Ask a Car Critic

Dear Car Critic,

Why do so many modern cars, not just sports cars but sedans and even station wagons, have low-profile tires like you’d see on a racecar? I rode in my kid’s Honda Accord and the ride was so harsh! What’s the point?

Chuck M, San Diego, CA

Dear Chuck,

I can offer you a simple answer and a more complicated answer. The simple answer is: people think low-profile tires look cool. The more complicated answer is: in accordance with mimetic theory, people want to buy the products that would be used by the ideal human whom they admire and wish they could be. They can’t afford the Aston Martin DB10 that James Bond has, but at least they can at least have a car with similarly sporty tires.

Not satisfied with my own hunch on this, I asked a tire guy. (I was at his shop after blowing out my second low-profile tire in under three years.) He said the same thing: low-profile tires look cool and that’s more important to people than having a smooth, quiet ride and not having to worry about big potholes (like the one that destroyed my first low-profile tire).

All this being said, there is a safety benefit to these tires. Because they’re wider they have more contact with the road, which improves traction, and the shorter sidewall means they squirm less under hard cornering. Granted, these characteristics generally benefit a driver who’s going too fast to begin with, but they can help in an emergency situation. (For example, I was driving on an interstate highway when a UPS truck came right into my lane. My extremely sudden swerve into the next lane might not have gone so well with traditional tires.) One other safety benefit is that the larger wheel rim can support bigger brake discs, which (if your car has them) enable faster stopping.

Dear Car Critic,

What is it with drink holders? Can’t people drive across town without their fricking Big Gulp? Cars never used to have these … what changed?

Sandra S, Spokane, WA

Dear Sandra,

While I am appalled by America’s evident addiction to soft drinks, I do find drink holders totally appropriate for road trips. Coffee is a must for very long drives, and I wouldn’t want to hold it in my lap. It would also be hypocritical of me to badmouth drink holders, because I’ve had them on all my bicycles since 1978 (though of course we call those “water bottle cages”). But drink holders on shopping carts … that’s just silly.

Dear Car Critic,

It’s time for a new car and my husband wants an SUV. I’m concerned about the gas mileage and frankly the sheer size of these vehicles, but my husband keeps emphasizing the safety aspect. We have two kids so he may have me over a barrel there—but I thought I’d check with you. Thoughts?

Emily W, San Antonio, TX

Dear Emily,

Of course there are good reasons to buy an SUV (e.g., you ski every weekend, or you’re a tradesman in a snowy, mountainous place and need to haul your tools around, or you have a fragile male ego that needs to be coddled), but safety isn’t among them. It is an absolute myth that SUVs are safer.

I used to work in risk management, and we evaluated risk along two axes: severity and likelihood. It may be true that an SUV protects its passenger effectively in an accident, but it’s also true that SUVs are more accident-prone. The reasons are threefold: 1) higher rollover risk, 2) greater weight leading to slower stopping; 3) overconfidence on the part of the driver. There was an excellent article about this, by Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker twenty years ago; you can read the abstract here and the full article here. As Gladwell put it, “The benefits of being nimble—of being in an automobile that’s capable of staying out of trouble—are in many cases greater than the benefits of being big.” He cited data on deaths per million vehicles, as provided by a study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in conjunction with the University of Michigan, showing that, at that time, SUV drivers had far higher rates of death than drivers of small and even compact cars.

That data being rather old, and Gladwell being perhaps less than 100% reliable, I have researched more modern statistics about car safety. My first stop, the ratings website managed by the National Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was not very helpful. I looked up the safety ratings for a variety of SUVs and they were all five-star, which might help explain why SUVs have a reputation for being safe. But then I started plugging in other vehicles at random, and they all got five stars as well. I tried my own car, my family members’ cars, my neighbors’ cars—everything was five stars. (It’s like the useless rating of all maple syrup in America: it’s all Grade A, whether it’s the tasty golden stuff that rises to the top or the murky brown stuff at the bottom.) Everyone gets a ribbon! What a joke. I think for the most part the NHTSA focuses on crash test dummy results, not the likelihood of an accident. The only difference I saw between the Ford Expedition and my car is that my car gets five stars across the board whereas the Expedition gets only three to four stars (depending on year) for rollover rating. (The only vehicle I could find with fewer than five stars was the four-star MINI Cooper, about which the NHTSA cautioned, “During the side impact test, the interior door panel struck the torso of the rear passenger dummy, causing a high lower spine acceleration.” To which I respond, who rides in the back of a MINI Cooper, besides your annoying baby brother who probably deserves a good spine acceleration?)

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent, nonprofit organization, is more helpful as it publishes modern data on deaths per million vehicles. It covers a decent variety (though alas, it’s not comprehensive). As of 2020, the Ford Fusion averaged 25 deaths per million and small cars in general averaged 54; the Ford Explorer had 22 deaths with midsize SUVs averaging 27. My first takeaway is that SUVs have gotten a lot safer in the last 20 years. That said, my second takeaway is that SUVs are not safer across the board. If you really want a safe vehicle, don’t assume SUVs are the way forward; simply peruse the IIHS website and find some individual vehicles with good numbers (and/or look up the car you already had your eye on). For example, the Subaru Outback shows just 6 deaths per million vehicles per year, while that Jeep Grand Cherokee you might assume would be safe has a whopping 103 deaths per million. (My own car, a basic station wagon, which I assumed would be safe because it’s a Volvo, isn’t listed on the site, but the 4WD version of it boasts just 5 deaths per million.) Suffice to say, limiting your new car selection to SUVs on the basis of safety doesn't make much sense.

