Mashing

A dear friend and fellow cyclist was lecturing me today on how I ought to do better at maintaining a zenlike patience while in traffic, and I explained that I was simply a little to the left of him on the cyclists' patience spectrum (not nearly as bad as summerboy, for example), and how he should shut up now.

(No, I didn't really tell him to shut up. He'd brought me soup. And he's adorable.)

But the truth is this. I am remarkably patient. I am too patient. It costs me.

Also, I will never be unruffled in the face of a motorist almost killing me. NOR SHOULD I BE.

Why? Because the biggest danger to cyclists is drivers' complacency. Entitlement on foot is annoying and potentially dangerous because if you suddenly step out two inches in front of me I probably can't stop or swerve in time, and we will both get hurt. Entitlement in a car, however, can all too easily result in bloody murder.

I was reading through the comments on this rather good blog post, and some of them were making me furious. The blogger is right: the deadliness of cars is not only the bull in the china shop; it's also the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it, because it requires a rethink of our entire way of life.

It's interesting to me, too, that there's so much debate about cyclists' rights and advocacy in Northern Europe, which we US cyclists tend to regard as cycling paradise. It suggests to me that it's not as simple as all that. Even in countries where cycling makes up a far heftier portion of transportation than it does here (where it's essentially 0%, according to the stats cited), there's a lot of backlash, and an entrenched infrastructure that favors cars.

Weird.

It occurs to me that the US is on an extreme end of another continuum - the relative insurmountability of barriers to bicycling for transportation. I always come back to that quote from TA, the one about it requiring a preposterous amount of "pluck" to cycle in this city. It does, it really does.

I was riding on upper First Ave. today, where there's a theoretical bike lane (faded, hugely pitted, and mostly filled with double & triple-parked cars and delivery vans), and I had that debate with myself that I have every time I'm up there: the cars want me to stay in the bike lane, but I know for a fact I'm in more danger there. Do I do what they want and avoid getting honked at, or do what I want and avoid getting killed?

Every time I'm up there, I have a moment, right around 76th, where I start to pray. Please, please don't let me get killed today.

When I get where I'm going, it takes me a few minutes to come down from that level of adrenaline. I crack a few jokes about it: "Hey, guess what? First Ave. still sucks."

I've been taking a lot more chances the last few days, and I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe I'm tired of always having to be the good guy. Maybe I'm just angry.

I admitted to another friend yesterday that I'd blown through a yellow light on Essex and had to race through that turn to avoid a gunning cab, and she lectured me a little, too. And she's right. When we rode home together I was my usual careful self, but the moment she split off towards her place I hit the pedals hard again.

I think I may be approaching supernova, and these bouts of sprint fury are me puffing off some of my outer layers of explosive gases. I only hope that the result will be one of these.