Who Does that Biker Think He Is?

The other day I brought my automobile to a complete stop in a bike lane in downtown Davis, California. I didn’t know which way to go and I needed to check my phone.  No one was in the bike lane and I didn’t see any parking spaces, so it seemed like the safest option.   After I had been sitting there a while figuring out my next move, a cyclist hit me.  Not hard.  And not like he didn’t see me.  Like he DID see me and was ramming me to send me a message.  He then screamed at me, “get out of the fucking bike lane!” and sped off.  

I started shaking and came very close to tears from the experience.  I felt like a victim.  I had been lost.  I had been late.  I was in an emotional state regarding one of my family members already.  To be screamed at and judged by this angry man, felt like the last straw.  I pulled myself together and drove safely off.  I passed the cyclist in question and turned left at the next corner.  He turned left too, again it seemed deliberately, and used the opportunity of passing me at the next light to scream at me a second time. This upset me mightily.

The following week I read How I learned to bike like a Dutchman in The New Yorker.  In this lovely piece, Dan Kois describes his American family’s experience of living in the Netherlands without a car and merging into their bicycle-oriented culture.  Thought it wasn’t the point of the piece, my eyes were opened by this article to the arrogance, privilege and primacy I assume behind the wheel of a car in the United States.   In the Netherlands, as the article informed me, there are “18 million residents with more than 22 million bicycles.”  In Holland, bicyclists not drivers own the road.   There it is the cars’ responsibility to get out of the way of the bikes not the other way around.  Kois describes how difficult it was for him and his family to stop cautiously assuming that at any minute they were going to be hit by a car.  He tells how they kept disrupting the massive flow of bicycle traffic by slowing down. 

After reading this article, I realized how incredibly thoughtless it is for me to casually use a bike lane as a place to pull over.  Imagine how I would feel as a driver if a biker (or any vehicle) came to a complete stop in the lane of a super busy car thoroughfare.  I would be outraged and terrified. “What the hell do they think they’re doing?” would be among my best thoughts.   When I bike, I ALWAYS assume that cars have the right of way.  Same as a pedestrian (although legally, its the opposite).

Davis, California, home of UC Davis, is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US.  Out of the 69,000 residents of that city, the majority are students at the UC and of those a huge chunk rely on bicycles as their main transportation (with the lack of parking and the size of the campus it is by far the smartest option).  When I came to a halt in that bike lane, I was selfishly endangering the lives of these students with my arrogance and privilege as a driver.  

If I want there to be alternative transportation options in the world, I need to bike more like a Dutchman myself, and drive less like an American.