From Outside magazine and that guy who wrote that book about traffic comes maybe the first good article I’ve ever read about hostility between cyclists and drivers on the roads. It’s a pretty long article (I actually found it via the apt twitter feed @longreads) but it’s Presidents’ Day, so what the hell else are you doing?

Not every piece of the article is spot-on (“riding a bike has become a little like entering a war zone”? Uh… it’s actually pretty mellow and fun, most of the time) but author Tom Vanderbilt does a great job of objectively explaining why people become such haters on the road:

In one sense, the so-called bikelash has little to do with transportation modes. In the late 1960s, a pair of British psychologists set out to understand the ways in which we humans tend to split ourselves into opposing factions. They divided a group of teenage schoolboys, who all knew each other, into two groups and asked them to perform a number of “trivial tasks.” The boys were then asked to give money to fellow subjects, who were anonymous save for their group affiliation. As it turned out, the schoolboys consistently gave more money to members of their own group, even though these groups had just formed and were essentially meaningless. …

This dynamic appears on the road in all kinds of ways. “All the time, you hear drivers saying things like ‘Cyclists, they’re all running red lights, they’re all riding on sidewalks,’ while completely overlooking the fact that the group they identify with regularly engages in a whole host of negative behaviors as well.” …

And so it is with cyclists. In a country like the Netherlands, which has more bikes than people and where virtually the entire population cycles at one time or another, the word cyclist isn’t meaningful. But in the U.S., the term often implies something more, in both a good and a bad sense.

Sarah Shay Mirk reported on transportation, sex and gender issues, and politics at the Mercury from 2008-2013. They have gone on to make many things, including countless comics and several books.

7 replies on “An Actually Good Article About “Bikes vs. Cars””

  1. Maybe when he says “a little like entering a warzone” he means it like, “you know how wars are sometimes waged on grassy fields or in lush jungle environs? They’re pretty chill settings (except for the bullets and napalm). Riding a bike around is pretty chill, too (except for those cars).

  2. It is a good article, though there is obviously some bias in favor of cycling, which is why, I suspect, that you still like it Sarah.

    I think there’s some ignorance of the obvious in the article, though. Sure, motorists get pissed at cyclists and vice versa (highlighted less than deserved in the article). But motorists also get pissed at each other and act in the same way towards other motorists than they do towards cyclists. The term “road rage” almost always refers to anger from one motorist towards another. We have fast-paced lives and we want instant gratification, getting from one place to another as quickly as possible.

    I do think the emphasis needs to be placed on re-thinking the laws or rules of the road for cyclists and also on the infrastructure.

  5. @TageSavage….that is indeed intense.

    I used to work with someone who rode in from Forest Grove to downtown Portland every morning. Crazy, I tells ya.

  7. Cyclist rage is way less evident than road rage is in Po. That speaks volumes about how mentally soothing it is to ride than it is to drive. Plus your face to face with the other person as opposed to being shielded by a vehicle where you can pretend to be tough.

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