On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 11/1/2008
The One-Percenters
This is a column I have avoided writing for all of the years I have had my shingle hung out at this space as a cycling commentator. And what makes that a bit strange is it's arguably the most common, most hot-button topic in the whole wide world of cycling. What am I talking about? I'm talking about road rage directed at cyclists, or, more accurately, harassment of cyclists by motorists.
I've avoided the topic precisely because it is so commonplace, so everyday, to the point of being banal and predictable. I mean, we've all been there and had that done to us, and every cyclist out there with access to a blog or a chat list or user forum has ranted and vented about it, again and again and again...so what can I possibly add that's new or revelatory or moves the discussion forward? Probably not much, frankly. But I'm going to add my two cents' worth anyway, even though, all in all, I would rather be writing about the happy, pleasant, healthful aspects of cycling.
I have been prompted, finally, to weigh in on this subject because of an incident that happened to me recently. Oh ho, you say: everyone else rants about this, but Bill never gets fired up about it until it happens to him! Well lemme tell ya, this is by no means the first time I've been on the receiving end of abuse from a motorist. Not even close. In over 40 years on a bike, my own first-hand encounters with this kind of crap could fill a book, or a police blotter. Just call this incident the last straw. No one was hurt--at least not seriously--in this encounter. No one went to the hospital or the morgue. It didn't make the local paper. It just came and went...was over in three seconds...except for the shock and the residual anger.
Saturday, September 20. We were a group of nine riders on our regular weekend club ride. We were heading north on Spring Hill Road, down around the Marin-Sonoma Counties border, south of the little village of Two Rock. A long, wide, flat stretch of road. Good sight lines, plenty of elbow room. No traffic at all, as is normal on that remote country road. A stiff wind was coming at us from about ten o'clock, so we had been spread out in two little echelons of four and five riders each. My friend Steve was leading the first one and I was leading the second one, a few yards back. A quarter-mile behind us, I saw--in my mirror--a pick-up coming our way. I called out, "Car back!" and we collapsed our echelons to be single-file by the time the truck caught up to us. We just about had the maneuver complete when the truck arrived. Steve and I were the last ones still very slightly two abreast; just a bit cross-wheeled on the riders to our right, but all of us, collectively, occupying a very narrow band of pavement at the edge of the very wide road. No oncoming traffic. Loads of room for a wide safe pass. But no...
Right from the start, I could see this was going to be trouble. The driver floored it from several hundred yards back and then blared the horn, full-tilt, as he zoomed past, probably at that point going 60 mph. I knew he was going to buzz us, and I scrunched myself over to the right as far as I could go without touching wheels with the other riders, and I sort of leaned my upper body that way as well. Steve, up ahead of me, who doesn't use a mirror, was unaware of how close it would be...
The truck--a full-size pick-up--went by me with about three inches to spare--60 miles per hour, remember--and I watched in shock as the side of the truck brushed the sleeve of Steve's windbreaker and the rear-view mirror clipped him on the side of the helmet. Fortunately, Steve, a former racer, is an excellent rider with nearly perfect handling skills and composure on the bike. He never wavered; didn't panic or react. Just kept tracking straight ahead. The truck never slowed down, never left off on the horn or the gas.
Naturally, at that speed, we never got a shot at a license number. When things happen that fast, it's hard to retain any details. Afterward, I rode around looking at a lot of late-model, full-size pick-ups, trying to match the trucks on the road with the images in my memory. I finally decided I'm about 80% sure it was a Ford F250 or F350, similar to the one in the photo, but white. I realize a white Ford F250 is probably the most common large pick-up on the road today, so that's not a great deal of help.
Steve has the scuff on the side of his helmet and a stiff neck to show for his close call. He filed an incident report with the Sonoma County Sheriff and I have tried on at least three occasions to follow up with the officer who took the report to add my own details. So far, I have failed to connect with him. I can't say whether we're simply having trouble connecting or whether he's just blowing me off. In the normal course of life, I would be inclined to let it go as just one more irritating little hassle, except for one thing. The Sonoma County Cycling Coalition keeps an incident log on cases like this, and they have a report of a white pick-up harassing cyclists on Spring Hill Road. Not our incident; another case.