Dear Car Critic,

It feels like from a cultural perspective, there was a golden era of motor vehicles that’s now behind us. It was mainly a guy thing … it was just so much fun to sit around and gab away about cars, happy as clams. Where did this go?

Mark A, Grand Junction, CO

Dear Mark,

I hear you, and your letter makes me think of the classic Tom Waits monologue “The Pontiac.” Now, I can’t say for sure that men everywhere have stopped talking about cars (which would be like proving a negative), but I’ve witnessed this shift myself. I would say that historically, and thinking back to my dad’s generation, a big part of what men talked about when they talked about cars was how to fix them, which I think has become less of a DIY thing over the years, with the rising complexity of modern vehicles. My own car doesn’t even have a dipstick and I had to look on YouTube to figure out how to get the digital dashboard to show me the oil level. The cultural change is similar, perhaps, to how men used to talk about navigation at great length, comparing various routes you could take between point A and point B, and how that’s now been made obsolete by GPS. And then you’ve got the younger generation that increasingly doesn’t even drive (for example, my own daughters haven’t bothered to get their licenses). On top of it all, we have endless new entertainment options that take up a lot of people’s attention. So those are a few theories for you, anyway.

Dear Car Critic,

How do you get little animals out of your engine area when they go there to escape the cold? Man I dunno but I think car mammals are funny.

Amanda A, Portland, OR

Dear  Amanda,

I don’t know how seriously to take this question, but I totally agree car mammals are funny. Case in point: a friend of mine finished grad school  and bought his first proper, non-beater, grownup car, a nice Audi sedan. Then he was called away to a postdoc in Sweden for a year, which consisted primarily of doing a lot of testing on lab rats, about which he felt kind of conflicted. Well, he came home to discover that a family of rats had taken up residence in his car and eaten all the upholstery and electrical wiring, costing him many thousands of dollars in repairs. He shrugged it off, chalking it up to karma.

Getting back to your question, it seems like if you could manage not to drive your car for a good while, especially during a cold snap, the animals would leave for warmer environments (though hopefully not the cabin of the car). Or, you could try sending in a very svelte, slinky cat.

Dear Car Critic,

Why are so many modern cars so ugly?

Bruce H, Brooklyn, NY

Dear Bruce,

I know, right? This bothers me a lot … I drive down the highway looking at all the cars around me, noting my reactions to each in turn: “Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, passable, ugly, kinda cool, ugly, ugly, ugly.” I suspect the problem is the endless need that the automotive industry has for novelty. As of 2020, the US automotive market size was almost $900 billion, meaning they’re able to get a whole lot of people to replace their perfectly good cars with newer ones. So, despite how expensive these things are, the industry treats them like fashion products—thus nobody is working really hard at creating timeless, classic designs. That’s my theory, anyway.

I did a little research for you, too. As described in this article, the car designer Frank Stephenson, who “reincarnated the MINI” and designed the (also cool looking) Ferrari F430, says “carmakers have this mindset that bold, shocking designs convey confidence in their brand and product” and “they assume that consumers will eventually catch up to their way of thinking.” Meanwhile, he complains, modern designers have “lost the appreciation for sketching on paper, and this contributes to the new, robotic, cold designs the industry is imposing on consumers.”

Of course, it’s also possible to complain that too many cars look too much alike, which kind of flies in the face of the “bold, shocking” claim. Maybe it’s both. Or may it’s just that, by and large, cars are lame.

Dear Car Critic,

Did Harry inherit more than William?

Wendy C, Granite Bay, CA

Dear Wendy,

I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong columnist. I know nothing about the royal family (and couldn’t care less).

Dear Car Critic,

What is a PZEV vehicle?

Robert M, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Robert,

It stands for “partial zero emissions vehicle,” which is linguistic blasphemy and a mathematical impossibility. On a less snotty note, this is the class of gas-powered motor vehicles that are the cleanest running.  As detailed here, PZEV vehicles have more sophisticated catalytic converters that turn nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide into less harmful gases, and fancy filters to keep unburned fuel vapors from escaping into the air. Now, if you’re trying to figure out of your own car is a PZEV, good luck with that. I went down that rabbit hole and was lucky to make it out alive (and no more informed than when I went in, alas).

Dear Car Critic,

I’m kind of torn when it comes to cars. On the one hand, I feel like I shouldn’t be swayed by “wow” features I’ll never use, like the cool little paddles alongside the steering wheel to shift gears. On the other hand, I want to own a car I will really love, even if it’s much fancier than I really need. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Lily A, Ashland, OR

Dear Lily,

I wouldn’t sweat the features that you don’t use. I mean, on the most fundamental level, most of us drive around with nobody in the rear passenger seats 90% of the time, but we wouldn’t want to switch to a two-seater. Meanwhile, most modern car tires (but not SUV tires!) could easily handle 100 mph safely even though almost nobody goes that fast (and none of us should). Most cars strike me as vastly over-engineered, but when we consider what’s at stake—literally life and death—perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. (Road traffic accidents, as documented by the CDC here, are a leading cause of death among people ages 1-54, second only to accidental poisoning, which includes overdoses.) I chose my car primarily because it’s safe, secondarily because it’s not ugly, and thirdly for its fuel economy, and although I adore the idea of its Geartronic shifting paddles, I never use mine, either. (I do wish my car were a stick shift.)

Hey Car Critic,

Why do you exist?

