I am now a cyclist. Yup. I’ve got a bike, a helmet, two lights, two locks, a trouser protecting band thing, cycle maps, a type pump and little puncture repair kit. And last night I experienced for the first time what it feels like to share the road with a bus. I’ve driven before, hired cars to escape the city, but that is usually early in the morning or late at night and I usually deliberately avoid main bus routes. I’ve walked a lot and caught taxi's but cycling is fundamentally different. It’s an entirely new physical language, a bodily knowledge, a visual feeling, a sensory intelligence. All of which I sense is neither instinctive nor natural for me.
Last night I felt intimately part of a mobile technology. It was my first taste of co-existence on the road: me as vehicle rather than me as pedestrian or passenger. I rode it through the dark streets after picking it up from a friend who attempted gallantly to fill the deep chasm that we both discovered should have contained some urban bike knowledge – thanks Kris. On the trip home I had numerous bus encounters – in particularly the No.73 bendy and the No.38 Routemaster. Both provided extraordinarily different co-located experiences. I found myself behind them, riding around, in front of them and once in between them (though I got out of that position pretty quickly).
I have spoken to cyclists before and watched then manoeuvre around stopping-and-starting buses but I had never personally shared the road so intimately with the large, grunting monsters. Curiously because of the open platform of the No.38, I watched the people inside the bus watching me. They watched me pass and get passed. I watched them board and disembark. We stared at each other at the lights. They no doubt swore when I held up the bus on smaller sections of the street. In a way, because I could imagine their reactions, I felt more socially responsible to them. I also felt the heat of the bus even in the warm dusky evening and I found I didn’t need to keep it in vision to sense its movements. I was able to rely instead on the rythmic engine rumbles and squealing brakes. The RM, is of course, a legendary element of the sonic street space. In comparison the movement of the bendy, the slithering action of the back section was very difficult to anticipate. Not knowing where it might be, took all my concentration. And since I couldn’t rely on my ears to sense its movements, I found I had to focus on the material mechanisms - the bendy bit, the back wheels and general visual feeling of the bus - and much less on the social space within it.
Overall it was incredible. And frightening. And exhilarating. And pretty damn cool to make it home quicker than the bus.
Kris suggests, since it has been years since I have ridden and never in this country, that I document my body knowledge now at this raw stage and again later when it slides into mundane everydayness. It’s an interesting idea - life as ethnography and all that. I have to say right now, nothing is mundane or everyday about cycling. The body position, the seat, the peddles, the locks, gears, road rules, hell, even the arm-out indicating thing nearly sent me hurtling into another cyclist at one narrow point – I yelled a very uncool “sorry” as we both veered off. So it is exciting to feel the edges of a new world of knowledge (given I am in the first year my Phd I think it is also comforting to personally hear the enthusiasm in this statement). I also know I should attend one of those bike training classes….
Nb: this does not mean I no longer catch the bus. The bus blog will continue – I will just have more and different perspectives from which to blog (hopefully none of which will be from hospital).
The routemaster is celebrated in a new book - The Bus We Loved - by Travis Elborough.
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