Incident reveals our lack of patience and respect

Are we all just a personal best away from anarchy

How long does it take for a genteel gathering of healthy Waterloo Region folks to become an angry mob? Based on recent experience, less than a minute.

Consider last month’s annual Fall 5 KM Classic running race. It was a crisp fall Sunday morning as nearly 800 runners legged their way from Westvale Public School to Waterloo Park.

Notably, this route requires runners to cross busy Erb Street. This typically occurs at University Avenue, but road construction detours this year pushed the cross-over to Westmount Road. As per usual race procedures, a Waterloo Regional Police officer was stationed at this intersection to ensure runner safety.

About 20 minutes into the race, however, Erb and Westmount was under severe stress. Dozens of cars were stacked up in every direction, and the drivers were getting antsy.

So the officer decided to relieve the pressure by halting runners to let some cars through. Almost instantly, those stopped racers became extremely aggressive toward the officer. Bad words I’m not allowed to use in this newspaper were shouted. Repeatedly.

(My source here is not just journalist’s shoe leather, but also my own waffle sole. I was the first runner stopped by the officer; and being the law-abiding sort I paused my running watch, waited and observed.)

One runner disobeyed a direct police command and ran across the intersection without breaking stride — weaving his way between moving vehicles.

Perhaps emboldened by this defiance, the crowd then asserted itself. Despite the officer’s continued interjections they pushed their way onto the roadway, blocked traffic and resumed the race on their own. The mob was up and running.

From the officer’s first command to a complete breakdown in civil order was a minute by my watch.

While admittedly small in scale, this incident paints a rather disturbing picture of our age’s surprising lack of patience and respect for others.

Race organizer Lloyd Schmidt of Run Waterloo has described the incident as a “road closure failure.” In a post-race letter he claims city permits should better accommodate the needs of runners by closing necessary intersections to all car traffic for the duration of all races.

“We need to get to a place where the entire community — from motorists and politicians to police officers and civil servants — buy into the value that comes from having an intersection like Westmount and Erb closed for an hour on Sunday morning for runners,” he wrote.

“Run Waterloo uses roads in Waterloo for less than 24 hours in any given year, and we need to have these permits mean what you would expect — a chance to run unimpeded.”

Since this route is mostly downhill, Schmidt promotes it as “Waterloo Region’s fastest 5 km course.” But this is a cheque he couldn’t cash.

According to Helga Bowman, who handles road permits for the City of Waterloo, “the organizers knew they were using a detour route — that was fully disclosed to them — and detour routes cannot be closed.”

The city tries to avoid races on construction detours, but Bowman notes it’s getting increasingly difficult to find suitable routes for timed events anywhere. “No race can go east/west anymore because of the LRT,” she says. Race organizers need to be less idealistic and more realistic in their communications with runners.

Const. Ron Nichols of the Waterloo Regional Police commands the 89-person volunteer auxiliary unit that handles races, parades and other community events on local streets. “Our officers do their best to take into account the needs of everyone: drivers and race participants,” he says, stressing the complex nature of competing demands for roadways and the need to keep intersections open to cars in some instances.

“Verbal abuse is definitely not a common occurrence,” Nichols adds, referring to the unpleasantness from runners. “But it does happen.” And that runner who disobeyed the officer and ran straight through the intersection? “Is your life worth a personal best?” he asks.

In an ideal world every race would take place on a closed course. And drivers would have convenient alternative routes. But that’s no longer possible. Given real world constraints, all road users should learn to respect the needs of others.

And while it’s become conventional wisdom to blame cars for every road-use conflict, note that the stationary drivers at Westmount and Erb never took matters into their own hands. It was the runners who disregarded explicit orders from an officer. (Who, by the way, was a regular paid-duty officer and not a volunteer auxiliary.)

Runners should thus be careful not to fall into the trap of self-indulgent entitlement, as is the case with many cyclists who seem to think they also own the roads. Exercising does not exempt you from the rules of polite society.

More broadly, any Canadian who heaps scorn at the heated political rhetoric in the United States should be mindful of how thin respect for the competing interests of others appears to be north of the border as well.

If it only takes a few seconds for a bunch of sweaty runners to turn into a foulmouthed, police-abusing mob, what happens when the stakes are that much greater — a major natural disaster for example?

Are we always just a minor inconvenience away from anarchy? Surely we can do better than this.