Notes on the roads: Traffic, surfaces, signs, and stuff
Motor traffic was mercifully light and well-behaved for most of my tour. Much of my route comprised secondary and tertiary roads, and even where I had some linking sections of busier highways, the motor traffic was usually no worse than moderate. The most stressful portion of the trip was near the end, on SR 20 in Washington, on the mainland near tidewater at Padilla Bay and on the approach to Deception Pass, as well as on Whidbey Island itself, north of the ferry to Port Townsend. Even in those circumstances, the presence of good paved shoulders helped, along with occasional exits onto secondary roads and bike paths.
There were one or two sections of narrow tarmac, such as the Road to the Sun in Glacier NP. (The latter had been resurfaced recently, however, and the new surface was a great help.) I was able to time my rides to avoid busy times on these roads, but I was also pleasantly surprised by motorists’ careful and considerate behaviour.
Much of my route had good paved shoulders, and as a result, I was usually not competing for space with motor vehicles. The only Seriously Bad Vibe I encountered was, as mentioned, in the small town of Oak Harbour, on Whidbey Island, where SR 20 morphed into an ugly and dangerous 4-lane arterial road as it traversed the town. After being whooshed a couple of times, I said, sod it, I don’t need this, and took to the sidewalk until I reached the outskirts of town, where paved shoulders and Reasonable Behaviour resumed.
Road surfaces were generally in good repair, both on tarmac and on the few gravel roads I used. The infamous chipseal became an unavoidable fact of life in Alberta and Montana. I dealt with this in several ways. I eased off the pressures in my Marathon Supremes, towards 50 PSI at the front and about 60 at the rear. This pretty much eliminated road buzz, at the cost of most of the tread on my rear tire. I also found occasional stretches of shoulder where layers of previous tarmac were visible, and there, down a couple of layers, I would see a strip a few inches wide and sometimes hundreds of metres long of ancient smooth tarmac. I would zip along these relics, evidence of a far-off and innocent time before the Fiscal Crisis of the State became manifest in the spread of chipseal. Lastly, I found it helped to make up and recite mantras: “From the iniquities of chipseal, may we be delivered.”
Rumble strips can serve a useful purpose, reminding careless drivers of their inattention to lane discipline. Rumble strips are most useful when they are at the edge of a traffic lane—say, on the driver’s right or on the centre line. On some highways, especially those in Montana, the rumble strip was pretty much dead-centre in the paved shoulder, leaving the cyclist the choice of the extreme right-hand side of the shoulder—no fun at all if there’s brush, a guard rail or a significant drop at the edge of the tarmac—or the narrow strip between the rumble strip and the traffic lane. Boooo!! State legislators and the contractors they hire should ride a bike on their creations.
“By their rubbish ye shall know them” – detritus and discardia along the way
You spend a lot of time on the shoulders of North American highways, and you see a lot of Stuff. Some of it is strange (“What is this doing here?”), some of it touching or sad, some of it just baffling. Much of it leads to ungenerous thoughts about other road users.
In no particular order, then, but with a chronological tilt:
- Alberta featured a highly specific discard: I must have seen at least three dozen heavy rubber bungee cords, 24” items with heavy wire S-hooks at each end, the kind you can buy at Canadian Tire or Princess Auto. There were very few elsewhere. I saw no sign of any tarp they might have been holding down, nor any load or parts thereof. So why were they there? Were they surplus to requirements? Thrown away because their owners were fed up with gouging fingers or worse on the sharp and rusty ends of the S-hooks?
- Also in Alberta, I saw tailpipes and mufflers, and even one full bumper assembly—an old item, this, made of steel and chrome, wholly unlike the cheap/useless/fragile/expensive moulded plastic affairs on so many newer vehicles.
- Plastic mouldings from motor vehicles were very common, as one would guess, and also bolts—oddly, these seemed to be usually 3/8” or thereabouts. I can’t recall seeing any nuts, however, and this seems very odd—not my lack of recall, but the absence of nuts. They’re smaller than bolts, obviously, but still—did they just bounce away when they and the bolt to which they were mated parted company? Or had there been no loose nuts at all--had all the bolts just worked themselves loose from blind holes?
- Along the whole length of my ride, I saw far too many small dead birds, blameless creatures thrown to the side of the road after a collision with a motor vehicle. There were fewer in the higher and colder northern sections of the Icefields Parkway, but still too many.
