The Incredible Shrinking Bike Lane! (Provided photo — Bob Seidenstein)

Question: Why can’t DOT employees do math?

Answer: Because they think this (see photo) is between four and seven feet.

OK, so that’s a joke of sorts and not strictly true, but if you check out some of the bike lanes in and around SL, you might think so. New York State law says bike lanes should be clearly marked, be between 4 and 7 feet wide and should not be obstructed. And while that’s true on paper, it’s a whole different thing on asphalt.

Don’t believe me? Well, check it out for your li’l ole self.

Where to start? How’s about our town hall?

If you look down Lake Flower Ave. you’ll see a bike lane that complies with all the regulations — at least most of the time. During Farmer’s Market, for example, or when there are various activities in the park, cars park in the bike lane. This is no biggie to the peeps with cars, either driving by or in the bike lanes. But what about if you’re a biker?

I’ll tell you what. If, let’s say, you want to ride to Mountain Mist and slake your ice cream cones, you have two choices. One is to ride in the middle of car traffic; the other is to ride on the sidewalk. Riding a bike on the sidewalk is illegal. But since bikes are legally defined as vehicles, they can be ridden on the roads when bike lanes are obstructed. Of course, it’s also suicidal, but the traffic codes don’t seem to cover that.

All right, so you survived riding in the road past the park and down to the boat launch, so you’re safely on your way to your king-size flavor of the day, right?

Uh, not quite.

Things will be pukka for a few hundred yards till you approach one of the wonders of My Home Town’s — The Incredible Shrinking Bike Lane! It takes place at the curve by Madden’s. For there — Lo and behold! — what was once a real bike lane now becomes a mere shadow of its former self (that’s the supposed bike lane in the photo).

If you’ve ridden through TISBL before, it’s no biggie. You can anticipate the situation and either get in the road, speed up and zip around the curve or go full-on outlaw and jump the curb and ride on the sidewalk.

But what if you’ve NEVER ridden there before? What if you’re such an innocent you think just because there was a real bike lane from the town hall, there’ll be one now? Well, in that case, you better hope the gods are gonna be smiling down upon you, because you can bet the car drivers won’t. And nor should you to expect they’ll be because you just went from riding on their right, where you belong, to riding mere inches away from their front bumper.

This gives you only one option, which is that you have enough juice to whiz around that corner (and maybe also in your shorts) unscathed, instead of modeling the latest biker fashion — Tire Tread Chic.

So you got around the corner and have made it to Mountain Mist, where you get your well-earned yummy. And while you’re merrily licking away, you’ll notice a car or two parked on the bike lane there. But what you won’t notice because they’re out of sight, are the cars parked on the bike lane by the tennis courts, once again making you ride in the road.

If you think the bike lanes are a mess only in town, guess again. Ride around for a while and you’ll see them go from ideal to downright lethal. They may be wide and clear, or jammed up with rocks, sand, pine needles, broken glass, empty bottles, full Pampers and maybe even a trash bag or two. Some of the lanes look like favorite targets of 10th Mountain grenadiers; others are so narrow they’re fit for only the like of John Tomac.

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Made in the USA

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But the problem with riding bikes here, or most places in the US, is not restricted to bike lanes. It’s the overall attitude Americans have toward bikes and how they treat bikers and the problems that result. In the rest of the world, bicycles are considered a viable means of transportation; in America, they’re thought of as either a child’s toy or a weirdo’s hobby. As a result, far too many, if not most, non-bikers regard bikers as intruders on “their” turf. Ask any biker if they ever had a rude or even violent hassle by a driver and you’ll get, not an earful, but TWO of ’em.

Want a recent example? Is yesterday recent enough? I hope so because that’s when it happened as I was in my car on my way to Evergreen Auto. There was a biker standing on the rail-trail crosswalk across from Woods and Waters. The car in the other lane stopped, I stopped and the car behind me stopped. As the biker walked his bike across the crosswalk, the car behind me laid on his horn — long and loud. That jamoke was outraged, but not for any sensible or legal reason, since the biker had the right of way — something he was either too ignorant to know or too stupid to care about.

But that was just yesterday’s incident. From horn-blowing to finger-flipping, getting run off crosswalks and even the road itself, I’ve had my share — like ever other biker. In America, legally defining a bike as a vehicle really only guarantees we can become roadkill with rights.

Another example of our national attitude toward biking: I told a bunch of my non-biker friends about our biking mess, and all of them said the same thing: That I could ride the rail trail. Don’t get me wrong: The rail trail is a wonderful alternative for bikers, but that’s what it is — an alternative. The issue isn’t that because the village (and the whole country) makes bike riding difficult and dangerous, the bikers should just stay on the rail trail.

That thought is unconsidered and unacceptable. It’d be like if 50 houses in the village suddenly had blocked sewers due to some problem that was the village’s responsibility. Then, when the homeowners called the powers that be asking for the problem to be fixed, they were told there were lots of bathrooms in town — at Stewart’s, at the town hall, at restaurants and so on. And then when the homeowners pointed out that, first, those places aren’t open all the time and second, it was the village’s DUTY to repair the sewer, they were told in turn to dig cat holes and quit whining.

To me, Biker Heaven on Earth is the Netherlands. I’ve been there about a dozen times and I can say that in a country with more bikes than people, they know how to do it right. Throughout the country, bike lanes are not only wide and perfectly maintained, but they’re also clearly separated from roadways, often by a small wall.

In Amsterdam, the bike traffic is mind-boggling. Bikers jam the bike lanes fore and aft, port and starboard, yet they all move at a good clip and stress-free as well. Bikers respect the bike laws, vehicle drivers respect the bikers. In fact, it seemed the bikers’ only problem was with foreign pedestrians (especially Americans) who, unused to so many bikes in so many places, would lose their bearings and stumble into a bike lane. And if I said that due to all my bike savvy, it never happened to me, I’d be lying.

So what’s the answer to our nation’s bike woes?

Sadly, because it’d require a complete change of consciousness on behalf of lawmakers, law enforcers and citizens, I see no solution in sight — certainly not in my lifetime.

But if reincarnation is real, and I was a good enough boy to come back as a born-again bike rider, I’d hope to come back only in Holland.