Apparently, I’m not the only one who has started commuting by bicycle lately, as this article in the most recent Economist points out. I find it very easy to imagine some of the bicyclist/driver altercations they describe.

I was almost nailed at a four-way stop at the beginning of the summer by a guy who rolled through a stop sign while talking on his cellphone. He didn’t just roll; he looked like he was going to come to a complete stop, and then gunned it just as I was crossing. He didn’t even know I was there (despite my safety-orange shirt). Just last week some lady in a minivan decided that she really wanted to make the green light that we were approaching. We were on a four-lane city street with no shoulder. Traffic was flowing in the left lane, but I was occupying part of the right lane and she wasn’t sure if she should try to squeeze between me and the traffic. As the green light got more stale, she decided to try it. She gunned her engine, accelerating madly until she was right next to me, only to brake abruptly as she doubted she could get through after all. She practically sideswiped the car to her left and practically knocked me off the road. People like her knock the mirrors off parked cars by forgetting how wide the piece of steel they’re piloting is. I would really hate to be a casualty of someone’s misplaced overconfidence in their spatial reasoning. Such a pointless way to go. The risks of a driver’s misjudgment are asymmetric: He risks his paint job, while he risks my life, or at least my skin and bones.

Bumpy Roads

WITH petrol the price it is, more and more people are riding a bicycle to work. In Broward County, Florida, about 35,000 people a month typically put their bicycles on a bus bike-rack, thereby shortening a cycle commute. In May of this year, 68,000 people did so. Denver saw 25,000 people register for a recent “bike to work” day, up from 15,000 a year ago. In Seattle cyclists complain about a shortage of bike stands, while in Portland, Oregon, some 6,000 cyclists cross just one of the city’s many bridges each morning.

Bicycle-boosters are thrilled with the sudden popularity of their humble machine. “Ridership is just skyrocketing,” says Elizabeth Preston of the League of American Bicyclists, a Washington, DC, advocacy group (even cyclists have lobbyists these days). Performance Bicycles, a retailer with shops in 15 states, says bicycle sales in June were the highest ever recorded.

But cycling’s popularity has a downside. The people of Portland, for instance, have been entertained over the past few days by a series of altercations between bicyclists and motorists. In one, a motorist and cyclist came to blows after the motorist berated the pedal-pusher for ignoring a stop sign. The enraged cyclist used his bike to batter the motorist’s car until a bystander punched him.

In Seattle, meanwhile, two cyclists were arrested after they attacked a motorist during a so-called “Critical Mass” ride, events where large groups of cyclists ride through city streets to demonstrate their right to the road. New York cyclists are up in arms about an incident in which a police officer, for no apparent reason, knocked a cyclist off his bike and then arrested him and tried to pretend the man had run into him until a video recording proved him wrong. And in Colorado, reports the Los Angeles Times, cyclists have been feuding with the sheriff of Larimer County for his aggressive—cyclists say unreasonable—enforcement of bike-related traffic laws. More seriously, most bicycle advocates say cycling deaths are sharply up, although the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has no figures as yet for 2008.

After years of federal and local spending on bike routes and other amenities, most cities are ready to handle more cyclists. But many motorists simply don’t see their two-wheeled brethren or, when they do, find them aggravating. Managing more cyclists is going to take more than new bike paths or fresh stripes on the roads. It looks as though there is a need, on both sides, for a revolution in manners.

DC, by the way, is not one of the cities that has invested in infrastructure and is “ready to handle more cyclists.” Many of the thoroughfares do not have bike lanes or shoulders of any kind. I often have to resort to all sorts of side streets and shortcuts to get where I’m going, and some places I just can’t go by bike. Until roads are built with an extra foot or two for the rest of us, riders will keep getting killed in pointless ways (an intern was run down by a garbage truck just a couple of weeks ago), and people will keep throwing their bicycles through people’s windshields.