Ron M, Boston, MA

Dear Ron,

If I take your question literally, the answer is: because my parents wanted a girl, and my three older siblings all came out male. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re asking. I’ll bet you’re chafing at the fact that, despite having no credible qualifications or education, I get to have my own column. That’s a harder question to answer, and you’d have to ask my publisher what he sees in me. My best guess is that it’s just because I’m dirt cheap. Meanwhile, though Ray Magliozzi’s “Car Talk” column is obviously far superior to mine, I have to say reading it sometimes makes me sad, as I think back to the radio show Ray no longer gets to do with his late brother Tom. Maybe people would rather read a hit-or-miss column from some rando who doesn’t even like cars.

A Car Critic is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Car Critic,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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Bike vs. Car - How I Broke My Femur

Introduction

I’m coming up on two years since I had a horrific bicycle accident and broke my femur.  Though I told part of the story on this blog, I didn’t describe exactly how it happened.  I was thinking of suing the motorist who caused the accident, and had a vague notion that anything I wrote about how it happened might give me trouble later, especially since I was so angry at the time.  Now that it’s essentially too late to file a lawsuit, I’m (mostly) free to tell the rest of the story.

In this post I tell what happened; explain why I have decided not to pursue a lawsuit; and examine some inappropriate attitudes towards cyclists.

The rest of the story

In late November, 2011, I did an early morning bike ride with my daughter.  Here’s a photo I snapped that morning during a rest stop. 

Afterward we had some hot cocoa at home and then at about 9:30 a.m. I set out again  for a more intense solo effort.  I rode up South Park Drive, down and back up Fish Ranch Rd, down and back up Claremont Ave, and then was ready to head home.  Normally I’d have ridden back down South Park Drive, but it was kind of a misty morning and, that road being closed to cars, it was strewn with a lot of debris (like eucalyptus bark that can get slippery in such conditions).  So instead I figured I’d ride down Grizzly Peak Blvd instead (northbound, toward Spruce St).  Normally I avoid this road because part of it is residential and you get a lot of drivers backing out of driveways.  On this day, I was descending it at a very mellow pace, and I can prove it.  Look at the speed/altitude/time profile of the last part of my ride:

I was doing under 30 mph in the non-residential part, and then slowed down to around 20 when I got to the residential section.  You can see an acceleration at around 1:21:45, which I reckon is after the stop sign after the intersection of Grizzly Peak Blvd with Golf Course Rd and Centennial Dr.  (Yes, I stopped at the stop sign.  My bike computer takes a sample of speed, altitude, heart rate, and other data every twenty seconds.  My stop evidently took place between these data samples.)  The fastest I went between this point and my crash was 23.5 mph, which is below the speed limit.  You can see it’s not a very steep downhill.

A car had been ahead of me and as it slowed down, I came up on it and also slowed down.  It slowed down some more and suddenly veered to the right.  What was this car doing?  The driver hadn’t signaled so this veer took me by surprise.  (I wasn’t that surprised, of course, because motorists often change direction without signaling.)  I decided the driver must have pulled off to the side to let me by, as drivers sometimes do, so I kept going.  Suddenly, the driver swerved to the left, across the road and directly in my path.  The driver was headed for her driveway, on the left side of the road.  I’ve looked at this driveway using Google Maps, and this was about a 135-degree hairpin turn.  That’s why she’d swung right first—to give herself the full road for executing this tricky maneuver.  It’s a pity it didn’t occur to her that there could be somebody behind her who might really benefit from a turn signal.

You could say I had a very brief window in which to make a snap decision:  do I just slam on the brakes, or slam on the brakes and try to steer around the back of the car so as to possibly miss it?  But actually, it’s not really a choice:  as any expert cyclist knows, it’s always better to avoid an impact with a car, even if this means sliding out and crashing on your side.  I’ve heard guys recount a conscious decision to “lay her down” rather than hit a car, though I’m not sure I quite believe anybody has that much nerve.  Suffice to say, when I slammed on the brakes while trying to steer to the right, I didn’t have enough traction to pull it off.  I laid her down and missed the car, in the process avoiding a probable head injury and also sparing the driver from having to get involved.

What’s that, you say?  You say the driver was already involved?  Yeah, no kidding!  Somebody should have told her that!  Because you know what she did?  She completed her parking maneuver, shut off her engine, and—ignoring my blood-curdling screams that her neighbors heard, even a block away—went into her house and stayed there.

This driver was clearly of the George Carlin “keep movin’” school of traffic accidents:  “I do not stop when I have a traffic accident, do you?  No, you can’t!  Hey, who has time?  Not me!  I hit somebody, I run somebody over, I keep moving!  Especially if I’ve injured someone.  I do not get involved in that….  Let’s be logical about it:  if you do stop at the scene of the accident, all you do is add to the confusion!  These people you ran over have enough troubles of their own, without you stopping and making things worse!  Leave these people alone!  They’ve just been in a major traffic accident!”

As the cowardly driver’s neighbors swarmed around me, stopping traffic and calling for help, she stayed in her house.  Perhaps she had a sudden hankering for some Sunday morning Metallica on her teenager-grade stereo system and thus couldn’t hear the sirens of the fire truck and then the ambulance that arrived.  Or maybe she heard them, but was more afraid of getting in trouble than she was curious about my injuries.  Carlin would understand:  “Well of course they’re hurt, look at all the blood!  You just ran over them with a ton and a half of steel!  Of course they’re hurt, leave these people alone!  Haven’t you done enough?  For once in your life, do the decent thing:  don’t get involved.”

I talked to the police officer at the scene, and pointed to the car that cut me off and the driveway it was parked in.  Then I was carted off in the ambulance (you can read the rest of my saga here, here, and here).  The officer subsequently interviewed the driver, and I’ve read the report, but each page is stamped with “Unlawful dissemination of this information is a misdemeanor.”  I don’t want to take any risks, so I won’t tell you what’s in that report.  But I’ll tell you what isn’t.