If it's the same guy and same truck, that probably means he's local to that area. Spring Hill Road is very lightly settled...not many addresses out there. I don't know the first thing about how police handle something like this, but it seems to me if it were taken seriously, they could easily get their computers to do a match for a white Ford F250 or F350 on that road. And then check to see if the owner has a criminal record or any tags for moving violations, etc. If such a match were made, I do realize there'd be no way to prove anything about our encounter. But I think the police might drop by and have a chat with the guy. If it is our boy, he might even be dumb or twisted enough to bluster at the cops and incriminate himself. At the very least he'd know he was being watched.
But I doubt any of that will happen because I doubt the police will take it seriously and do the least bit of follow-up. Not without a license number. And to some degree, I can't blame them for that. After all, no one was seriously injured or killed, so what's the big deal? It would take an eager and sympathetic cop--maybe one who's a cyclist--to pursue it, assuming he or she were even allowed the time and freedom to do so.
But I worry that it's not one isolated incident; that this is a sicko who's going to do the same thing over and over; who gets a charge out of tormenting bikers. He may have only meant to scare us and--oops!--came a bit closer than he intended to. But he's fooling around with a very large loaded gun there: depending on which model in the Ford line-up it was, it weighs between 9,000 and 14,000 pounds! I know he doesn't have the pinpoint control with a big rig like that to judge his near-miss that closely. Had he been two inches further to the right, the blow from the mirror might have broken Steve's neck. In all my years of cycling, I've never seen such a close call...so close to a murder. And that's what it would have been, had he hit him a little harder. If he keeps on with these attacks, sooner or later he's going to kill someone.
Okay...that's a much ink as I want to expend on that little incident. (And please, please: do not send me accounts of your similar horror stories. I won't read them and I won't respond to them. I have endured enough of my own. I have seen first-hand or read or heard about as many as I ever want to in this lifetime.)
What I really wanted to get into was...WHY?
Why do some motorists harass cyclists? Every report of one of these lunatic attacks on cyclists is followed by an examination of why such things happen. This will be no different. Greater minds than mine have attempted to answer that knotty question, often backed up with all sorts of research and resources for crunching the data. All I'm going to do is rehash the various theories, one after another, and see if a pattern emerges. I don't know if one will because I'm making this up as I go along.
My personal, subjective observation, based on those 40-plus years of riding, is that about 90% of all the interactions between cyclists and motorists are at the very worst neutral. The driver and the rider meet on the road, pass one another, and go their own ways. Nothing happens, good or bad. Some portion of that 90% might even be deemed to be positive: a little cheery wave or friendly toot on the horn, or even a hearty thumbs-up of support.
Of the 10% of interactions that are not neutral or benign, I place about 9% in the category I would call clueless. Inattentive drivers turning in front of you or otherwise not focusing on the job of driving.
It's the remaining 1% that is the problem. The Hells Angels wear a little patch on their denim colors that says exactly that: 1%. It commemorates a speech made by some forgotten politician wherein he condemned the outlaw bikers as the lowest 1% of society. They're proud of that. Sort of an inverted snobbery. In the world of cars versus bicycles, we have our own 1% of bottom-feeding outlaw scum.
Often, in fact almost always, when journalists or bloggers talk about attacks by motorists on cyclists, they refer to the incidents as road rage. That's a handy, general catch-all, but I find it less than satisfactory, because so often the attacks don't meet the standard criteria for road rage episodes, in that the attacks are unprovoked. In trying to get a handle on this, I did a little half-baked research on the internet. I started by googling "road rage" and that pulled up a more or less endless list of articles and essays. One in particular seemed helpful. It was commissioned and published by AAA. Check it out if you have any interest in the topic. It's not specifically about attacks on cyclists, but it gives a good overview of road rage, and it describes the type of driver and attitude that we know so well in this context.
Road rage typically stems from some provoking trigger event: one driver cutting in front of another; tailgating; dawdling in the fast lane, etc. Usually, the rage response is way out of proportion to whatever the ostensible trigger event might have been; that the real cause lies deeper, within the angry, torqued-up minds of the folks who go ballistic.
