Vicious Cycle
Mere talk of bike lanes can trigger outrage
FORGET the great debate over whether pears and gorgonzola cheese belong on pizza — the biggest stinkbomb topic in New York City is bike lanes. Just mentioning them pushes normally sane people over the edge.
In a column last week, I lashed out at City Hall’s way of coddling cyclists with proliferating bike lanes. The scariest reactions in hundreds of e-mails and nearly 100,000 Twitter clicks came not from cyclists who called me names like “old colostomy bag,” but from outraged white guys who flunked reading comprehension.
I laughed over insults like “keyboard pussy,” “irrelevant dinosaur” and “you should stick to reviewing wet noodles.” Others bizarrely accused me of egging on motorists to run cyclists down — e.g., “Your article has the result of increasing driver aggressiveness towards cyclists, putting lives in danger.”
But I was thoroughly, deeply rattled by racists who can’t read.
I wrote that the great majority of Big Apple bikers are male and young (as substantiated by statistics) and white and athletic (as is clear to anyone with eyes). My point was that adding ever more bike lanes, contrary to Mayor de Blasio’s “egalitarian” agenda, unfairly favors the narrow cycling demographic over everyone else.
I said it was “sexist, racist, ageist and ableist” that “the wishes of so narrow a slice of the populace” are favored over those of the 98 percent-plus of New Yorkers who go to work by means other than bikes.
A certain stripe of readers took the column to mean one thing: I’m a self-hating white “douche.”
The column was “both sexist and racist against white males,” wrote Ric Robinson. “The fact that you are a white male does not excuse it.”
From Antony Simms: “You owe white males an apology.” John Lazer urged me to “join the anti-white male brigade with the other Benedict Arnolds . . . you fall in line with the ethno-gender masochists.”
“It never ceases to amaze me that people will self-flagellate themselves for the crime of being white,” roared Jonathan Collins. A guy with a presumably fake Scottish “lord” title sputtered, “Did you write this racist funk while wearing too tight a helmet?” Larry Bloss warned, “Remind me to punch you in the face if we ever meet.” C. Drysdale took up the whitepower battle cry: “We are the same tribe that . . . created Western Civilization as we know it today.”
Others perceived an anti-black message in my writing. If I didn’t see many nonwhite faces on bikes, it was because I “refused” to see them. According to Marna Nightingal, what I really meant was “men of color and women of all colors are — literally — invisible to me ... I do look forward to his explanation of why we don’t count.”
But all I wrote was, “Despite lack of data, anyone can see that in a city that’s 55 percent nonwhite, black, Latin and Asian faces on wheels [except among food deliverers] are relatively scarce.” The Web site of leading bike advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives cackled that my claim was an “attempt to court millennials by showing he’s down with diversity” — but offered neither a word nor a statistic to rebut it.
The lunatic-fringe onslaught obscured some reasonable, predictable arguments. One reader responded, “These entitled hipsters . . . have no regard for pedestrians, runners, baby carriages and even emergency vehicles.”
I received horror stories of people being run over by bikes — Brewer Shettles was “thrown 30 feet in the air” — and reminders from cycling advocates that cars kill more people than bikes do.
But even some who agreed with my basic premise couldn’t handle mild satire. I ridiculed macho bikers as “Dale Earnhardts of the handlebars.” The joke was lost on Heidi Tucker, who e-mailed, “Love the article but don’t compare these people with the late great Dale Earnhardt Sr. None of them cyclists could hold a candle to Dale Sr.”
I think Fred Miller was being facetious with: “Maybe you could write how motorists who are forced to wear seat belts in city traffic are much more likely to hit pedestrians, as they cannot move their bodies about to assess their environment. You do not need statistics to confirm this, just try driving like this long enough. As Yogi Berra said, ‘You can learn a lot by observing.’ ”
Yogi actually said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” Which is what I did — and learned that for cycling’s true believers and haters, truth is hard to take.