After a season of interactions with drivers and hikers, John had an epiphany about how different modes of moving about in a city and in nature can shape our perspective. Realizing this is a topic the readership might be interested in chewing on, he penned a compelling installation of The Dust-Up…

Hypothesis

I believe when people drive their cars, they become incredibly inward-minded, focusing wholly on themselves, their vehicle, and their agendas. The shadow version of themselves is allowed to surface, encouraging behavior rooted in a feeling of anonymity, independence, and egocentricity. Furthermore, when people drive a car to hike or even ride a bike, the residue from this inward-minded activity of driving to the trailhead can create ego-envelopment, leading to aversive interactions with other users on the trails. Cycling, on the other hand, is more vulnerable, and thus, cyclists have to be more outward-minded, with our eyes open, absorbing everything around us, which results in a more compassionate, empathetic experience overall.

Part of empathizing with the world is understanding why people behave a certain way. My intention here is not to drive divisive rhetoric in an op-ed that says bikes are the solution to all our problems, but rather to understand the behaviors of other road and trail users. Once we understand the root of people’s behaviors, we can adjust our expectations and respond to situations rather than be reactionary.

Car Brain and the Shadow

The term car brain is often used in cycling circles to describe how a seemingly “nice” person can quickly become aggressive or violent while driving an automobile. I believe that this phenomenon can be attributed to the Jungian concept of the shadow.

Readers of analytical psychologist Carl Jung will immediately understand the shadow reference. According to Jung, the shadow is our true self hidden by societal constructs, such as laws or social rules, and is covered by the façade of our personality. The shadow can be greedy, self-centered, reactionary, defensive, or crass. However, a shadow isn’t a negative consciousness device; it can be a powerful tool for improving ourselves. Jung believed addressing our darker selves would lead to true enlightenment. If we default to fear, grief, or aggression, Jung implores us to ask ourselves why.

Addressing your shadow can take years of intense exercises where you tune out the noise of day-to-day living and peel away scabs and layers to reveal the subconscious self. It’s only after confronting our darker selves that we can realize our full potential and become more empathetic creatures. Yet I would argue that driving a car might be a quicker vehicle (no pun intended) to get to the bottom of who people truly are, or at least what their shadows reveal.

Driving a car often seems to bring out the most primal reactions, rather than enlightened responses. A reaction is in which our emotions block a logical reply, whereas a response is how we reply to situations after we have logically addressed them.

You didn’t sign up for a Carl Jung talk on a bike website, so I’ll move this along…

Cars create a sense of protection and heighten the inward-minded experience of road dominance. Through their marketing in American culture, the car represents individual freedom and autonomy. I truly believe this is why, in a post-COVID world, drivers have exhibited an increase in self-centered recklessness, including a 10% increase in speeding. As cyclists, I’m sure you all have felt this. The roads do not feel as safe as they did in a pre-pandemic world.

When riding a bike, we absorb the world that surrounds us because we have no protection from it. We have to be outward-minded and aware, resulting in a more empathetic world experience.

Cycling as an Outward-Minded Experience

My argument is that driving a car is an inward-minded act and that cycling, because we lack the safety of airbags or a metal cage surrounding us, has to be outward-minded.

A second sense develops when riding a bike in a big city. You can almost predict the erratic movements of cars or what the flow of traffic will do as a response to road conditions. Maybe a lifetime of riding a bike, not only as recreation but also as transportation, embedded this atavistic third eye in me while riding in chaotic environments. You’ll always remember how to ride a bike… in a city.

When you’re on your bike, you’re thinking about what is going on around you because you are vulnerable. The butterfly effect of occurrences can literally change your life if you do not pay attention while riding. Be it the child on the sidewalk and the distracted parent, the taxi door opening, or the car that just parked with the person driving it looking at their phone, all of these cases can result in bodily harm to yourself or others.

Your eyes are constantly engaged with the world. You’re looking, listening, and sometimes smelling any potential threat to your safety.

Drivers might even view bikes as obstructions to their inward-minded agendas. If you’re a commuter and you have a slight hill on your ride, how often do cars blindly pass you without waiting for both of you to safely clear the hill? This is just one example of how an inward-minded driver might not even consider how it makes us feel on a bicycle. And how we have to develop outward-minded awareness while riding.

I think if you’re not a cyclist (or a pedestrian), you cannot possibly understand the trauma that we have all endured by distracted, inward-minded drivers almost killing us. As a side view mirror clipped my handlebar, I came to the fervent realization that I just want to get to the trail in one piece without ending up under a speeding Subaru that really wants to get to the trail 20 seconds faster.

This translates into trail riding as well. While a majority of my negative interactions with people while on my bike are almost wholly on the ride to the trail in the form of distracted or impatient driving, it is important to be just as keen-eared while riding singletrack on mixed-use trails in order to reduce the amount of negative interactions while on the trail.

I’ll listen for conversation, for a dog barking, or a child playing, or a chorus of rocks rolling down a hillside. I want to sense the proximity of other trail users as I’m riding, if only to avoid any sort of negative interaction due to me scaring the people who didn’t expect to see anyone else during their inward-minded experience.

Bringing the Inward Mindset Outside

It’s taken me all summer to come to this realization, or at least how to talk about it. Much less to have the courage to write it all down. But I truly believe if someone drives to a trailhead and spends that drive being inward-minded, it does not change when they exit their car and step foot onto a trail. They bring this inward-minded worldview with them, and suddenly, they are by themselves in the woods.

