Originally Posted by
Don in Austin
Sometimes I walk places in the city. I regularly see pedestrians enter intersections against a red light or "don't walk," I see people too lazy to go to a nearby crosswalk and instead cross mid-block basically daring traffic to mow them down. i suppose we pedestrians have "brought it on ourselves?"
I used to tow my race car home from a dirt track 80 miles away and enter the city on a freeway at 1:30 AM Sunday. I was pretty much the only sober driver on the road. Have we motorists "brought it on ourselves?"
Do you tell law-abiding members of a minority group "you have brought it on yourselves" because some members of a minority group are in a gang?
Do you tell white, middle class males who practice tolerance and love towards all groups that they can be considered bigots and because of the attitudes of some white middle class males they have "brought it on themselves?"
Total BS! A person is responsible for his/her own actions and only his/her own actions.
Don in Austin
Originally Posted by
aixaix
Do you tell all cell phone users they can't use their phones while driving, even though only some drivers doing so get into accidents?
Do you tell drinkers not to drive, even though most of the time (such as 1:30AM Sunday in your state)most of those drunk drivers aren't actually having accidents?
The law certainly does!
Generalizing, though often odious, racist and wrong-headed, is a necessary part of the legal system, as well as a vital tool for understanding the world.
Just because you feel that everyone should be judged as an individual doesn't mean that that's how it works. People often do condemn all cyclists when they've been injured by one. The OP certainly isn't biased against cyclists! He is rightly concerned with how it makes us look to people who make & enforce laws, many of whom will lump us all together if it suits their purposes.
Right, aixaix. My concerns are strategic.
Don, bicyclists are still in a sense the "other". We are more present than ever before, but we are not yet entirely mainstream. The general public still judges us by the actions of the worst of us, whether we like it or not (and I don't like it at all -- I hate that I am lumped in with the idiot who hit me in the public consciousness).
We have seen wonderful things during the Bloomberg administration. This, however, was due largely to the fact that these were things that the mayor himself wanted. In other words, while the bicycle activists of the past decades have done heroic work to make bicycling more visible and more mainstream, the changes we've seen in New York were not responses to public pressure or to the demands of the majority; they were actions taken by a visionary mayor who understands that promoting bicycling amounts to promoting good health.
The next mayor will surely not have the same commitment to bicycling that the current mayor has; and there isn't the mass of public support that would be necessary to ensure that our bike infrastructure doesn't get dismantled.
If the next mayor were to decide to remove all bike lanes and to install as DOT commissioner someone who (like every commissioner before Sadik-Khan) sees his/her mandate as serving the needs of drivers only, those decisions would be met by a wave of approval that would drown out the objections from the bicycle community.
So our bike lanes hang by a string, and we bicyclists need to understand this. Our primary responsibility is to behave properly ourselves. But we can also help the cause by trying to educate as many fellow bicyclists as possible about the need to protect what we have, and about the danger of exacerbating the inevitable backlash.
We'll never reach the little rat-boys. But it's possible to use reasoned arguments to change the minds of reasonable people. I think it's probably too late; but we need to go down swinging, giving it our best effort.
Tom - If you are encountering Spanish-speakers who are riding on the wrong side, then perhaps you can say to them "otro lado", which means "other side". Incidentally, I am not a Spanish speaker; so I can say very little in the language beyond a few short sentences. My ethnicity is Italian; but neither do I speak that language. (I am, however, fluent in Esperanto. And today is Esperanto Day. So happy Esperanto Day!)