(Edward Wilkinson-Latham)
The bicycle yahoo is a vexatious creature of summer. They come in all shapes and sizes but here I’m thinking specifically of the type riding the bike with thick chunky frames and thick chunky tires, and at constant risk of cracking open his thick, chunky head.
Just the other day, as I cycled along Queen, one such yahoo hurtled over the streetcar tracks from my left, cut me off, weaved around the right-hand side of a red minivan that was trying to make a slow turn, and deftly clotheslined himself on the van’s side-view mirror.
He lay sprawled across the ground for a moment, before being helped to his feet. He dusted himself off and looking around at the assembled with the look of a raccoon caught in the green bin: The crossing of manifest guilt and blank unrepetence. He got back on his chunky bike and rode off on the sidewalk.
What to do with the yahoos? It’s the season for the city to start chewing its arm off about the question. As city hall-watchers try to get their heads around a plan for dedicated bike lanes coming from an openly bike-hostile administration, the bike-culture question has reared to the fore as well. Just this week, Spacing Magazine published an open letter from one disgruntled cyclist to her counterparts, a letter that turned into a CBC segment, a rebuttal, and interminable online nattering.
Such dialogues within the bicycling community are useful, and, in the main, those who would give their brethren a slap upside their unhelmeted heads have a very good point. Cyclists who breeze through red lights in full view of stopped traffic only foster contempt from the people they’re trying to share the road with civilly. Riders who dodge and weave through traffic, plough the wrong way up one-way streets, shouting and rapping on car trunks, leaving drivers white-knuckled and quivering, are — how to phrase this gently? —making the city worse for everyone.
But cyclist-on-cyclist tut-tutting it has its limitations. For one thing, it presumes that the cyclists in question give a fig, and not every cyclist has figs. It’s the kind of conversation that winds up being internal to some loosely-defined “bike culture,” the culture in which people talk about bikes and read about bikes and blog about bikes and maybe even bike to meetings about bikes.
Even this coterie of conscientious cyclists can’t seem to agree on what constitutes acceptable practices on and off the road. (Clearly, “the law” isn’t cutting it, and perhaps rightly so.) And if the cyclists who talk incessantly about cycling can’t agree, then what hope is there of creating the kind of consensus that reaches beyond this subculture’s confines, and extends to anyone who mounts a bike — be they amateur, recreational, Bixi-punter or garden-variety meathead?
I put the question of creating a bicycle culture to Kay Teschke, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia, who’s the lead researcher on a massive national study of bicycling accidents. She recalled the words of a visiting European cycling advocate: “In Vancouver, there’s a cycling culture. In Copenhagen, cycling is the culture.”
This is a valuable distinction: As long as “bike culture” is hived off from the rest of society, a subculture riddled with internal codes of behaviour, disputed rules and backbiting, so too will cycling remain a marginalized activity.
Somehow, we need to come to an understanding of bike behaviour that applies to everyone, and not just people who self-identify as cyclists and tune into cycling conversations. We need a code of behaviour that envelops yahoos and bloggers alike. If only society had devised a system of codifying rules that would reflect and reinforce preexisting notions of justice and apply to all people equally!
Clearly, the law has a role to play here. At the moment, though, any attempt at enforcing the law is hamstrung by the fact that it doesn’t make much sense to apply car laws to bicycles, which are small and can stop on a dime.
A two-pronged solution is in order. First, we need to meet cyclists halfway, with infrastructure that will help turn cycling into a mainstream activity. It shouldn’t a heresy to suggest that it’s better if cars and bikes don’t share the road. Dr. Teschke, at UBC, says that two of most significant factors in reducing cycling injuries are the number of cyclists on the road, and the amount of infrastructure built for cyclists — chief among them, physically separated bike lanes. This kind of infrastructure, in turn, is critical in encouraging more people to ride.
“Everyone would love to cycle for some of their trip,” she notes. “Even Mayor Ford. Even Don Cherry.”
But until we give the roads over to bikes and make cars drive in the ravines, we’re going to have to share the road. The best way to do that is with laws that make sense, and can be enforced. Cyclists need a clear set of rules that can be hewed to without fulminating that they’re wasting time on irrelevancies.
The reason we’re having this conversation in the first place is that cyclists have been forced into a grey area. Since cyclists are governed by a law that doesn’t really fit them, each one internalizes the moral question, makes up his or her own rules to fit, then fumes indignantly when others don’t follow suit. And since the city is so woefully short of bike infrastructure, with its patchwork of rutted, death-trap bike lanes and mysterious “sharrows,” it’s not clear where cyclists physically fit into the city.
There are risks to over-defining what bicycles can and can’t do; witness the recently-gone-viral plight of the man in New York City who was ticketed for not riding in a bike lane. The provision of bike infrastructure and laws can’t be used as an excuse to ghettoise cyclists to their newfound facilities – and there would be those who want to do just that.
Still, bicyclist behaviour shouldn’t be merely a question of bike culture. Let’s carve them out a place in the law, and in the land.
Related:
A Typology of Toronto Cyclists
The Spokefather
Concept Bikes
