New chapters: Biking books serve up armchair adventures

Inclement weather keeping you indoors? Recent biking books, co-reviewed with others, serve up armchair adventures and thoughts on safety, as potential stocking stuffers for yourself and others.

It may be a stretch to consider Wes Marshall’s “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” (2024) a biking book, but for cyclists concerned about safety, it’s an insightful “journey into the underbelly of the traffic engineering profession,” as regional transportation planner Lindsay Bayley notes in her review.

While Marshall is a PhD, professional engineer and civil engineering professor at University of Colorado, Denver, appreciating his book doesn’t require an engineering degree. Written for non-engineers, its 88 short chapters tackle specific topics, biases, approaches, etc., offering plenty to ponder related to traffic safety for all roadway users.

Irreverently finger-pointing at his own profession, Marshall argues that research-based science doesn’t undergird our transportation system. Acknowledging traffic engineering’s short history, his research showed that many “standards” have unknown safety impacts or may make drivers behave unsafely. Engineers can, and should, use their professional judgment outside of guidebooks.

As Bayley points out, “Marshall found that many recommendations, standards, and generally accepted ‘facts’ were based on very limited and often flawed studies, many of which were conducted nearly 80 years ago. They’ve been cited so many times and included in design manuals for so long, they’ve been accepted as fact.”

Per Marshall, human error and lack of enforcement traditionally take the blame as the immediate cause for traffic crashes. Despite road designs’ influence on human behavior — think speeding on wide straightaways — it’s often overlooked as an underlying cause, leaving engineers off the hook.

Many roadways are designed to facilitate high traffic volumes at high speeds. There’s no requirement to study the safety outcomes of different designs, research that Marshall would recommend. If we are too quick to assign blame, Bayley continues, “we miss the systemic design failures that prevent us from creating safe streets.”

Rescuer or rescued?

Not your typical bike journey of magnificent scenery, close calls, and inspirational grit, “Nala’s World” (2020) is more a tale of redemption. In attempting to cycle the globe, kindhearted author Dean Nicholson adopts Nala, a stray, sick kitten in the Bosnian mountains. Nala, however, turns out to be more rescuer than rescued.

Co-reviewer Joanne Spitz, former member of Batavia’s Active Transportation Commission, notes that Nicholson learns “many life lessons about self-discovery, finding purpose, friendship, and compassion” in accepting responsibility for her. “It’s a great read for animal lovers, adventurers, or anyone looking for an uplifting story about the joys of connection.”

Nicholson’s conversational writing reveals a young Scotsman with no real-life goals dramatically switching gears when his buddy quits their world biking trip, replaced by Nala. As his feline connection deepened, his global ambition is sidetracked (to my disappointment) with long stays in various countries to earn money, sightsee and accept hospitality from willing hosts.

Nicholson “learns the unexpected ways life can change for the better,” Spitz continues. Contacts with pet rescue advocates lead Nicholson to other personal ambitions. “He develops a strong following on Instagram with followers worldwide, aiding him as he travels and supporting his fundraising for many animal charities worldwide.”

Prompted by travel photos and videos of himself and Nala, donations start pouring in. For someone admittedly disorganized and spur-of-the-moment, Nicholson monetizes a global love of cat videos (who doesn't love them?), putting his personal biking adventure, albeit pandemic-shortened, to good use.

This connections story is a fresh reminder that journeys can be unexpectedly life-changing. Whether one rides around a lake or the globe, personal transformations can occur no matter how planned or unplanned one’s route.

Circling Lake Michigan

Chicagoland cyclists consider it, but few attempt cycling solo around Lake Michigan. Even fewer write about it. Palatine native, now Chicago resident, John McShea chronicled his September 2023 adventure circumnavigating the lake in 15 days in “Old Bones, Young Spirit” (2024).

McShea embodied the youthful determination and adventurousness in the book’s title. Subject to nine days of rain, plus headwinds aplenty over 1,100-plus miles, a can-do spirit powered him through his counter-clockwise journey.

As co-reviewer Brian Larson of the Arlington Heights Bicycle Club notes, “McShea’s trip, besides a bucket list opportunity, also carried a nobler mission: fundraising for the Danny Did Foundation to provide epilepsy seizure monitors” for parents, a cause personally close to McShea and his family.

His concession to “old bones” was paid overnight lodging versus the additional labor of camping outdoors and lugging related equipment, plus the risk of missing restorative sleep. He placed his bets on small-town motels, often losing the wager due to uncooperative showers, noisy A/C window units, picked-over breakfast buffets, and indifferent innkeepers.

McShea’s writing includes fresh and clever descriptions of situations he has experienced as a veteran cyclist: from the popcorn patter of precipitation to gentle end-of-car-wash mist; cradle-rocking his bike as he stand-pedals up steep grades; unimpressed bovine stares while riding by dairy pastures.

His interactions with locations are brief, maybe due to his trip’s pace. Unfortunately, that can leave a disappointing gap in one’s sense of the overall experience. Both Larson and I wished McShea had shared more of the sights, sounds and smells of the harbors, shorelines, farms and forested trails he traveled.

“The travelogue element of his story falters at times,” per Larson. “McShea provides just enough historical tangents to get the reader interested, and wanting to learn more, but then he’s right back on the road.”

• Join the ride. Contact Ralph Banasiak at alongfortheridemail@gmail.com.