On a trip to the gas station today, the card reader on the pump malfunctioned, so I had to pay inside. As I returned to my vehicle, a pickup truck with a plow blade came barreling in from my left as if I did not exist. The station is having a price war with one down the road, so it's bustling with eager customers.
I'm sick today. I wouldn't have gone out at all, but this was the least frigid and nasty day for several days out in the forecast. I half turned my head toward the truck with a well-practiced "where the fck do you think you're going?" look. He kept pushing me, but at least slowed enough for me to get across to the gas island.
I thought about all of the decades I've spent facing down vehicles that could effortlessly kill me. I thought about how mountain biking and other segregated forms of cycling avoid the confrontation and life risk of traffic, except as you are driving to your "safe" place to ride.
Good luck getting motorists to recognize the role that bicycles played in the early engineering of both automobiles and airplanes, as well as the first public pressure to improve pavement, making today's highway vehicles possible at all, especially at highway speeds. The airplane thing is less of a stretch because of the Wright Brothers, but then those guys escaped from traffic by heading to the sky.
When I first mastered a two-wheeler at the dawn of the 1960s, that was the key to freedom for a kid in those days. All the way to the 1970s, motorists seemed more willing to go along, get along, but as both cyclist and motorist numbers rose, conflicts rose with them. By the mid 1970s, road hassles were common. In some places they were endemic. It's only gotten worse since then. This follows the paradox that increased bike usage almost always coincides with surges in population in an area, guaranteeing more hostility. There are more biking organizations today than in the 1970s and '80s, and overall more riders, though I don't know the breakdown regarding the percentage of road users. And yet we still have to deal with the careless and the malicious.
It extends to pedestrians as well. On social media I see posts from pedestrian advocacy groups reporting their own encounters, and sometimes deadly incidents with drivers.
Motorists are caught in the middle between themselves and the vulnerable road users. Who here is ready to admit that they have absolutely seethed when stuck behind someone who seems to be driving much slower than conditions warrant? I have as bad a tendency as anyone to rate my speed on the basis of the limits of stability and traction. More than once I have come out of an entrance ramp a little sideways, though definitely not in the last 30 years or more. When the road is open I drive fast, so I can drive slowly when I get to the congested parts. So I don't preach from a stance of superiority. Motorists, I am a sinner like yourselves. The difference is when I'm around vulnerable road users.
From the moment I started driving I sensed peer pressure to keep up the pace. Back before internet navigation services, if you had to find your way around an unfamiliar area, good luck with the locals. They all knew where they were going. Even in your own area, you would attract unwanted criticism. This was when road rage shootings happened a lot less often. There again: more than a hundred million fewer people in the country when I started driving. For social animals we really seem to piss each other off a lot.
As someone who was bullied for a few bad years in school, I developed a defensive offensiveness because I couldn't develop the kind of sense of humor that launches entertainment careers. I grew tall and broad shouldered enough to make most of the tough kids decide not to bother in high school. I wasn't tall by any means. Just tall enough. The idea of defended personal space translated readily to road riding in the 1970s and beyond. It's a shame that it has to be that way, and it's hardly a foolproof charm. It's just part of claiming the bicycle's ancestral territory.
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