Playing In Traffic

In close to 20 years of off-and-on commuting by bicycle I’ve been lucky to have only been involved in two semi-serious mishaps. The first was when the ding-bat with the boy-friend who was a trial lawyer turned left in front of me at the corner of Wisconsin & M Street, in Washington, D.C. It wouldn’t have been a big deal except I was already in the intersection, and she managed to hit me hard enough to put me onto the hood of her car, but not hard enough to leave any permanent damage. Then she tried to take me to small claims court for the scratches my bike put on her hood. The second was the first day I rode my bike to work in Boston. Riding along the Esplanade (that’s the riverbank for those not acquainted with the Hub of the Universe), enjoying the view of Cambridge & MIT, when a cigarette smoking, blue haired matron from Beacon Hill lost control of her three-pound lhasa apso (sp?), which immediately ran under my front tire. If looks could kill I still wouldn’t be dead, but there might me some flesh missing. The woman couldn’t keep her lap-dog on a leash, but she expected me to ride into the Charles River to keep from putting tire marks on Muffy.

I’m telling this because I don’t want to make it seem like I’m some sort of un-appreciated victim here. I ride a lot, in some places where it probably isn’t the smartest idea to ride a bicycle. I’ve been lucky, and/or aware enough to avoid most trouble. But I drive a lot too, and see all the fun and care-free ways that bicyclists piss fossil-fuel consumers off.

Lately there’s been way too much attention paid to the battle of bicycle-vs-car, with not a lot of discussion about why the battle is even taking place. Is it simply because there are more bikes on the road? Are the people riding bikes suddenly more antagonistic towards cars? Are drivers so stressed out by $4/gallon gas that they’re taking offense at any perceived slight? Yes. But I think reasons like those are only scratching the surface. There’re a lot of deeper-seated reasons that, right now, cars and bikes don’t play nice together.

Here’s a question: When you’re driving a car, and some other driver does something stupid in front of you, causing you to slow down/stop/honk/flip them the bird, is your initial thought “That idiot should be banned from driving on this street!”? Or is it simply, “That idiot!”? If you’re stuck in traffic and a pedestrian crosses the street in front of you, a half a block away from the nearest cross walk, is your first reaction, “She’s dis-obeying traffic regulations! Where’s a cop?” The point is that there’s a lot of low-grade traffic law infractions that happen around us every day, and the ones that people focus on right now involve bikes. Because they’re visible, they’re un-expected, they’re a little exotic in the context of urban streets, and all of a sudden there are more of them out there. My little experiment is going to try to give some examples of bad behavior — by cars, by pedistrians, certainly by buses, and definitely by bicyclists. And I’ll keep a tally of them, so there can be some objective, quantifiable measure of who’s screwing who here.

It’s late August 2008. Let the games begin.

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