Trash could fill an entire section of this journal, and part of me would rather say nothing about the subject, but the bloody stuff was all too visible, as much a part of my journey as the magnificent sky- and landscapes and the kindness of strangers. It was especially the curse of the more built-up areas I visited, such as the Washington coast, and highways such as US 2 and MT 37 in the interior. (Lest you think that I think that this is a problem peculiar to the U.S., I don’t and it ain’t: the roadside ditches of Eastern Ontario are cluttered with cardboard coffee cups bearing the logo of Tim Horton’s doughnut shops, and each spring I remove a bagful of discarded trash from our hedge beside a quiet street in quiet, privileged Ottawa.)
I saw pretty much what one would expect: plastic bottles, some glass containers (often broken), fast food drink cups and styrofoam boxes, endless beer and soda cans, loose plastic and occasional paper bags, magazines, CDs or DVDs, small appliances, plastic jerry cans and large plastic bottles and water containers, bungee cords (not the HD rubber Albertan items), and more ominously, spent cartridge casings (these, only in the U.S.)
Organic discardia was much less common, banana skins being the exception. Maybe other stuff had decomposed? Maybe drivers and passengers don’t eat such stuff? Maybe they do, but don’t throw away the leftovers, tucking them instead into their little bag on the gearshift, and then dumping it into the compost when they get home?
(And these were just the visible discards, mind. Who knows what piles of emotional or intellectual baggage there were, discarded, lost or forgotten? Unrequited longings, or dreams deferred or broken? Or outmoded or obsolete paradigms—such as the rational-choice models so beloved of mainstream economists, about to be chucked onto the rubbish heap of history by a presidential candidate, now elected, who clearly doesn’t operate on the plane of rationality? Mind you, the relentless and inescapable presence of large motorized vehicles served as a reminder that even obsolete paradigms can have considerable staying power.)
Back to the thread. Regularly, there were Adopt-a-Highway signs about the detritus below, and these bore the names of the adopters, usually organizations. Frequently, I saw large plastic bags of rubbish neatly tied and awaiting pickup. Sometimes, however, these had been split open (by raccoons?), their contents awaiting bagging once again, and pickup.
Why?? We know what motivates manufacturers to produce disposable packaging. It's cheap, little regulated, and we don't do full-cost accounting. But what motivates people to throw away rubbish, expecting other people to clean up after them? (Or not, as obviously happens much of the time.)
Other people do pick up after those who litter. On Whidbey Island, I was cycling up a hill on a secondary road, and stopped to ask directions from a woman about my own age. It was a cloudy fresh Saturday morning, and she was dressed in work clothes, wearing work gloves and a hi-viz vest. She was spearing rubbish and loading it into a heavy-duty garbage bag. There were several of these, all full, in the bed of her pickup. We chatted, and I asked her if this was her work, and did she get time and a half for working Saturdays. No, she said, she used to work for the county, but now that she's retired, she did this because she just couldn’t bear to see her neighbourhood full of trash that would never decompose. (Thinks I to myself: People who live here must know that she does this work. Would they still continue to throw rubbish around, and continue to look her in the eye? Or is the rubbish the product of strangers passing through?) I wished her well, and thanked her for her directions and her commitment.
Moments like this raise all sorts of questions: Why should cleaning up litter depend on volunteering grandmothers, or organizations which “adopt a highway”? Policing the discard of trash would be expensive, because it’s both time-consuming and practically difficult. (Signs warning of fines for littering are common—does anyone ever get ticketed for doing so?) So, why not just simply put a significant price on non-decompostable bags, or food or drink containers?
Road signs comprise a subculture of their own. Earlier sections of this journal note a few that I passed along the way. Here are a few more:
- Just west of Sedro-Woolley, WA, en route to the coast in hand-painted black capitals on a white background: “July 16-17, at the Fairgrounds: Knife and Gun Show”. Just below it, “Got bothersome neighbours? Waste ‘em!” That last sentence wasn’t there, BTW – but it could have been.
- On a cedar tree beside the road to Langley, on Whidbey Island, also in hand-painted black capitals on a white background: “What is the war economy doing for you?”
Then, there were more formal signs. These seemed to me to be heavy with social commentary – but meaning, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder:
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