Moving Targets
By JAN HOFFMAN
Published: August 8, 2008
Photo by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
IT seemed like a good idea at the time.
Save gas money, be environmentally correct, lose weight — just by biking to work. And so after two decades, Dan Cooley, 41, saddled up a silver 21-speed Raleigh in April to make the daily two-mile commute to his nursing job at a senior citizen center in Louisville, Ky. In four months, he lost 15 pounds. Way to go, Dan!
Friday morning, July 25, around 6:50 a.m., he was pedaling on a residential street, wearing his green hospital scrubs, when a Volkswagen roared out of a driveway in front of him. Swerving to avoid the car, Mr. Cooley cursed loudly and rode on.
The driver and his passenger cursed back. As Mr. Cooley pulled over to the sidewalk, the car turned onto a driveway, knocking him off his bike. In Mr. Cooley’s narrative, the passenger, swearing, jumped out and pummeled him. Then he got back into the car, which zoomed away. Mr. Cooley lay prostrate on the sidewalk, bloodied, with a concussion and a torn ligament.
“We’ve had a car culture for so long and suddenly the roads become saturated with bicyclists trying to save gas,” Mr. Cooley said 10 days after the attack, still feeling scrambled, in pain and traumatized. “No one knows how to share the road.” He doesn’t plan to bike to work again this season.
Every year, the war of the wheels breaks out in the sweet summer months, as four-wheelers react with aggravation and anger to the two-wheelers competing for the same limited real estate.
This summer, the number of new cyclists has increased strongly across the country. In June, nearly 11,000 first-time riders participated in Denver’s Bike to Work Day. Dahon, makers of folding bikes popular with commuters, reports a 30-percent sales increase from a year ago, with many models having been sold out since the spring. Transportation Alternatives, a bicycling advocacy group, estimates that 131,000 people cycle daily in New York, up 77 percent since 2000.
Like Mr. Cooley, the newbies are lured by improved bike lanes as well as the benefits of exercise, a smaller carbon footprint and gas savings. But talk about a vicious cycle! With more bikes on the road, the driver-cyclist, Hatfield-McCoy hostility seems to be ratcheting up. Cycling: good for the environment, bad for mental health?
Having noted the uptick in aggression, Michelle Holcomb, a cycling instructor in Dallas, now carries a secret weapon. Recently, as she cycled into an intersection at a four-way stop and began turning left, a driver at the cross street revved and shot through, laughing as he missed her front wheel by inches. “Smile for the camera,” muttered Ms. Holcomb, who videotaped the incident with her new helmet camera.
In this dogfight, bigger’s impact is always much, much badder. But smaller is hardly better-behaved. It’s especially true in city traffic, where pedestrians add a third volatile element to a compound already wildly unstable.
Last Thursday evening, at the peak of Manhattan rush hour, Howard Savery was crossing Broadway at 40th Street with fellow bipeds. Abruptly he reared back, just avoiding a crash with an impatient cyclist, racing through the red light.
“Well, that’s a first!” remarked Mr. Savery, a banker, who was heading home to Staten Island.
First time he’d nearly been knocked over by a cyclist in Manhattan?
No, corrected Mr. Savery: “That’s the first time one of them actually beeped at me. Usually they run you down silently.”
In spot clashes around the country, the hostility this summer has erupted in baroque violence:
¶A Brentwood, Calif., doctor was charged with assault. Police say he intentionally braked in front of two cyclists, with one smashing into his rear window and the other crashing to the pavement.
¶In bike-utopia, Portland, Ore., where 6 percent of the people cycle daily — the national average is under 1 percent — a cyclist knocked off his bike clung desperately to the hood of a moving car. And a car passenger fought with a cyclist after yelling at him to wear his helmet.
¶Last weekend, Utah state police arrested the driver of a pickup truck, suspected of plowing intentionally into cyclists on a morning ride.
Isolated, freakish events, certainly. Indeed, some cycling advocates say that as riders in their communities have become a customary sight, civility by motorists has improved. But overwhelmingly, on blogs and Web sites nationwide, drivers and cyclists routinely describe shouted epithets, flung water bottles, sprays of spit and harrowing near-misses of the intentional kind.
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