Inward-mindedness creates an egocentric framework into which many people seeking the outdoors fall into. It’s a slippery slope to egocentricity when it comes to the outdoor experience. Countless writers have waxed poetic about the solitary experiences found in wild and vast places. This notion is incredibly selfish in our modern age of outdoor recreation.

“To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.” – John Muir.

What troubles me about this inward-minded worldview is that it is a direct reaction to a world shaped by the car. Drivers, including men like John Muir, value “wilderness” and “wild” places because they cannot drive their cars in these places. They say they are silent to the constructs of industrialization, including the hustle and bustle of car-shaped landscapes. Otherwise, what is the difference? However, as a vessel for both transportation and exploration, these same people have somehow villainized the bicycle, the greenest vehicle human transport ever invented, in the process of coming to these conclusions.

Hikers: Inward-Minded or Outward-Minded?

Hikers often react to cyclists on a trail with the same regard as drivers do to cyclists on a roadway. I don’t believe they feel scared by our presence in the way that cyclists feel scared by distracted drivers. I believe cyclists are viewed as inconveniences in all environments.

I’ve had a few conversations with hikers on the trails this summer that spurred me to chew on this topic while I ride. Oftentimes, when I’ve surprised a hiker on the trail, I have asked them immediately, politely, “Why did I scare you?” I’ve recorded the following replies over the past eight months:

• “I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be out here.”
• “This is my morning walk. I’m not used to seeing other people.”
• “You came up on me so fast that I didn’t have time to get off the trail.” (This was said to me after I came to a complete stop on the trail without them hearing me and quietly said, “Excuse me.”)
• “Cyclists shouldn’t be out here. It ruins my peace and quiet.”

Not all of my interactions were like this; these are just a few, but you get the point. I interrupted their peace and quiet on their walk in the woods on the trail that they stepped onto from their car, which they drove to from their home. They might have buzzed a cyclist on the way to the trail, not because they don’t value human life but because they become self-absorbed, ego-centric, and anonymous to the outside world when they are in their car. Even while hiking, they have car brain.

Now, I’m not trying to vilify hikers. Still, when I made this connection, I began taking notes on my rides for no other reason than to try to understand these reactions and learn how I could alter my own behavior to make these interactions less weighted.

Cycling as a Vehicle for Being Polite

Plenty of people drive to trails and shuttle with cars, so I do wonder if the act of driving to the ride causes bike riders to bring a car-brained mindset to the trails. This would explain the interactions we often are told of by hikers. “Some guy nearly rode us off the trail last week and didn’t even stop.” Can this inward-minded residue affect cyclists, too? I would say so. Have you ever been cut off by a driver with a bike on their car rack? Me too. Do you think they saw you on the road? How can we expect that mindset to “switch off” as soon as they pedal onto a trail?

If you drive to a trail to ride, are you so swept up in your experience that you don’t consider the experiences of others?

This is evident in many hiker-versus-cyclist interactions. A hiker always has the right of way. Uphill traffic always has the right of way. Do people just not know about right of way and trail etiquette? Or do people just not care? With all these questions come some weighted answers. Personally, riding my bike to trails is a constant reminder that a lot of people are swept up in their own worlds and don’t even see me pedaling to the trailhead as they rush by, too close for comfort, distracted, isolated, in their cars.

Which is terrifying.

So, in order to circumvent this fear, I try to be a more outward-minded trail user. I give people plenty of space, both physically and verbally, when riding in tight terrain like mixed-use trails. Sometimes, on weekends, I’ll ride with an Awareness Bell – to which I’ve had mixed responses. And I’ll always “kill them with kindness.” Not in a disrespectful or snarky way, but in an overwhelmingly positive delivery.

“Have a great hike!”

By allowing my outward-minded experience to spill over to these seemingly, and perhaps even miscategorized, inward-minded people, I am attempting to awaken them to the reality that we all share these trails. By simply saying hello, we humanize these otherwise anonymous or inconvenient interactions. No one wants to be interrupted, so when we do, let’s make it positive. This pushes against the very notion of an egocentric outdoor experience, that we are out there by ourselves, for ourselves.

The language of the great outdoor authors upholds these inward-minded dialogs, peppered with solitude, peace, and quiet. But we do not live in the same world as Muir did.

With the amount of people in the world now, is it realistic to expect to be the only person on a trail? Not only the world population but outdoor recreation base grew by 4.3% to a record 175M participants, or 57.3% of the U.S. population.

Does the notion of “solitude” stand as a myth in modern society? If you’re out on the trails, why wouldn’t you expect others to also be on the trails for the same reasons?

Being friendly, sharing, and engaging with other users is also a good way to be one less inward-minded user on the trail. The perpetuation of fear is what leads to a divisive society, and one intrinsically linked to the egocentricity found in an inward-minded driver-and-car relationship.

It should also be noted that mountain bikers could do a lot more to be more responsible trail users. But that’s a Dust-Up for another day…

What do you think? Is there a connection between cars and inward-minded tendencies beyond the reactionary “cars versus bikes” divisiveness? Are people being programmed by their day-to-day existence faster toward heightened egocentricity? My intent here, once again, is not to drive divisive rhetoric, but rather to encourage responses rather than reactions to situations where we feel vulnerable. Understanding where someone is coming from often informs a more compassionate response, and in doing so, I have found I hold onto less reaction-fueled negativity.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

If you’re new to this series, welcome to The Dust-Up. This will be a semi-regular platform for Radavist editors and contributors to make bold, sometimes controversial claims about cycling. A way to challenge long-held assumptions that deserve a second look. Sometimes, they will be global issues with important, far-reaching consequences; other times, they will shed light on little nerdy corners of our world that don’t get enough attention.