains capable of speeds higher than 256 mph. In service, they operate at speeds of around 200-220 mph. I’ve never traveled on a train that fast, but the experience on a train is that of an observer, as the world scrolls by.

Multiply by four again and you’ve got the Concorde: 1,024 mph. Passenger planes fall somewhere between it and the bullet train. But any kind of flying strikes me as an order of magnitude above any kind of land transportation.

Next: How orders of magnitude (should) shape traffic laws.

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* – A star of magnitude 1 is 100 times brighter than a star of magnitude 6. The number 2.512 is an approximation of the 5th root of 100, so that (2.512)5 ≅ 100. Every five magnitudes means a 100-fold difference in brightness. In this way the old Greek system is preserved, and can be extended to extremely bright or faint celestial objects.

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