Borders the Bike

The last time I was seriously injured on a bike was (virtual) Housing Day 2020. After I got quadded, I wanted to ride my mountain bike along a local trail to get my mind off the disappointment of landing in Pforzheimer House.

Feeling the familiar contours of the trail underneath me stilled my mind until I turned a corner and saw an unleashed dog quickly running up the trail towards me. I slowed down and drifted to the right side of the trail to give it plenty of space. As I did so, I was briefly aware that I had left the ground. Then, I was acutely aware that I had hit the ground.

I had drifted too far to the right and smashed my right foot into a rock, sending me headfirst over my handlebars. I got off the ground and biked the four miles back home as my right shoe filled with blood.

In my eight years as a cyclist, I have had many minor accidents and even more close calls, most caused by something (like an unleashed dog) and I not being able to occupy the same space at the same time.

When I moved back to Cambridge this summer, I started biking in the city for the first time. Among cars making unannounced right turns, buses drifting into the bike lane, and jaywalkers stepping into the street with no warning, every ride was haunted by the threat of collision.

It took me several weeks to figure out how to safely ride through the rotary near my sum- mer apartment, and another two weeks to figure out how to cross the portion of Massachusetts Avenue by Johnston Gate where the bike lane suddenly ends on the right side of the road and reappears on the left.

By late June, I had things figured out, but I still didn’t feel at ease. When you are on a mountain bike, you can fool yourself into thinking that it’s just you and the trail, that any danger you face is a consequence of your actions. On a road bike, sharing the streets with hundreds of pedestrians, motorists, and obstacles, you never feel in control — the street is chaos.

Rivers Sheehan ’23, who has been biking in Cambridge since last October, tells me commuting around Harvard Square has heightened her awareness of the “unpredictability of behaviors.” After biking the same routes every day, she says, someone might want to “see everything as predictable, but actually, people are doing things that are so outside the norm, that that in itself is the norm.”

That makes any place in Cambridge where cars, pedestrians and cyclists meet a nightmare to navigate. Take Mt. Auburn Street, for example: you have students “walking back and forth” and cars that are “annoyed at having to wait,” Sheehan says.

Even in ideal conditions — wide bike lanes and protected shoulders — accidents still happen. Sheehan’s was on Mass. Ave., about two months ago, just past the Law School.