The officer did not make any notation to the effect that the driver was hard of hearing.  He did not write anything vaguely resembling this:  “Are you sure you used your turn signal?  It’s kind of hard to believe that you did, since you’d have had to put it on twice:  once when you started your maneuver, and again after your veer to the right caused it to automatically turn off.”  He didn’t say anything like the following, either:  “Are you sure you didn’t veer to the right?  Because it’d be awfully difficult—impossible, actually—to execute such a sharp turn otherwise.”  He also didn’t say anything that even approached this:  “Weren’t you at all curious about the screaming, and the sirens, right out in the road in front of your house right after you got home?”  He didn’t say, “When you say you didn’t see a cyclist behind you, is it because you don’t check your rearview mirror before doing a 135-degree turn, or because he was using some kind of cloaking device?”  The officer has written nothing to the effect that he asked her, “Don’t you feel kind of bad?  Not that you could have known that he broke his femur, and that if the broken bone had punctured his femoral artery he could have bled to death right in front of your house….”

Based on the paucity of detail in this report, and thus the evident brevity of his questioning, the police officer might not have been totally averse to the Carlin school of traffic accidents.  Carlin rants, “And I’ll give you a practical reason not to stop—you need a practical reason?  If you do stop, sooner or later the police are gonna show up!  Is that what you want?  Huh?  Waste even more of your time, standing around, filling out forms, answering a lot of foolish questions?  Lying to the authorities?  And by the way, who are you to be taking up the valuable time of the police department?  These men and women are professionals, they’re supposed to be out fighting crime—stop interfering with police!”

Why I’m letting it go

For awhile after this crash I was intending to sue the driver, and I even retained a lawyer.  But I didn’t actively pursue the matter—frankly, with physical therapy and just trying to heal up, I had bigger fish to fry—and when the months dragged on and I hadn’t heard anything from my lawyer, I didn’t pursue the matter.  I have a few reasons for this.

First, there’s the matter of how cyclists are generally viewed by the general public, and the even thornier matter of how I might be viewed when the insurance company’s defense trots out a freelance article I wrote called “Five Seconds on a Mountain Pass – On Being a Velocity Addict.”  That doesn’t look good, especially when cyclists in general are widely believed to be reckless speed demons who deserve what they get.  With this in mind, I considered that the lack of response from my lawyer may have indicated second thoughts on his part.

Then, there’s the matter of my mental and emotional health.  I was so angry, for so long after that crash, that I had trouble sleeping.  It took great force of will to not dwell on the driver’s behavior every night when I lay in bed trying to fall asleep through all that pain.  To open up a new can of worms, that would rekindle that rage, was not a pleasant prospect.

Finally, there’s something my lawyer said:  that in these “he-said, she-said” cases, often the outcome boils down to how the jury feels about the parties involved.  If they like you, he said, of course that’s not a bad thing.  But if they hate the defendant, that’s when you can get a very favorable result.  I’ve let on in this post that this driver was female (simply because I can’t be bothered to play the non-specific-pronoun game); she also had two other traits that are often connoted, unfairly, with being a bad driver.  I wouldn’t want to win big just because a jury let itself be influenced by (possibly subconscious) stereotypes.  And oddly enough, since I know this driver to be a complete coward, I figured putting her on the stand would cause her a lot of pain.  And though part of me would welcome such revenge, the bigger part of me doesn’t like to cause pain, especially when I don’t know the circumstances of that person’s life.

Let’s blame the victim!

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this blog you’re a cyclist, and thus you understand things about our sport that the general populace doesn’t.  I have a hunch that if you’ve ridden with me, you didn’t read this report and think, “Well, it’s clear that a foolish daredevil like this—author of 'Velocity Addict,' for crissakes—got what he had comin’!”  But in case you really do think this is my fault, and that such accidents are often, generally, or always the cyclist’s fault, or in case you’d like to try to educate a benighted motorist of your acquaintance by forwarding this, I’m going to explore the idea that I could be innocent in this even though I like to ride my bike fast.

There are certainly cases where it would be hard to defend a cyclist, like the case of the guy who took a curve too wide, crashed into a car, and was killed while trying to set a new record descending South Park Drive.  There, the reckless behavior directly led to his death.  But there’s a temptation to connote the willingness to go fast—as in over 40 mph—with an overall risk profile that you label “daredevil” and which puts the blame on the cyclist whenever he gets into an accident.

The problem of risk assessment

When we evaluate risk, there’s an impulse to extrapolate from the specific to the general.  For example, if your brother-in-law is a gambling addict, you’re probably not going to loan him money.  After all, you can guess what will happen to it.  This is a highly reasonable judgment, I think, but mainly because money is fungible.  Loaning money to a gambler is just like gambling yourself.

But would you also naturally assume that a gambling addict is a reckless driver?  Well, possibly.  But what about other people who take risks on a regular basis?  Being a garbage man is a very dangerous profession.  Would you automatically assume that if a garbage man gets in a traffic accident that it’s his fault, because he tolerates a high level of risk in his daily life?  Of course not.

I realize this isn’t a perfect analogy; I’ll concede that a cyclist who gets injured while cycling is a lot different than a garbage man injured in a car crash.  But from the perspective of evaluating risk, it’s simplistic to say a cyclist who enjoys speed is generally to blame when things go wrong.  Suppose the layman thinks it’s crazy to descend Claremont Ave at 40 mph on a bicycle.  If that same person watched me descending Grizzly Peak Blvd on that November morning, and based his assessment of me on that alone, he probably wouldn’t decide I was a daredevil.  (Or to put it another way, most people would consider 40 mph on Claremont Ave to be way more dangerous than 23 mph on Grizzly.)

