Today’s post will be brief in observation of Columbus Day:
Sorry, Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Streetsblog wants you to know the WON’T be observing “Columbus Day,” but they WILL be taking the day off, thankyouverymuch:
They also take pains to enumerate Columbus’s many character flaws which include being rapacious, being Spanish, and being Jewish:
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” goes the oft-quoted line from the distressingly hetero-normative “Romeo and Juliet.” Does the same not hold true for federal holidays? Call it whatever you want, ultimately you’re just fucking off from work.
Speaking of polarizing subjects, the Internet was abuzz over the weekend with this video in which an extremely agitated older Fred accosts an extremely relaxed younger motorist over an alleged close-pass:
Alas, between the attitude, the Saab jersey, and the backwards Fred-waddle when he goes to rattle off the driver’s license plate to the cops, he makes us look bad enough:
[Pro tip: don’t keep straddling the bike when you’re done riding.]
But then he says the phrase that will ensure motorists will continue to hate and harass us for all eternity:
“I’m riding a bike, I have more rights than you!”
While I’ve mostly given up now, I spent many years actively fighting the myth that cyclists are nothing but a bunch of entitled elitists, and now here comes this guy and undoes it all in the course of a single viral video.
And yet I also feel compassion for the cyclist, who clearly feels as though the world is out to get him. For example, he tells the police that he feels extremely unsafe because there’s another person on the scene. We then see the other person:
He looks absolutely terrifying.
And of course anyone who rides bikes has experienced being passed too closely. Here in New York people pass you so closely you don’t even notice unless you feel it in your arm hairs. Plenty of us have also been hit this way; I still think about the woman who sideswiped me, sent me sprawling, and then shrugged and said, “I thought I could get around you.”
However, this does not seem to be what happened here:
As the story notes, the video doesn’t show the exact distance of the pass, but it also doesn’t seem to convey anything even remotely harrowing.
So is the cyclist here the Lycra-clad embodiment of entitlement? Or is he just a guy who, like all of us, has been subject to the aggression, indifference, and ineptitude of motorists and finally had enough? According to him it’s the latter:
Though it seems more like a little bit of both.
Either way, I submit this video as exhibit one billion of why confronting drivers is never worth it. Forget the pass–after trying to detain a complete stranger he’s lucky to be alive.