Velo Vengeance! Our Day Has Come...

I’m going to come right out and say it—there’s been a lot of arguing here lately. Messengers vs. non-messengers, roadies vs. commuters, and everybody vs. the so-called “hipsters.” Hey, I’m not going to get all self-righteous. I’m all in favor of passing judgement and name-calling. It’s fun! At the same time, though, as cyclists, it’s time we set all that aside for a moment and teamed up against something together. No, not triathletes. (Not today anyway.) Cars.

Look, I’ve got nothing against cars in general. We need them. Many of us own them. That’s not what this is about. This is about being cyclists first and foremost, and about being at the bottom of the vehicular pecking order when we’re out on our bikes. Regardless of whether you don’t own a car or you own three, when you’re riding you’re inevitably going to encounter coffee-slurping, text-message-spewing morons who think the fact that some bank gave them a lease on an Explorer makes them important enough to try to run you off the road.

I thought about this as I read a short piece in the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker this morning about the Smart ForTwo. If you’re in Europe, you’re of course familiar with this car. But here in the US they’re only just appearing on our radar, and will be available for the first time in January 2008. Apparently the president of Smart USA recently visited Manhattan in a Smart car, and the piece offered up an irritatingly delightful sketch of how the locals were alternately charmed, perplexed, and nonplussed by its diminutive size and unusual appearance.

It is small. It is inexpensive. It gets excellent gas mileage. We’re supposed to admire it for these qualities. I don’t. As cyclists we’ve been bossed around by cars for too long. And like the Yorkshire terrier at the dog run who after constantly being terrorized by Rottweilers finally gets a chance to hump a Chihuahua, here at long last is a car we can intimidate and dominate. This car has a shorter wheelbase than a recumbent, the same passenger capacity as a tandem, and a curb weight lower than most people’s Rivendells.

When you’re the kid who gets picked on in school, what do you do when a new kid transfers in who’s nerdier than you? Do you become his friend and team up against your oppressors? No! You pretend to be his friend, and then when the cool kids are looking you push him into the girls’ bathroom.

So I say when these things hit the street we in turn hit them with everything we’ve got. You Euros might not understand this, but here in the US we’ve been “sharing” the road with vehicles that are, on average, larger than your homes. This is our chance to exact payback for years of oppression. And the great thing is that every segment of the cycling population can take part. Just imagine:

--Three or four bearded guys in “One Less Car” t-shirts with SPD sandals and panniers full of organic groceries stopping on their way home from the food co-op to tip one over;

--The Sunday morning group ride swarming around one and forcing the driver to take part in a mandatory motorpacing session;

--Locking your bike up to one when you run into the store. What are they gonna do about it? Or, better yet, just locking the car itself to a street sign;

--Using them for skitching. Messengers have long skitched off of trucks, but like pilot fish they did so surreptitiously and with no say as to the destination. With a Smart car, now’s your chance to be the shark. When your legs get tired, just grab onto the side mirror, rap on the glass, and say, “Dag Hammarskjold Plaza—and step on it!”;

--Some nutcase in a neon windbreaker on a recumbent overtaking one on a stretch of country road, taking quick stock of it in his helmet mirror, and running it into a ditch.

The possibilities are endless. So next time that Hummer driver ignores your right-of-way and almost flattens you at an intersection, take a deep breath and just let it go. Soon you’ll be able to grab a Smart car by the bumper and hold it there while you berate the driver.

Cycling in NYC: Know Your Enemy

For those of you who are new to cycling in the city, or who may be planning a trip to town with bicycle in tow, following is a guide to the local vehicular fauna that inhabits our streets. Recognizing their appearance, habits, and means of attack is essential to your survival. Here are seven of the most dangerous vehicles you’re likely to encounter:

Yellow Cabs

New York City yellow cabs are the sharks of the automobile world. While they’ve become the archetypal example of bad driving, aggressive behavior, and general internal-combustion mayhem, the fact is they’re pretty low on the danger scale and are pretty easy to deal with. Recently, as one drifted slowly into the bike lane and nearly crushed me against a row of parked cars, I knocked urgently on its sheet metal in the same way you’d punch an approaching shark in the nose to drive it away. The driver not only refrained from squelching me, but also offered up a bewildered expression that could have been interpreted as an apology in some countries. If that’s not politeness and consideration I don’t know what is.

