What piece of everyday athletic gear, applied in urban areas to the buttocks, turns normal people into raging, homicidal, suicidal, antisocial maniacs?
The bicycle seat.
Bicycling in cities is prima-facie evidence of insanity. Yes, bike lanes indicate where cars mustn’t go, but a) drivers aren’t looking for bicyclists; b) drivers don’t care about bicyclists; and c) drivers occasionally think it’s funny to terrify bicyclists by coming into their lanes.
When not bicycling, urban riders are normal and law-abiding. They’re your neighbors, your co-workers, your friends. They pay their taxes. They buy Girl Scout Cookies. They vote.
But put them on a 10-speed and they morph from John Q. Public into Evel Knievel. They speed, they swerve, they run red lights, they go the wrong way, and if you don’t like it, they flip you the bird. They’re … free! And everyone else has to lump it.
The same anti-growth, anti-car, anti-common sense mentality that animates socialism also leads to the anarchistic desire to ride in traffic. Socialists, who likely overlap with urban bicyclists, may end up repealing the laws of free enterprise and private property. But they will not succeed at repealing the laws of physics.
To wit: If a vehicle hits a bike, the vehicle wins. And if another bike hits your bike, you both hit the pavement, and then you both get hit by cars. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, physics don’t play.
Everyone has a story about a friend or relative who got hit or killed while riding a bike on city streets. Yet bikers ignore those outcomes. Norm Macdonald’s joke comes to mind: “When you see a traffic accident, you think, ‘That could never happen to me.’ That’s true, unless you got to the same spot 90 seconds earlier.”
Biking on city streets is crazy enough. But the real nuttiness is “guerrilla biking” or “DIY bike lane creation.” This means sneaking into the street in the middle of the night and then painting new bike lane lines. A given city’s traffic engineers have declared a street unsafe for bikers. Yet the lines painted by excitable, oppositional, law-defiant bicyclists are actually putting their fellow bikers (and pedestrians) at mortal risk. In their bravado and foolhardiness, the danger they create means nothing to them.
The latest example is Boston, where you’d think people would be smarter. But they aren’t. Apparently putting on a bicycle helmet in a city reduces your IQ by at least 50 points. A bicyclist was killed recently, and the response of the biking community was to paint new bike lanes.
A city counselor has suggested that those repainted lines, near where a biker had been killed, led to a person riding a scooter getting hit by a car. Uh, thanks, DIY bicycle activists! You nearly got another person killed. Stand by for more carnage.
But it’s not just Beantown. In 2009, residents of Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood, complained that people were getting hurt by speeding bicyclists who had no regard for pedestrians. In response, the city removed the offending bike lane. Urban hipsters immediately repainted the bike lane.
Same thing happened in Spokane, Washington, in 2017. The city removed a bike lane and some urban Einstein repainted it. Same thing happened in Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and (no surprise) San Francisco.
It’s not just Americans who are willing to put themselves and their fellow cyclists at risk. Cyclists in Mexico City, Toronto, and even those Mensa members over in Riga, Latvia painted new lines.
THE SPEECH TRUMP WOULD MAKE IF HE HAD 100% HONESTY AND ZERO FILTER
One of my best friends, Russell Moon, was an urban cyclist, a spinning instructor, and a dentist who routinely did free dental work for low-income people. He was riding on a side street in Santa Monica, California, when the person behind the wheel of a parked car opened the driver’s side door. Russell had no time to react and crashed into the door. He survived but became a quadriplegic. He lost his dental practice, his spinning classes, his girlfriend, and within a few years, his life.
Every bicyclist knows a Russell Moon, but they all keep riding, running lights, cutting off cars, putting pedestrians at risk, and in the most extreme cases, painting new lines. The arguments for biking are obvious. It’s good for the environment. It’s great exercise. No debate on either point. But as long as they’re willing to paint new lines, maybe we need to draw new lines and make them obey the same traffic laws as the rest of us.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April.