I do think it’s dangerous for a cyclist, even an expert cyclist, to descend the residential section of northbound Grizzly Peak Blvd.  But I don’t think it’s dangerous for an expert cyclist to hit 40 mph descending Claremont Ave.  Should this attitude get me branded as a daredevil, such that it’s my fault when I get hurt doing something the layman may think is reasonable?

In thirty years of competitive cycling, I’ve had three bad accidents.  Once, I crashed mountain biking and it was totally my fault and I’ll own that.  (In fact, I have, right here.)  Due to that crash I needed stitches.  With my other two bad accidents, a car was involved.  Once, I was riding in a business district when a driver failed to see me and turned right into me.  I was going under 20 mph, in the bike lane, wearing a bright orange jersey in broad daylight.  I suffered a separated shoulder and a cracked elbow.  (The driver accepted responsibility and his insurance company took care of me.)  The other time is what you just read about:  I was doing under 25 mph in a residential area.  Broken femur.  The total tally of my serious injuries from crashes on high-speed descents?  Zero.

I used to work in risk assessment.  When professionals evaluate risk and design safeguards, they do so in terms of two main factors:  severity and likelihood.  When we consider the severity of crashing at 40 mph on a bicycle, with just eighth-inch-thick Lycra and a Styrofoam helmet protecting us, we get a visceral sense that this is really, really bad.  And yeah, it would be.  But it can be less bad than a lower-speed collision with a car.  Meanwhile, setting severity aside for a moment, the likelihood of an expert cyclist crashing at 40 by himself on a mountain road is way, way lower than the likelihood of a bike commuter getting creamed by a car in Anytown, USA.  I don’t have a mountain of statistics at hand to support this but I’ll bet I could assemble one.

So is the “daredevil” road racing cyclist really more to blame, when he does get taken out by a car, than the responsible commuter?  Decide that for yourself, but I’ll guarantee you two things.  One, the racing cyclist who can handle a bike at 40 mph will be better equipped for evasive maneuvers at 20 mph and be much less likely to panic.  And two, the racing cyclist who can handle a bike at 40 will better appreciate risk, and pay a hell of a lot more attention, than most motorists in this country.

Of course, a jury in a bike accident case may not differentiate between a bike racer and a casual bike commuter.  There’s this widespread idea among Americans—that is, among American motorists, because virtually all adult Americans are both—that cycling is inherently dangerous, and that cyclists who get hurt have only themselves to blame.  But my experience tells me that opinion is pretty absurd.  The most dangerous thing about cycling is being around careless motorists! 

Are motorists careless?

When’s the last time you saw a motorist neglect to use his turn signal?  Earlier today?  I thought so.  In my experience, a typical motorist seems to consider it none of your business if he chooses to use his turn signal or not.  If a motorist does deign to use his signal, it’s usually just because he knows he’s supposed to.  In my experience, cyclists almost always signal their turns, because they want the cars to know what they’re doing.  They don’t want to get run over.

Here’s something to consider:  between in-car accelerometers, wireless communications, and GPS, the highway patrol could develop the capability to detect if a car turns without its turn signal being activated.  Imagine if this technology was used to police the turn-signal law.  It would be kind of like those cameras on traffic signals that automatically ticket you for running the red.  You think if it were put to a vote, people would choose this kind of new, high-tech enforcement?  And do you think they’d also warm to the idea of network connected cameras on highways automatically busting you for speeding?  Of course not.  The spotty enforcement of traffic laws is like a big game, and motorists like it that way.  In other words, they consider it their God-given right to flout traffic laws if they feel like taking the (relatively small) risk of getting caught.

According to a recent “New Yorker” article, “Of the ten million [car] accidents that Americans get in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.”  So why are cyclists considered the big risk takers?  Well, probably it’s because cars do such a good job of protecting us most of the time. (That said, car crashes have been the leading cause of accidental death for most of the last thirty years.)  Careless motorists get in an awful lot of minor fender-benders that don’t do much to make driving seem dangerous.  The fact is, being in a car just doesn’t seem that dangerous, and that’s precisely what makes cars so dangerous to the non-armored among us.  Drivers feel so safe, ensconced in these giant vehicles that are loaded with safety features, that they discount the overall risk that driving presents.

If cycling, even among cars, were intrinsically, unavoidably dangerous, we’d see similar accident statistics all over the world.  But we don’t.  Many other places are much safer for cyclists.  For example, in Amsterdam, your chances of being killed on a bicycle are lower than your chances of being murdered in America.  (Click here for details.)

So what?

What is to be done?  Nothing, of course.  There’s no solution, because motorists so hugely outnumber cyclists in this country.  Majority opinion seldom shines brightly on minorities.

Though we can’t snap our fingers and make American drivers more careful, there are a couple of things I’d like to ask motorists to do.  Number one:  when you’re driving in your car, enjoying a little “me” time, your radio tuned to your favorite station, maybe driving down a remote road you know like the back of your hand, try to remember that you’re still in a public space, and try to be aware of who else is on the road, not just right in front of you but behind you.  And two:  when you do screw up and either hit a cyclist or cause him to crash, try to remember that George Carlin was being facetious.  Take responsibility.  Do not leave that poor maimed cyclist lying there in the road.  If you fess up, your insurance rates might go up, but the law will go easy on you, the motorist.  The law always does, where we daredevil cyclists are concerned.