Town Cars/Car Services

These things, on the other hand, are death on wheels. Generally speaking, the older and more customized the Town Car the more dangerous it is. A shiny new Town Car in Manhattan is generally operated by an upscale car service and will for the most part operate with a degree of civility, as the driver is not about to delay the financier or celebrity in the back seat by having to stop to pry a cyclist from under the car. However, as the cars age, they are sold to progressively lower-end car services, and they bring their increasingly predatory behavior to habitats well outside of the city. They acquire more layers of paint, more dents, and shinier wheels. The suspension is also usually jacked up too, to ease the removal of unfortunate cyclists from underneath the chassis. Eventually they become gypsy cabs, whose drivers are responsible for more hitting-and-running than the Yankees and Mets combined. If in doubt, check the car’s antenna length. The longer the antenna the more dangerous the car. Some of these things have antennas so long they resemble trolley polls on electric buses. This is because they receive their marching orders from the center of the earth, and are dispatched by Satan himself.

Access-A-Ride Buses

According to the MTA, “Access-A-Ride (AAR) provides transportation for people with disabilities who are unable to use public bus or subway service for some or all of their trips. It offers shared ride, door-to-door paratransit service.” What they fail to mention is that for some reason these things rarely have passengers on them and they drive like bats fly. Their preferred mode of attack is going through intersections at high speed ten seconds after the light has changed, switching lanes schizophrenically, and making high-speed right turns on red. If you don’t know what these things look like, they’re boxy white buses similar to airport shuttles, and they usually have a crushed wheelchair under the front bumper that’s throwing out a shower of sparks.

City Buses

Like Access-A-Ride buses, these too will run lights. They are also emboldened by their formidable size and will quite willingly play chicken with cyclists. One favorite tactic is to speed up in order to pass you, and then to quickly pull over at the next bus stop in an attempt to make you either stop short or hop the curb. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a municipal service like a bus would ever yield the right-of-way to a fellow citizen when it’s appropriate to do so, or would take the huge disparity between your level of vulnerability and theirs into account. It won’t. It will, however, kill you.

Fresh Direct Trucks

Thanks to the proliferation of people in places like Brownstone Brooklyn who are too important to do their own shopping, the urban landscape is now completely cluttered with Fresh Direct delivery vehicles. Fresh Direct customers cite their busy careers and child-rearing responsibilities as reasons for having their groceries delivered to their homes, despite the fact that people have somehow managed to juggle these tasks successfully for centuries now. The truth is that they are of a certain breed that considers olives and fresh shrimp a staple, who won’t let their children watch TV despite owning four giant plasmas, and who are secretly thrilled at the prospect of having three or more service people in their house at a given time. (For them, making the cable guy work around the contractor while their personal organizer accepts a FedEx package is ecstasy.) Unfortunately, they make the rest of us work around their service people as well, since these trucks stop wherever and whenever they want, and halt traffic for blocks. And should you attempt to speed by one, you are liable to become one with a hand-truck laden with free-range chicken, tapenade, and organic vegetables.

Old American-Made Minivans

If you happen to be cycling in New York and you see an old domestic minivan, immediately dismount and seek the nearest sidewalk. (Though once off the street you’re still not completely safe from them.) Fortunately, you can usually hear these things first, since they emit a shrill chirping sound caused by their squeaky belts. They are usually carrying three generations of a large family simultaneously, and for some reason these families almost universally designate the driving duties to the shortest, angriest, and most confused family member among them. These things straddle lanes like Hollywood starlets straddle producers, and for reasons I have yet to deduce, they want you dead. Forest green ones with bubbling tinted windows are the most dangerous, followed closely by maroon. And if the driver is on a cell phone, just get it over with and kill yourself.

Food Delivery Bikes

It’s sad that one of the most dangerous vehicles out there in New York happens to be a bicycle. But it’s true—these things operate with an impunity that would make an Access-A-Ride driver blush. Take a seasoned messenger’s risk-taking and disregard for traffic laws but subtract his artful ability to do both well; that is a New York City food delivery person. Now, I don’t mean to begrudge anybody making a living by bike, and I certainly respect someone who makes a living in a manner as difficult as this. But he fact is, some of these guys are incredibly dangerous and will come at you in ways you’d never expect: from between parked cars; flying off curbs; head-on between two lanes of traffic; and leaping from rooftops and swinging from power lines like Paul Reubens did in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” during the climactic Warner Brothers studio rampage scene. They also eschew baskets and tend to carry their cargo in plastic bags hanging from their handlebars, which makes their already wobbly department store bikes handle even more unpredictably. Lately, too, they seem to be fed up with not getting the kind of respect and admiration that messengers get, since they’ve actually been trying to race me with increasing frequency in what I can only assume is an attempt to assert themselves as cyclists. The other day I passed a guy with a pizza who was going to be damned if he wasn’t going to beat me to the light. (I tried to let him go but he slowed right down with me like it was a matched sprint.)