I was riding my bike home from work yesterday when I saw a pedestrian step off the curb between two parked cars, without looking up. Because I saw him, and because I'm kind of an a**hole, I decided to time it so that I would pass in front of him by just a couple inches when he walked out from behind the parked car.
He never looked up for even a moment, and I passed in front of him so close that he had to notice and pause his walk for a second. "Sorry," I heard him say. I stopped my bike a few feet beyond him and turned around to look at him. "The reason you are 'sorry' and not dead is because I'm a bike and not a car," I lectured him very pompously.
Right at that moment a pickup truck came roaring by us at a velocity far greater than the speed limit. It's side mirror clipped my upper arm and knocked me against a parked car, leaving a bruise. The driver of the pickup truck never even slowed down. I saw him run the stop sign at the end of the block, gunning his engine the whole way.
I've been a bicycle commuter for most of the last two decades. During that time I've seen uncountable numbers of idiot pedestrians, idiot bicyclists, and idiot automobile drivers. The only difference between them is that the only the idiot automobile drivers will kill and maim innocent people.
And that is the main point of my diary.
A bicyclist has more in common with a skateboarder or roller skater than it does with a car. The difference is beyond obvious: only the car driver is surrounded by 2 tons of steel, rubber, and plastic.
Let's take a step beyond the current situation and use common sense for a change.
Common Sense #1) Bicyclists don't want to be in the middle of car traffic anymore than car drivers want bicyclists in front of them when they are driving.
Common Sense #2) In a collision between a car and a bike, the bicyclist will lose 100% of the time. The same is true for collisions between cars and pedestrians. So why are the traffic laws treating cars and bikes the same, but not cars and pedestrians?
For instance:
Bicycle riders on public streets have the same rights and responsibilities as automobile drivers. Cyclists are part of the normal traffic flow and are entitled to share the road with other drivers.
And guess what else? I also have the right to commit suicide, but I'm not planning on exercising that right either. If I was in the mood to commit suicide I would follow your Rules Of The Road.
Common Sense #3) Given the energy crunch, the environment, and the social dysfunction of the car culture, we should be encouraging bicycles over cars whenever reasonable. Yet the debate over every minor change towards this objective is framed in how it will effect car drivers, rather than what we hope to accomplish.
Believe it or not, it doesn't have to be this way. The most progressive state in the union towards bicycles is not California - it is Idaho of all places.
The concept is a simple one that allows bicyclists to keep their momentum without ever taking the right-of-way from motorists: basically, stop signs are treated a yield signs, and stop lights as stop signs. Bicycles can legally blow through stop signs as long as it isn't another driver's turn.
And at red lights, bicycles must stop, but can proceed if the intersection is clear
"There are lots of good reasons for it," said attorney Kurt Holzer, who specializes in bicycle accidents. Aside from the fact that a waiting cyclist won't trip a traffic light changing mechanism, Holzer said the laws are in place for safety reasons. "If you have a bike on the right side and a car wants to turn right, the law allows the bike through the intersection, through the area of conflict, so the biker can get out of the way."
Rather than each faction exerting ownership over the pavement, cyclists should know and follow all the laws, while drivers should concede that bicycles are different from cars and should therefore be subject to different laws. Stopping at empty intersections is cumbersome for drivers and cyclists alike — but cyclists aren't likely to kill pedestrians with their carelessness.
By drawing a legal line in the sand between cars and bikes, allowing them different rules in the same environment, Idaho's bike laws ultimately foster a mutual respect between drivers and cyclists.
A few years ago I took a trip around central Europe. In every major city they shut off at least one main street to cars, leaving it only to pedestrians and bikes. Those streets were always crowded with people.
In some cities small streets were striped for bicycle use only. At every railroad station I saw there were hundreds, if not thousands, of bicycles locked up outside the stations. Paris has implemented a bike rental program that is so popular that dozens of other cities in the world want to copy it.
Yet here in America, making a couple bike lanes is a controversial thing.
What is wrong with this picture?
Commute Clot
Which brings us to Critical Mass.
I moved to San Francisco on the same day as the 2nd Critical Mass event ever.
After Critical Mass at The Zeitgeist circa December 1992
For those of you who still don't know what Critical Mass is, it is a regular (usually monthly), rolling demonstration of self-propelled commuters that generally protest a society that prefers environmentally-destructive automobiles over other types of cleaner transportation.
However, it isn't that simple. Critical Mass has no official leaders, no organizational sponsors, no single political statement, stand or agenda. It rarely has an designated protest route. It often has participants riding skateboards, inline skates, and even unicycles (who recognize that their interests correspond with bikes and not with cars). Often you will see customized bikes and people wearing costumes as if they were at a parade rather than a demonstration. In fact, the only consistent thing about it is that it is normally made up of bicyclists and they have an agreed upon time and location to meet. Nothing else is for certain.
Critical Mass started in San Francisco in 1992 and is now in at least 325 cities on every continent in the world (except Antartica...yet). It has inspired books, documentaries, and civil rights court cases. In fact, critical mass just might be the most successful, worldwide, grassroots, political movement today. And yet mainstream liberals and progressives still ignore it.
