Out of my way!
by Karl Benedek
James Winkelman knows that multi-use paths are not necessarily a utopian alternative to the toxic gridlock of the auto-centric road system. In fact, he knows from experience that user conflicts are common on these important transportation and recreation corridors. Perhaps it’s because for all the good they represent, multi-use paths could be considered a transportation ghetto—where pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, wheelchair users and non-motorized scooters are all crammed together and expected to get along. Winkelman has witnessed or been a part of path confrontations often enough that he wanted to speak out to ask for a bit of courtesy from all path users.“can i take viagra” Herbal Cialis viagra how it works
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James is a former racing cyclist and an amateur framebuilder. His particular interest is carbon-fiber tricycle frames. He is involved with trying to develop stronger and more stable racing tricycles. His involvement in cycling and his interest in helping alter-abled racers makes what he has to relate all the more painful for him.
James is considered disabled, although you wouldn’t know it to look at him. His disabilities, he says, are invisible. “There are a lot of us out there,” he observes. James is mostly deaf, and has some other inner ear issues that make balancing extremely difficult. He feels like he is falling over, even as he sits talking with me in a stable chair on a solid concrete floor inside a room that is definitely not in motion. “On my best days it feels like I’m sitting in a canoe,” he says in a conversational voice. “Other times it’s like trying to stand up in a canoe. On my worst days it’s like going through rapids trying to stand up in a canoe. Those days I just stay home,” he says. To get around, James uses a service animal, a dog named Jack. Jack accompanies James almost everywhere he goes and always wears a clearly visible service animal vest when he is out in public to let people know not to touch him or play with him while he is on duty.
When he feels up to it, James walks a couple of miles with Jack as part of his physical therapy. Jack is always off the leash. Jim’s medical condtion is such that balance issues prevent him from using a leash to control Jack. “It could be deadly for me to have him on a leash because I might fall over and hit my head, and it could be deadly for me not to have him—he keeps me from being run over by vehicles that are coming up behind me.” James does not walk around wearing a helmet at all times, but his doctor says he probably should.
Walking Jack without a leash is legal according to all the doctors he has spoken with and the research he has done. “Service animals are covered under what your physical disabilities and needs are according to the Americans with Disabilites Act. I checked with the Lane Independent Living Alliance and the City Human Rights Commission before I began talking to anybody about this,” he says.
Jack’s job is to notice anything moving towards James, then to position himself in James’ path and stare at the object to let James know there is something he should take notice of. The problem is when training cyclists get up to full speed on the path, they are often moving too fast for Jack to take his position.
One particular cyclist, James recalls, would buzz him at high speed on a regular basis, shouting obscenities as he passed by. “Even though I’m deaf, I could tell what he was saying,” James says wryly. Jack could never move fast enough to warn him. The first few times this happened, James wrote it off as either a bad morning or an unfortunate meeting place on the path. There are plenty of low visibilty areas and tight curves on the stretch of path he regularly walks. The final straw was when James was walking on a part of the path that crosses a wide-open field; no visibility problems at all. At the time, James was stopped on the path talking with another pedestrian when the cyclist allegedly went out of his way to buzz James, yelling and pointing at Jack. James tried to shout back that it was all right, Jack was a service animal, but the cyclist would not hear any of it and rode off in a cloud of expletives. “The guy had a unique enough bike that I tracked him down and found the company he worked for (not the same company as the bike he was riding, he notes for all the armchair investigators). “I didn’t go there to confront the individual, but I went to the company and explained myself and I got a really good response,” James said. He has since had no trouble from that particular cyclist.
Although this particular story turned out well, James acknowledges that most people would not be able to pursue the matter as far as he did—to the front door of someone’s employer. He feels that only cyclists can prevent bike rage, either through peer pressure or simply more education. “Most people don’t know there’s a speed limit on the path because it’s not posted,” he says, “but it’s in the documentation.”
James recalls the last bike race he was ever in, where another racer became so self-centered and focused on winning that he could not stand to have anyone in his way. He deliberately caused a crash which ended up breaking James’ back. “It’s the same attitude displayed by that cyclist on the path,” James says. “It was a Masters race. We were all working hard, had trained hard.” The prize for that race? A couple of slicks. “He broke my back for a pair of Continental tires,” James says with amazement.
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