She Doesn’t Think We’re “The Enemy”

We believe love is love, science is real…but keep your government paws off my vehicular patterns.

You’ve seen the two phrases preceding the ellipsis on signs outside houses in “blue” neighborhoods and on bumper stickers affixed to Priuses. (Is the plural of Prius “Prii?”) But the seemingly-contradictory exhortation that follows is, according to Maggie Cassidy, an expression of how otherwise sane people think, and what they sometimes voice, when a bike lane is propsed.

Ms. Cassidy admits that she loves driving and is “too weak and clumsy” to ride a bicycle. But she adds that she has felt safer during one of her daily drives since bicycle lanes have been installed and given cyclists “a prudent amount of space” along a busy stretch of road.

While I have spoken and written against bike lanes, I am not against lanes in principle. Rather, I criticize particular green ribbons of asphalt or concrete because they’re poorly-conceived, designed, constructed or maintained. Though not a cyclist, Ms. Cassidy seems to understand as much.

The most perceptive comments in her Valley News (Vermont) editorial, however, refute the objections of drivers. She mentions one who complains that he’ll have to drive with his “head on a swivel.” As Ms. Cassidy points out, that’s what drivers have to do anyway:  Drivers, and people in general, need to be aware of their surroundings, not only what’s immediately in front of them.

She doesn’t only blame drivers’ misconceptions, which she attributes to “anecdotal” evidence and flat-out misconceptions. She gets at something that causes motorists to see not only cyclists, but planners who conceive and engineers who plan and design bike lanes and other infrastructure. As she says, they are, too often, poor communicators: They too often lapse into professional and technical jargon or show other misunderstandings of their audiences.

I must say that Maggie Cassidy’s editorial is notable because she writes from a perspective I rarely, if ever, see: A motorist who isn’t a cyclist but doesn’t see us as “the enemy.”