Critical Mass in San Francisco is largely a product of the San Francisco Bicycle Messengers. Going all the way back to the late 1970's, bicycle messengers were considered "crazy", and at the time they were often punkers. Because they shared the narrow and crowded streets of downtown San Francisco with huge MUNI buses, streets that were never designed for the two to coexist, there were inevitable conflicts. When a 4 ton bus has a conflict with a 30 pound bicycle the results are predictable, and a lot of bicycle messengers got killed over the years.
With the growing size and popularity, and because of the lack of an organizational body, Critical Mass has never once applied for a protest permit or advanced police notification. This has increasingly led to confrontations, both with the police and with drivers. The most notable examples are:
* The
July 1997, one month after Mayor Willie Brown declared that he was going to "fix" the Critical Mass ride. This led to the police closing off an entire block and arresting everyone, including people just walking down the sidewalks. 105 were arrested, but all charges were dropped. The only thing it accomplished was to get even more people out to ride in Critical Mass. Bicyclists in San Francisco have more political influence than ever.
* The August 2004 Critical Mass ride in New York coincided with the Republican National Convention. NYPD
arrests 250 "massers" for blocking traffic and impound their bikes. It required several levels of court appeals before judges ruled that
bikes can't be stolen from their owners if they haven't been charged with a crime.
Months later NYC then tried to stop Critical Mass altogether by saying they couldn't ride without a permit from The City. More riders were arrested and their bikes confiscated. This law was ruled unconstitutional.
Organized Coincidence
There is no shortage of people that hate Critical Mass.
Inevitably Critical Mass, like any demonstration, is going to inconvenience some people. That is unavoidable. A demonstration that doesn't get in someone's way is useless and not worth the trouble.
The anti-war protests during the Vietnam War inconvenienced a lot of people and got in people's way. In the end the anti-war movement of the 1960's was successful.
The century-long labor rights movement in America inconvenienced a lot of people and got in almost everyone's way. In the end it was successful.
The same things can be said for the women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement.
OTOH, the anti-war protests before the Iraq War, carefully planned for weekends in the park, didn't inconvenience anyone and got in almost no one's way. It failed miserably.
If you want Critical Mass to not get in anyone's way, you are also saying you want the bicycle rights movement to fail. Maybe not intentionally, but the end result is the same.
In some cases Critical Mass riders bring trouble upon themselves. There are a few "massers" that want to tie up traffic and and confront drivers. This is the wrong approach, especially when you consider how stressed out drivers already are. The rides are usually timed for Friday afternoon, when drivers are most strung out from a long week.
For instance, I've seen a woman break down in tears, telling a police officer that she's been stranded "for hours" because of the protest. In fact, it took about 5 minutes for all the bikes to ride past her, but maybe to her it was "hours".
On the other hand, media coverage of these confrontations is more than just one-sided.
For instance, in rides in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2007, as well as a July 2008 ride in Seattle, confrontations between bicyclists and drivers led to massers using their bikes and bike locks to break the windows of the cars involved. The media portrayal was of bicyclists being "out of control", with the implied message that "something must be done about them."
I won't try to justify what the massers did in these instances, but let's put some perspective on these events. In these cases, the drivers involved intentionally struck the bicyclists with their cars.
That's a ton of steel and plastic coming down on someone's 30 pound bicycle. It doesn't matter if the car is going 15 miles and hour or 50 miles an hour. If the car drivers had done this to a protester on foot then everyone, including the news media, would consider the drivers to be dangerous and irresponsible. But because the people struck in this case had two skinny wheels under them, the news media framed the situation like it was a car-on-car incident, as if traffic law can trump common sense. The only outrage was reserved for the bicyclists who attacked the cars, not for the car drivers who first attacked the bicyclists.
In none of these cases did the drivers even get cited by police. In the Seattle case the driver even admitted that he "freaked out and overreacted".
A bicycle is NOT a car! Hitting a bicyclist with your car means you are endangering the life of a bicyclist. Yet neither the news media, nor some car drivers seem to care when these bicyclists got hit. So with that attitude is it any wonder that Critical Mass keeps getting bigger?
Until the public and news media care about the welfare of the bicyclist as much as they care about the welfare of the car driver, then Critical Mass will keep growing and spreading.
And speaking of getting angry at bicyclists for getting in your way, why don't car drivers feel that way towards other cars. After all, cars get in your way thousands of times more often than bikes do.
Oh, wait. Car drivers do get angry at other cars for getting in their way. It's called road rage, and its an ugly thing to see. It's even uglier to see people defend it.
Which brings me to the reason why I prefer to ride a bike instead of drive my car. For the lady above, any delay in her commute drive is enough to bring on tears. Yet, during my commute, its not unusual to get smiles and kind words from other bicyclists. When is the last time that a car driver has waved more than a single finger at you during your commute? Bicyclists, OTOH, are generally a happy bunch who make comments to strangers like, "Great day for a ride, huh?" and "Cool bike."
I don't ride because it is an environmentally friendly thing to do (although I am a tree-hugger). I don't ride because it is a healthy thing to do (although I need the exercise).
I ride my bicycle because it makes me happy. At the end of a long day at work there is nothing better than to get on my bike and take a long, sweaty ride through the park. By the time I get home I'm refreshed and awake.
I feel sorry for those people who have to commute in their cars.
I'm not a car hater.
Over the last couple decades I've owned three old cars, and have lovingly restored each of them by hand. Yet I still consistently put more miles on my bikes than on my cars.
I also almost never ride in Critical Mass. It isn't convenient for me to do so.