But what's so frustrating and maddening about so many of the attacks on bikes is that they are unprovoked in any remotely plausible sense. The riders are just there, minding their own business, when they are set upon by some thug. The only justification might be described as deferred or displaced justification, in the sense that the driver saw one or several other cyclists doing something he didn't like at some other time and is punishing the current cyclist for the past sins of others. The logic is of course flawed to the point of imbecility, but that doesn't matter for our self-appointed vigilante. Nor does it matter when attempting to assign root causes to the problem. If the logic works for the goon in the pick-up, it's something we have to take into account.
And for whatever it's worth, some cyclists do provoke motorists by doing things that are against the law or may appear to be so at a glance. Blowing through stop signs is the one we hear about all the time. The cyclist who doesn't do this at least occasionally is a rare cyclist indeed. We all have our personal excuses for why we think it's okay in this or that situation. We like to have it both ways too: we want our bikes to be considered vehicles protected by the vehicle code, but many riders are willing to stop being a legitimate "vehicle" momentarily; to hop up on a sidewalk, ride against traffic, or nip through a parking lot or gas station to dodge around or get ahead of traffic...stunts we would be appalled to see a driver doing.
However, none of those little transgressions justifies the violent attacks on the riders. And anyway, the whole issue of justifying the attacks based on some spurious redress of traffic violations is a red herring. I doubt one attack in a hundred has such a close-coupled, cause-and-effect chronology. Most are in that deferred justification category, if any justification is a part of what passes for thought in the minds of the attackers. So what other motivation might there be for these out-of-the-blue episodes of harassment and violence?
In the general road rage dynamic, the AAA essay cites accumulated stress in the driver. Frustrations at work and at home can simmer away and leave the driver with a seething cauldron of pent-up anger just waiting for an outlet. And then, driving itself is an extremely stressful chore for most people. We tend to forget that at times. Being on the road, in a wild mix of big metal transport modules, all dodging and darting here and there at relatively high speeds, only barely on the same page as far as rules of the road go...it can be very frightening, and justifiably so, in light of the 44,000 fatalities on American roads each year.
It's worth noting too that humans tend to be territorial. It's an atavistic response to threat from predators, be they big animals that might eat us or other humans who might attack us to steal our food or shelter or whatnot. Modern terms such as, "I need my space!" or, "Back off!" have their roots in this essential defensive mechanism. We're no different than rats in a science experiment in this sense: create conditions of overcrowding, and the rats turn on one another. Ditto for drivers on the road: if you get in "my" space, you're going to get some pushback. Supposedly, civilized, sophisticated people have learned how to peacefully coexist in close society with one another, and most of the time, this is true. But not always, and not everyone.
On a bike, when we get stressed by a close call or some nervous moment, we can dissipate that tension by jumping on the pedals and cranking up our internal engines. We flush the adrenaline out of our bloodstream and go on about our business. When a driver gets tense, he has no physiological outlet for that accumulated tightness. He just has to sit there and let the stewpot boil. One little adrenaline shot at a time, the tension builds and builds... For a few lost souls who don't have adequate self-control, that tension squirts out into little steam jets of hositility and anger at whatever handy targets come up on their radar.
That, unfortunately, is where cyclists come into play. Whether their own actions or the proxie actions of other cyclists can serve as justification for attacks, the fact is the riders are right there, very exposed and very vulnerable. And what's more, there is a very low probability that they will be able to either defend themselves or retailiate in any meaningful way. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's just way too easy. For overstressed, angry, tiny-minded punks, it's just too good to pass up. It is absolutely no different in this respect than nasty boys torturing small animals to see them squirm. It is every bit as cowardly and sick as that.
But beyond the release of tension and the sick pleasure of tormenting helpless creatures, there are other cultural forces at work here too. Some suggest that the attacks on cyclists are a form of class warfare; that the attackers are lower class, blue-collar types who hate or at least resent cyclists because they perceive them to be elite and effete. The AAA essay offers this profile of a typical road rage attacker: "...the majority of the perpetrators are between the ages of 18 and 26...relatively poorly educated males who have criminal records, histories of violence, and drug or alcohol problems. Many of these individuals have recently suffered an emotional or professional setback, such as losing a job or a girlfriend, going through a divorce, or having suffered an injury or an accident."
