To the editor:
I’m a daily reader of The Item and a cyclist, so you can imagine my shock at the article in last Friday’s Lifestyle section, “Living with the two-wheeled menace”. Just at the most surface level, if you switched out cyclists for any other ethnic, political, religious, or other groups of humans and ran a similarly negative story, that would be wildly unacceptable. Why is it OK for cyclists? Why is it OK to call me a menace? Cars are far more of a menace to bikes than vice versa because when cars and cyclists collide, cyclists get killed and cars get damaged. I expect better out of your editor then letting this kind of rant get published.
I can only assume the author hasn’t been on a bike in traffic in quite some time. If you do spend time on a bike around here, you’ll know the vast majority of streets don’t have bike lanes. Many streets are very narrow, so you can’t avoid blocking cars. Good examples of that are Chestnut, Union, Chatham, Exchange, and parts of Essex Street. It’s also not uncommon at all for a bike lane to inexplicably end with no clear direction as it does on Exchange Street turning into “sharrows.”
Cyclists are forced by the very nature of the activity to contend with a world built for cars. For example, there is no good way to get across Route 1 from east to west Saugus due to the on/off ramps. This is exactly the kind of place that gets drivers thinking I’m a menace when in reality, I have no other option than to try to make the road that exists today work for a bike.
Bikers are experiencing the road in a dramatically different way. You’re thinking about road hazards, pavement quality, hills, train tracks, narrow shoulders, and most of all the car that could kill you. These different factors in the environment might make a cyclist do something that annoys you, like going into a travel lane, but if you had the perspective of the person on the bike it would look completely rational. Cyclists do have a right to use a travel lane because roads are public ways that belong to everyone. Of course, any courteous cyclists stick to the shoulder, but that isn’t always possible and bike lanes don’t exist on most streets.
The type of complaint on display in this article is incredibly common. I think what it boils down to are three things. Cyclists make some drivers nervous, it would be better if we didn’t exist at all, and if we have to exist they’re too selfish to share the road.
Sometimes as a driver myself, or even as a cyclist, I see another cyclist do something that even I roll my eyes at, like going the wrong way in a bike lane. People — drivers or cyclists — aren’t perfect but we’ve all got to live together and try to get along. So please have patience with your neighbors, no matter how they’re moving around, and keep in mind the road belongs to all of us.
Scott Kane
Lynn
