Recently there was a “leaked” report that the New York State DOT is about to revise its policy regarding the installation of rumble strips along state roads — whereas previously rumblestrips were an option to be considered, henceforth rumble strips will be default, to be added to every road project unless otherwise specified.

I found it a really disturbing prospect and expected cyclists around me to rise in protest. But no such protest seems to be materializing; most people I’ve talked to have said it’s not a big deal; if there is sufficient space left between the rumble strip and the edge of the road, they say, it might even be a safe place to hide from traffic; we’ll just ride in the road, others have said.

I don’t know if the leaked info is actually valid (see the New York Bicycling Coalition website for the reports), but I certainly don’t share the calm acceptance that I’ve found among other cyclists. Here’s my reaction to the situation (posted after encouragement from Bill Lodico, whose comments allow me to believe that I may not be crazy on this score).

I’m really surprised at the acceptance of rumble strips, the calm with which cyclists contemplate riding in a world where every road has one.

An unpleasant nuisance? Well, I can see where, if you’re on a training ride by yourself, it could be no more than that. If you never need to pass another cyclist or go around an obstacle, then you can just ride in the (hypothetically) available space on the shoulder just keeping some awareness that drifting toward the roadway has a penalty.

But, Bill’s paceline — is this a paceline that remains in the same order for miles on end? Wouldn’t the leader want to drop back? If so, it surely isn’t possible within the shoulder, so it would require crossing the rumble strip to drift back, then crossing it again to fall in behind the paceline. Repeating this for a 40 mile ride sounds to me like a hell, not an unpleasant nuisance.

What I’ve experienced of rumble strips varies a bit, but none of them is something that I can regard as routine to cross. I know there are skilled bike handlers who could bunny-hop no-handed over the worst rumble strips. I’m not among those and I know for a fact there are others closer to my skill level. I’ve hit a rumble strip by surprise — just riding along, minding where I’m going but not noticing the subtle change in the asphalt — and nearly gone down as the handlebars were jerked out of my loose grasp. If rumble strips were put on every road, of course the element of surprise wouldn’t apply. But it would still be a hazard if one were to drift into the strip, whether by inadvertence or trying to get around another cyclist or obstacle.

And discussions of “standards” whereby cyclists would retain safe-width shoulders “protected” by the rumble strips sound to me preposterously naive. The best shoulders that our state highways have now are barely wide enough for cycling. There are a few major roads with wider shoulders, but they are the exception. If the state were to widen the shoulders (extremely inlikely imho), we would wind up with another seam in the asphalt forming a longitudinal crack (not right away, but within a year these seams always open). So, we’d have maybe a 2-foot path with drop-off or rubble on the right and a rumble strip on the left. With any luck, the potholes, broken glass, and road-killed possums would leave a few inches for us to dodge between. The leader of that paceline would really have to be the prince of paceline leaders.

I’ve spent some time riding next to rumble strips in Arizona, where roads are commonly wide and the shoulders are pretty roomy. The roads seem to have been built wide to begin with so that the biking portion isn’t squeezed. There, the rumble strips really are mostly just an unpleasant nuisance. But if I had to put up with it every week instead of one week a year I’d be really vexed. For one thing, the shoulders accumulate rubbish much more than where there are no rumble strips. So there’s quite an extra burden of glass, tire wire and other debris (and the Southwest’s goathead thorns, but that’s another matter). On long stretches of low-traffic road the most sensible way to ride is to use the roadway most of the time and drift into the shoulder when overtaking traffic appears. With the rumble strips, this moving back and forth becomes a big deal and something I have to think about and prepare for. Unpleasant nuisance.

But, in British Columbia, when we were doing a bike tour around the Glacier/Waterton national parks last summer, we encountered what is probably more like the rumble strips that we can expect around here. There it was obvious that the roadway, shoulder and rumble strip had been squeezed into a space originally designed only for the roadway. For a couple days we were riding in a maximum width of 2 feet with dangerous barriers to the right and multiply-dangerous rumble strips to the left. The multiplicity came from the longitudinal cracks on both sides of the rumble strip, so that crossing to the roadway meant dodging some wheel-trapping cracks in addition to handling the bucking from the rumble strip. Riding in the roadway wasn’t an appealing idea because the road was curvy, traffic was pretty frequent, and bicycles were clearly not what the motorists were expecting. With no ready way to get out of the path of cars, I didn’t want to be in front of them. One dreary result of all this was that we rode for hours on end without communicating with other cyclists on the tour — it was impossible to move two-up for a few minutes when the traffic lightened up.

The photo shows a stretch of the BC riding conditions — a very narrow passage between hard places.

People in the cycling club in Fernie, BC, were really upset and exasperated by their highways. They had had popular and well-attended annual century rides in the past; these had been canceled because their roads were deemed too dangerous due to the rumble strips.

On that tour I was using front and rear panniers. But if I had been using my other option of a trailer, it might very well have been impossible to ride on that British Columbia shoulder. Pulling a two-wheel trailer requires more width than was available in some places. Even where it was available, I wouldn’t be able to keep my position so accurate that I wouldn’t trigger one booby trap or another.

I really think that if you take the propaganda gloss off it and consider what living with rumble strips would be like in day-to-day reality, they are more than a nuisance. They would really ruin our roads for enjoyable group cycling. They would be another step in tailoring our country for automobiles and their servants.

[clearly I could go on, alas]

Andrejs

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