rant

Following is a well-thought out essay from reader Kevin. Give him your thoughts:

I extend my left arm. It’s the morning rush, and I’m on a bicycle. There are cars all around me. I’m doing a good clip, and approaching a set of traffic lights. In the lane adjacent to the one I’m in, and riding a few metres back there is a black BMW. The lady driving the beamer, probably in her mid 40’s, holding a Starbucks mint mocha Frappuccino and clad in gym attire is initially surprised by my actions and slows. I begin to inch over to the other lane, preparing for my turn. Realizing my intentions, and seeing that her God-given right to catch the green before it turned yellow would soon be abolished, she puts her foot down. She guns it. The noise from the engine is as loud as a city bus at full acceleration. I retract my arm quickly and my handlebars miss the metal box by all of 10 centimetres. Any closer and I would have replaced the BMW hood ornament with my body.

As a full time cyclist, and sometimes as a pedestrian, I have to deal with cars and their drivers every day. I am disgusted by drivers of private motor vehicles. Their actions infuriate me. A very high percentage of the drivers I see on the roads of Toronto are dangerous and inconsiderate, impatient, and grossly undereducated. A world with fewer or no cars would be many steps forward in the right direction.

Drivers are often inconsiderate and create risky situations for other road users. It fascinates me how urban planners ever even conceived of mixing cars, pedestrians and cyclists all in the same space. 150 pound persons are forced to share the road with 2000+ pound automobiles travelling many times faster. In a collision, the car will always win. Yet some drivers simply ignore that truth. The onus is on the drivers of motor vehicles to ensure the safety of all other road traffic. Often, during my commutes by bicycle, I have been very closely tailgated by cars. If I were to suddenly brake, or spill, I could be seriously maimed or killed. On other occasions, I have been squeezed out into parked cars on residential streets by drivers who pass without due consideration to cyclists. Cyclists and pedestrians are the most vulnerable users of the road network; we deserve to be respected to the utmost degree.

Parked on the Sidewalk: Perth Ave., April 6 2009.

It's that time of year again. The snow is long gone, the potholes are getting patched up, and many "fair weather" cyclists have returned to riding and increased our numbers on the streets. This is also the time of year when most major newspapers publish an anti-cyclist rant of some form of another.

The Toronto Star kicked it off on April 28th when they published a letter titled Ahh, the annual rites of spring. Letter writer Rick Morris rants about cyclists breaking traffic laws, and seems to show some signs of jealousy about how cyclists can get ahead in car-gridlocked traffic. The Star also published a couple of responses to this letter, from Gabriela Byron and Brian Huntley.

The Toronto Sun came out swinging yesterday with Joe Warmington's Pedal-pushers a problem article.

Joe's rant starts off with the typical bashing of sidewalk cyclists, and I can actually agree with him here. Sidewalks are for pedestrians, and roads are for vehicles. I'm not sure why he didn't rant about motorists parking and driving on sidewalks though. In all honesty, in my neighbourhood I see more motorists parked and/or driving on sidewalks than cyclists, causing a MUCH more dangerous and inconvenient pedestrian environment than any sidewalk cyclists around here.

The next standard anti-cyclist point that Joe tries to make is that many cyclists are evil lawbreakers:

As much as the new influx of electric bikes bugs me, there’s no real reason for my discomfort; it’s like my inherent aversion to those fluorescent moulded gardening shoes people insist on wearing around town.

I can certainly deal with either of these trends, if they’re any indication of fewer cars on the road.

Today however, on three separate occasions, I saw full-sized motor scooters (with exhaust pipes!) cutting into the bike lanes to blow ahead of the rest of their mindlessly idling friends and make their right hand turn.

What's this?!? One of them pops out from a delivery truck right in front of me and jerks on her brakes to avoid smashing me over! I taste my heart, swallow it and nearly wipe out from the blindness of my life flashing before my eyes!

I must have really been shaken because my words come out all jumbled and sound more like “Are you F-ing Kidding Me? Get the %&#$ out of my lane!” than my intended “I've got something to Vespa in your ear, friend. If you want to share the bike lane, you need to play safe and ride with the rest of us, through the power of yourself!”

It seems the MTO has something a little hard-hitting to say to scooter drivers as well.