Mood:
irritatedTopic: breaking out the torches
There is a line in an old song by the Eagles: "Curising down the center of a two-way street, wondering who is really in the driver's seat/ minding my business, along comes big brother / says Son, you better get on, one side or the other!"
There is also a line from an old song I once heard live at the Coffe shop where I often rode on my bike that describes the attitude of drivers and authorities to those of us on bikes, who are percieved as "driving down the center" as the Eagles said, and doing other such things, literally or figuratively, which don't fit with the trends or rules: "They are taking up the torches again".
The following is from a Chicago editorial blasting cyclists: "Chicago -- Even though I am a year-round bike commuter, the negative and self-righteous response of the biking community to a planned police crackdown on law-breaking cyclists in Lakeview has convinced me that such a crackdown is not only desirable but necessary."
Why should a group of people NOT be objecting -- and loudly -- to efforts to define them by the actions of a few lawless memebers? If a gangster uses a gun to murder, does that make every hunter or sportsman a villain? If a rapper shoots up a club, does that mean everyone listening to rap is a criminal? Hardly. So why does one bad cyclist mean we are all to be cursed as reckelss and lawbreaking? If the same standard were applied to drivers tyhe lot of them would have been rounded up a long time ago, back when I was knee-high to a Newark cockroach.
The madness continues...
"Judging by recent letters to the editor, cyclists seem to think that because they are keeping fit and not burning gas they have a moral right to cruise through stop signs and ride on the sidewalks. Alternatively they can do these things because they are victimized by clumsy, incompetent motorists and should not be further persecuted by the authorities.
Neither justification holds water. I, too, have cruised through stop signs and ridden on sidewalks, but I also recognize, unlike most of your correspondents, that these things are illegal because they are dangerous. There is not a single day on my commute to work in which I don't see at least one cyclist run a stop sign where the car with the right-of-way is forced to a halt. Chicago drivers--who have more sense then we credit them with--save the lives of far more cyclists than they kill."
Maybe in Chicago. But my own experience in NJ -- having been hit by cars 5 times, had one broken leg and one reconstructed shoulder -- is that drivers break laws. They float stop signs, they turn without signalling, they even try to run you off the road.
I am aware that some cyclists do these things too. Cracking down on the guy riding a 18-lb bicycle who runs a stop sign might make sense if drivers were no longer doing so. But while the same things is done by those in 2-ton automobiles, which are not only larger but more numerous, is it not wasteful and stupid to direct law enforcement efforts to going after cyclists, who are not only much fewer, but less likely, really, to kill large numbers of people and cause massive property damage? The cars are greater in number and more dangerous and there are many many more bad drivers than bad cyclists. Let's face it, the cyclist has a lot to lose if he hits a car or a truck [SUV's they call them now]. I can tell you from personal experience that driver's don't seem to feel any reason to worry about hitting cyclists.
This isn't to excuse the fact that a few cyclists run stopsigns -- or ride on the sidewalk. But the truth is that while drivers are still breaking laws with impunity in vehicles that pose a great risk to life and limb, it makes no sense to go after cyclists.
What times we live in.