Don't Try This At Home--Or On The Interstate

Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann has been as revered as Nehemiah and reviled as Robert Moses.  However you see him, you can't deny that he is as responsible as anyone for the kind of city Paris is, and has been for the past century-plus.

One of the things he did was to introduce a street grid. Previously, much of Paris--especially the old districts like Le Marais--were laced with streets narrow streets that zigged, zagged and curved.  If you've been in the medieval sections of some European cities--or a few small districts of New York and Boston--you have an idea of what the City of Light was like before Baron Haussmann came along.

In re-doing Paris' streets, he also made them wider.  While they still seem charmingly or claustrophobically narrow, depending on your point of view, compared to American thoroughfares, the newly-made streets were still a good bit wider.  They allowed for Paris' new infrastructure, including sewers and the very thing that gave the city its nicknames:  gas-powered streetlights. 

While most people agree that widening and straightening the streets modernized the city and made it more habitable for many people, others accused Haussmann of being a tool of the powers-that-be.  Up to that time, Parisians were noted for insurrecting on the drop of a chapeau, and instigators who knew the streets could evade soldiers and guardsmen, who often came from other parts of the country and therefore weren't familiar with the twists and turns of those byways.  But the new, arrow-straight streets made pursuits easier because, well, they made it easier to keep perpetrators in their pursuers' sights.

I mention all of this because, while I hope (and assume, dear reader) that you will never steal a bike, I can offer this bit of advice:  If you try to make your escape on wheels you wrested from their rightful owners, don't try to make your escape on a road that stretches straight ahead of you for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers).

And, especially, don't try to make your getaway on an Interstate highway.  It will almost certainly result in your getting caught and hurt, or worse.

A 31-year-old man in Seattle learned that lesson the hard way.  At around 7pm on Wednesday, a bicycle was reported stolen on NE 45th Street near Interstate 5. Police were alerted and Washington State Troopers stopped him on the highway.  When he fought, they tasered him.  He ended up in a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to find out more about this alleged thief--and what prompted him to try to get away on the main north-south highway of the US West Coast.