Other chapters

2014 update:  it occurred to me to add links to all the chapters of this tale.  Here you go:

The Femur Report - Part I (posted Dec 11, 2011)

The Femur Report - Part II (posted Dec 19, 2011)

The Femur Report - Part III (posted Dec 28, 2011)

Physical Therapy (posted March 11, 2012)

Tire Chains II - The Spawning

Announcement

I am happy to announce that this is my 200th post on albertnet!  My first post was in February of 2009, over four years ago.  My 100th post was in March, 2011.  Odd … it doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long.

Introduction

You may wonder what I mean by “The Spawning.”  Well, that’s just an extra phrase I like to add when giving the name of any sequel, because it just says “cheap retread.”  I got this phrase from “Piranha II – The Spawning,” which was James Cameron’s first full-length film, and a bad one—one reviewer called it a “near-total disaster” and “almost impossibly bad.” Oddly enough, “Piranha II” wasn’t actually a sequel to “Piranha.”  Its original title was “Flying Killers” and I guess making it look like a sequel was an attempt to cash in on the earlier (also terrible) movie.

This post isn’t exactly a sequel, either, though it has much in common with an earlier archival post, “Trouble with Tire Chains.”  What follows is another snow-packed tale of road trip woe, this one even more harrowing than the original.  I think the phrases “near-total disaster” and “almost impossibly bad” work pretty well in describing it.  (Of course it could have been worse, like if somebody had been injured, but then I wouldn’t be blogging so lightly about it.)

It started as a vacation

My family decided to spend the kids’ spring break in Colorado, where we have friends and family.  Five years ago we did this same trip and encountered a freak snowstorm on Vail Pass, where our 1984 Volvo had just enough traction to keep moving.  On the way home from that trip, we took I-80 through Wyoming to avoid Vail Pass, only to hit an icy section and slide right off the highway, as had more than a hundred other cars on that stretch that day (click here and search on “April 11, 2008” for details).  We figured the weather should be better this year; I mean, what are the odds we’d get such strange weather a second time?

Ha.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  This time the storm was far, far worse.  The weather in Nevada and Utah had been fine, but the closer to Vail Pass we got, heading east on I-70, the worse the reports were.  Vail Pass was eventually closed due to ice and multiple accidents.  A parking lot was set up to accommodate stranded motorists, but it was full by the time we got there.  We could have stayed the night somewhere to wait out the storm, but the weather forecast for the area was “endless snow for the rest of our miserable, frigid lives with absolutely no sign of respite.”  (I’m paraphrasing.)  I didn’t fancy living out the rest of my days in a little town like Eagle or Edwards (slogan:  “Home of the Kobe Bryant sex scandal!”).

So:  onward.  Electronic signs advised us to use “alternate routes,” of which there was only one:  taking Highway 24 south to Leadville, and coming back northeast on Highway 91, about a 45-mile detour.  We guessed that this is what the signs were suggesting (the lack of specificity perhaps being for liability reasons).  The gal at the Colorado Visitors Center in Eagle checked the conditions on these highways and said they should be okay.

Detour around Vail Pass

Much signage warned that commercial vehicles—i.e., semis—were not allowed on Highway 24, but that didn’t stop one trucker from trying, and jackknifing his vehicle in the process.  An indescribably masculine tow truck was hooking up to it when we came by.  I immediately thought of a Radiohead song:  “In the next world war/ In a jackknifed juggernaut/ … An airbag saved my life.”

Traction wasn’t bad on these twisty little highways.  Our car, a 2006 Volvo V70 wagon with front-wheel drive, has good tires on the front and new ones on the back, along with computerized Stability Traction Control (STC) and a winter-driving mode that rides the clutch while you start up from a stop.  So I figured we’d be okay, even though it was snowing increasingly hard and it was becoming difficult to keep ice off the windshield.

 

From bad to worse

When we got back on I-70 eastbound there wasn’t much traffic—only those cars that had taken the detour like us—but a number of drivers were going way, way too fast.  I’m not some craven poltroon when it comes to snow driving—I learned the craft as a teenager in Boulder, without the inhibition of a fully formed prefrontal cortex—but I have respect for icy conditions and the high stakes of highway driving.  (After being a passenger in a high-speed rollover back in 1984, I learned to appreciate that these kicky, fun vehicles—the heartbeat of America—can also be accurately described as killing machines.)  I crept along at about 30 mph while guys in 4WD pickup trucks sailed by at 50 or 60, with complete faith that 4WD means nothing bad can happen.  This blithe belief in pure fiction reminded me of something … but what?  Finally it hit me:  in their carefree ignorance these motorists are just like the teenage girls who believe they can’t get pregnant the first time they have sex.  Sure enough, we did see a few vehicles off the side (all of them 4WD, I hasten to add).

Everything was fine (other than increasingly poor visibility) until we hit a long uphill and the strangest thing happened.  The car just started to slow down, regardless of what I did with the gas pedal.  Moreover, the Stability Traction Control (STC) light on the dashboard, which lights up when this feature kicks in, went from an occasional flicker to being on practically all the time.  According to an online Volvo forum, when STC detects slippage it “retards the timing to keep the revs at an acceptable level to prevent slip.”  The problem was, there was so little traction, the transmission was putting power to the wheels less and less of the time.  After making sure nobody was behind me, I tried the left lane to see if it was less slick.  It wasn’t.  Eventually, to my utter horror, the car simply came to a stop!

I had thought that making it through this ordeal would depend mainly on my skill as a driver.  So long as I kept the speed down, used engine compression (not the brakes) to decelerate, and kept a cool head, I figured, everything would be fine.  But it turns out the enterprise was doomed from the outset.  A car this heavy, with these tires, on a road surface this slippery, could not possibly make it over a grade this steep, no matter who was driving.  It was all a matter of physics, with no room for negotiation.

Completely screwed!

