A New Hazard In The COVID-19 Bike Boom

The good and bad news about the pandemic....

That does seem like an odd phrase, doesn't it?  Well, in the two years-plus since COVID-19 hijacked the world,  there was at least one positive development, at least related to cycling:  more of us are doing it.  I have at least a little bit of hope every time someone mounts a saddle and pedals.  I have a little more when someone rides again.  Of course, that has made bikes, parts and accessories difficult to find--and far more expensive than they were.  

The bad news?  More riders has meant more riders being injured and killed.  The pandemic has derailed "Vision Zero" initiatives here in New York and in other cities:  The goal of no more pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, toward which cities were trending, however slowly, seems even further out of reach than it was when those initiatives started.

Most of the attention has been on cyclists who were struck by motorists.  They, of course, accounted for the vast majority of casualties.  But an increasing number of us have fallen victim to an even-more disturbing trend.

Oscar Gaytan is one of them.  The award-winning nurse from the Duarte area of Los Angeles attended a Dodger game Monday night.  He was, apparently, riding to an LA Metro station Monday night when someone pulled him off his bike and pushed him to the ground. He was found early Tuesday morning, dead, from head injuries.

Police have declared they are conducting a homicide investigation and are seeking a man between 30 and 40 years old who fled on foot.  Duarte community members have organized a GoFundMe page to help his family pay for funeral services.

I have been hearing and reading about an increasing number of such incidents--or ones in which a cyclist is knocked down while riding.  The assaults are, of course, serious.  But, in addition to injuring riders, they also have the potential to put us in even greater danger, especially if we're attacked on a street or a streetside bike lane, from traffic.  I became all-too-aware of that danger a year and a half ago, when a driver flung her door into my side and sent me sprawling into the street, where another driver stopped inches from running over me.

So, while it's important to look at ways to eliminate fatal encounters between cyclists and motorists, it's also important to treat seemingly-random assaults as what they are.  It's hard not to think that Oscar Gaytan's death was a hate crime because of his ethnicity.  But I think that even if he were whiter than I am, he could've been the victim of another kind of hate: the kind some feel against us for taking "their" streets and parking spaces when bike lanes or built, or who simply for what they believe we, as cyclists, represent.