My guess is most cyclists would like to think that image pretty accurately describes the low-life jerks who hassle them on the road. I can think of any number of cases about which I have personal knowledge, where that template is an exact match for the people involved.
In that same vein, think most cyclists would agree that the preponderance of attacks--not all, but most--seem to involve pick-up trucks. I know I'm skating out onto the thin ice of stereotypes here, on a couple of fronts. So let me note that I have suffered assorted abuse from motorists in all sorts of cars and trucks, from an up-market Mercedes to an earth mother Volvo to a big commercial rig. But if we are working in stereotypes, or trying to track tendencies, then the pick-up might be described as the vehicle of choice for most attacks on cyclists. So, to proceed from one stereotype to another, can we further propose that the "typical" pick-up driver is a blue-collar working man? Okay, okay... not so fast! We all know folks who own pick-ups who are not blue-collar by any definition of the term, and who, further, would never think of assaulting cyclists. Many cyclists own pick-ups. I used to own one myself. So pardon me for falling through the thin ice into the deep waters of cultural cliché. But I do think there is at least some basis for believing in this notion of class warfare, and that the common thread of pick-ups is just one bit of evidence to support that surmise.
Cycling advocates often characterize bike riders--as a group--as upwardly mobile sophisticates, with incomes above the average, better educations, and substantial purchasing power. So if we're to use that stereotype to define our exalted market niche, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to find that others, in other tiers of society, might not think we're as wonderful as we do.
Finally, there's a cultural phenomenon I might describe as growing pains. Dealing in wholesale stereotypes again, let's look at some different regions. Those of us who have cycled in Europe--at least some parts of Europe--notice that cyclists are an accepted and even cherished part of the transit mix. All sorts of people ride bikes (not just effete, elite yuppies in racing kit). In countries such as Italy, France, Holland, etc., it would be almost unthinkable to attack a cyclist as a form of demented sport. You might just imagine a dispute where a motorist was pissed off at a rider, but gratuitous violence visited upon otherwise blameless bikers? Not a chance. Over a hundred years of bikes being everywhere, ridden by everyone, has habituated the population to them.
Now look at a small town in a distant backwater of this country...a place where a bike is almost never seen. In this small town, there might be half a dozen serious or semi-serious riders. I'm not making this town up. A cycling friend of mine has described his town to me this way. According to him, those few cyclists in the little town are treated almost as an amusing novelty. When he runs into some of the good old boys down at the lumber yard, they might say, "Hey, you're one of those bikers! Yeah, I saw you out on Route whatever...howya doin'?" They're friendly and almost protective of him in his odd but seemingly harmless recreation.
On one extreme, we have the European model, where cycling is an everyday, ordinary part of life, and has been for generations. Nothing alien or "other" about bike riders. On the other end, we have a place where they're so rare as to be unique and intriguing...quirky maybe, but nothing to get upset about.
In between, we have our more typical urban-suburban American landscapes, and this is where most of the friction seems to happen. Call it the critical mass backlash. We have cities and suburbs and rural residential greenbelts where bikes have not heretofore been an accepted, everyday part of the transit mix, and yet here they come, in their thousands, swarming like rats through Hamlin town. The citizens of these cities and suburbs and rural surrounds might have been able to tolerate a few bikes here and there, but in just a generation, the dang things have spread like a plague.
We've reached that point of critical mass where cycling and cyclists can no longer be shunted into a little corner as an amusing but harmless novelty. And a lot of people are simply not prepared to assimilate this new ingredient into their everyday world. They could handle one or two bikes, maybe, but all the time, everywhere you go? Jeez...
So we're experiencing growing pains. It may take two or three generations to get to the point where bikes are no longer a cultural flashpoint in this country. But one day at a time, inch by inch, I do believe our auto-holic culture is being dragged, kicking and screaming perhaps, into a new world where hassling bikers will be simply unthinkable and unacceptable. I don't expect, in my lifetime, to hear the last of the many horror stories about some poor cyclists being tormented for no good reason. But I'm fairly confident my grandchildren will see that day, and will look back in bafflement at a society that tolerated such hateful behavior.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net