In accordance with a corollary of Murphy’s Law, my car had come to a stop not far after a blind curve.  I immediately checked behind us—still nobody coming—and attempted to back up and steer right, to get the car onto the shoulder.  Actually, there wasn’t much of a shoulder, which is one of the reasons I hadn’t attempted to install my tire chains:  the chances of being run over by an overconfident driver had, up until now, seemed higher than the likelihood of chains being necessary.

Have you ever watched a propeller plane stunt pilot do a hammerhead stall?  The plane flies straight up until it stalls (or seems to stall), and then the nose comes around (whether due to pilot input or some by-product of the physics of the aircraft) and the pilot flies straight down until he gets enough speed to regain control.  Well, for some reason, as I rolled backward, my car attempted a hammerhead stall of its own.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to keep the front end from swinging around.  This is how I found myself pointing the wrong direction on I-70!  It was all I could do to steer into the snow bank beside the left lane.  I ended up stuck there, facing the oncoming traffic!

Keeping an eye on the road and honking my horn whenever a car approached, I dialed 911 from my cell phone.  When the dispatcher gathered that my car wasn’t damaged and there weren’t injuries, she transferred me to a DOT call center.  The person there said she’d try to get a tow truck out to me.  This of course seemed highly unlikely:  the only way to get to where I was, to my knowledge, was via that 45-mile detour near Leadville.  The cars I’d seen off the road looked to have been long abandoned.  My options seemed limited to sitting in my car and waiting for help, or installing my chains in the middle of the interstate just past a blind curve.  (My wife thought of a third plan—she offered to try pushing the car out—but I refused:  too dangerous, plus it wouldn’t address the greater problem, which was our ongoing lack of traction.  I could see my hammerhead stall scenario simply repeating.)

Tire chains and the law

Before too long a DOT truck pulled up.  The DOT guy parked in my lane about fifty feet back with his big yellow warning lights on, and came over to assess my situation.  He said a snowplow was on its way, that was spitting sand out the back.  Sure enough, it showed up, and stopped just ahead of my car (i.e., uphill from us).  The DOT guy pulled out a shovel and started taking loads of sand from the back of the snowplow truck and shoveling it under my tires.  He was oddly cheerful, like this was all just a grand adventure.  As I walked to the back of the car to get my tire chains, I realized the entire surface was nothing but ice.  Really:  no bare asphalt, no sand, no mere packed snow.  My feet were slipping all over the place.  The road was all ice, the whole damn thing.  With the right power tools we could have made enough Slurpees for everyone in Colorado.

A cop showed up.  He eyed my tires and said, “Those don’t look like very good snow tires.  You should think about getting something better.  Continental makes some nice ones.”  I replied, “Well, I’m from California.”  (Driving in snow as seldom as I do, I’m not about to buy snow tires.  Frankly, if I’d had any inkling the roads would be this bad, I’d have simply canceled the trip.)

I do wish, now, that I had some photos of all this.  A picture in this case would be worth about five hundred regular words and five hundred profanities, many of them from you.  But of course getting out the camera would have been ridiculous.  In the midst of a crisis, snapping photos is in very poor taste … just ask Lynndie England.

The cop asked what the plan was.  The DOT guy said, “I’m going to finish sanding behind his tires and then push him out, and then he can follow the snowplow the rest of the way.”  The cop told him, “Don’t try to push him out.  It’s too dangerous.  He could crush you with his car.”  I told the cop, “I was thinking of putting on my tire chains, now that the traffic is blocked behind me.”  I had the chains out now and was untangling them in preparation.

If you read my other tire chain post, you know how much I despise chains, but most of that is ideological:  whenever I’ve had to use them, it was because the DOT pointlessly mandated it, when the conditions were actually fine.  Sure, chains are a drag to install, especially when it’s only 20 degrees out and your hat and gloves are buried in your luggage, but when your car has become a two-ton paperweight stranded on the highway, you suck it up.  Or at least I do.

But the cop replied, “Don’t put on your chains.  They’re not going to help, not here.  Actually, I don’t think chains really belong on cars.  They work for semis and that’s about it.”  Surprised as I was to hear this, I wasn’t going to argue.  For one thing, I try never to argue with cops, and for another, his confidence in me, a California driver with three-season Yokohama tires, was infectious, especially when I had a sand-spewing snowplow to lead me.

The only problem was, the cop continued to argue with the DOT guy about the pushing-me-out strategy.  It got pretty heated.  Eventually the DOT guy said, “Hey, man, I’m just here to get a paycheck!”  Incongruous as this was, the cop either acquiesced, decided at this moment debate was pointless, or got sick of my ordeal—who knows which—and got back into his car.  Following this the DOT guy successfully pushed me out, the snowplow got rolling again, and as the DOT guy yelled “GO!  GO!  GO!” my car magically gripped the sand-enhanced road and we set off.  I don’t think we broke 10 mph, but I wasn’t complaining.  This went on until the Eisenhower Tunnel, at which point the snowplow pulled off and I was on my own.

Once more into the breach

While we were stopped, my wife had scraped clean the windshield, so visibility was a lot better for awhile, but I know we weren’t out of the woods yet.  It was snowing harder than ever and the road was still slicker than snot.  Still, I figured the closer we got to civilization and the car-worn roads, the better off we’d be, and I was actually starting to feel more optimistic when we made it past Georgetown (elevation 8,530, a couple thousand feet lower than Vail Pass).  Looking back, it seems impossible that this is a distance of only thirteen miles.  Covering it seemed to take forever.

And then, on an uphill that came out of nowhere, I felt that dreaded sensation of the car losing more and more speed.

When it became obvious we were grinding to a halt, I acted on a desperate hunch that the STC might be too conservative, cutting too much power to the wheels.  So I turned it off.  Whether due to the lack of STC or my having taking a hand off the wheel, or both, I immediately lost control of the car and we veered sharply to the right.  By this point we were out of momentum and traction anyway, and the car came to a halt.  Again, this was just past a blind curve.  What’s worse, traffic had picked up, and it was dusk (a terrible time for visibility). 

Prior to this trip, I wasn’t sure whether or not my two daughters knew any swear words; now I’m certain they do.  As my wife scrambled to find the DOT phone number I’d jotted down earlier, an old beater car passed us and pulled over.  I abandoned the phone call (what would I have said anyway?) and got out to talk to the car’s driver, a twenty- or thirty-something guy with the hip, sporty look of a rock climber and/or espresso aficionado.  He cautioned me that he’d seen a driver stuck in this spot before and it had caused chaos, with cars and big rigs having to change lanes very suddenly in the midst of the curve.  “I can park behind you, before the curve, with my hazards on,” he told me.  “Do you have chains?  If you’ll take care of me, I’ll put them on—I know how.” 

I could have installed the chains myself, with him merely stopping traffic behind me, but we were quickly running out of daylight so it made sense to tag-team it.  I must say I was happy to let somebody else lie down in the road to get the inboard side of the chains hooked up.  He had a snowsuit, at least.

Tire chains vindicated

The process didn’t go too badly, considering.  Sure, my hands got so numb I couldn’t even tell I was cutting them up on frayed steel cable strands, and it was hard to tell what we were doing in the dim light, and our feet were slipping on the ice road, but we got ‘er done.  We also troubleshot the windshield wipers, which had become less and less effective since the tunnel.  It turns out that so much ice had built up within the mechanism at the base of the wiper arms, the blades weren’t even contacting the windshield.  I dug the ice out of the passenger-side wiper while the Samaritan guy worked on the driver side.  Suddenly the wiper blade snapped off in his hand.  I held out some hope that it was just the one-size-fits-all adapter that had come unsnapped, vs. an actual breakage, and to my great relief this turned out to be the case.

I gave the guy all the cash I had, which was $60, and he looked totally stoked.  “That’s too much!” he protested.  I insisted he take it.  He offered to drive behind us until the top of the hill just in case anything went wrong.

Unbelievably, my car did manage to creep forward up the hill.  I couldn’t get much speed up—the STC light was still flashing continually—but the chains were doing the trick.  Alas, there was a very ominous thwack-thwack-thwack sound from one of the chains, so I had to stop again.  The Samaritan stopped again and came to help.  The loose end of the cable had come unclipped but the chain was still intact.  While he and I fixed this, a DOT truck saw us and pulled over.  It turned out to be the same guy who’d helped me earlier.  “You again?!” he said.  I told him I was basically okay this time and thanked him for stopping.  As he made his way back to his truck he said, “See you around!”  I replied, “Hey, no offense, but I really hope I never see you again!”

(By the way, as regards that heading above about tire chains being vindicated:  that applies only to ice-rink conditions such as you’ll sometimes find in Colorado.  I still stand behind my previous excoriations of pointless tire chain mandates for the occasionally cold, wet roads you’ll find in California.)

Final leg

With the chains on and the wipers working, our progress was more predictable (though still really slow).  It got dark.  The snow was blowing so hard, and my eyes were so tired, I was stunned again and again by a deeply disturbing optical illusion.  Have you ever been in a car wash, with your engine stopped and your parking brake on, and you suddenly thought the car was rolling forward because the big mop-like brushes came at you and shifted your frame of reference?  Something similar was going on here.  My windshield was once again icing up (despite my running the defroster full time), so I was watching the taillights of the car a couple hundred feet ahead of me, matching its speed exactly because the driver seemed to know what he or she was doing.  The combination of my low speed, my lockstep progress behind this other car, and the absence of any other visual cues indicating forward motion, along with the millions of snowflakes blowing by (like the stars when the Millenium Falcon reaches light-speed), gave the perception that my car was standing still.  This of course was frightening given that coming to an unplanned stop was my greatest concern.

Throughout this drive, my kids were chattering away merrily in the back seat, evidently completely oblivious of the danger we were in.  I guess I should be glad they have such complete faith in their parents, as opposed to thinking we’re totally lame (though I know this will come soon enough).  At times, though, it was oppressive trying to concentrate amidst all their giggling and (occasionally) their fighting.  And while I was wondering if we’d even make it at all, my younger daughter kept asking, “How long until we’re there?”  I’m proud to say I resisted the temptation to yell, “SHUT UP OR WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”

Just as we reached Boulder, heading north on Highway 93, we saw a car that had gone off the road, pointing north but in the ditch on the left.  Either he’d been heading north and somehow slid across four lanes, or he’d been heading southbound and did a 180.  My wife phoned to report it as we continued on our way.  We were halfway across Boulder when the Samaritan passed us again, tooting his horn.  Finally we arrived at our friends’ house.  The 400-mile drive had taken over twelve hours. 

Epilogue

It snowed in Boulder again the next day, and the day after that.  It snowed again this past Monday, and yet again yesterday, but I don’t care anymore because we did manage to make it home last Friday without further incident.  I spent half of Sunday overhauling my poor bike, whose headset and bottom bracket bearings were completely black when I repacked them.

Needless to say, the whole time we were gone it was gloriously sunny and warm out here in California.  I think I’m done with spring break in Boulder.  Next year I think we’ll just stay home and hang out.  I can rent some movies for the kids … maybe “Alive” or “Death Race 2000.”  Hell, I might even check out “Piranha II – The Spawning.”