Make Sure You Know The Way

 Nearly a century and a half ago, Baron Haussmann remade Paris. Before he began his work, the City of Light had, like many other old European cities, serpentine, circuitous streets. He replaced them with wider, arrow-straight avenues and boulevards. 

He reasoned, correctly, that those new thoroughfares would facilitate commerce. 

But city and national officials probably cared more about how they could make it easier for troops to move—and put down protests and rebellions for which Parisians were famous. City residents who incited or participated in such conflicts could evade gendarmes and soldiers, many of whom came from other parts of the country—or different quarters of the city—and were therefore not familiar with the meandering streets.

I mention this history because if you are trying to flee law enforcement or military personnel—whether because you’ve incited a protest for a noble cause or have committed a crime (which I don’t recommend)—on your bicycle, be sure you know the terrain.

It’s too late for a man in Troy, New York. Police in the city, just northeast of Albany, responded to a call about “suspicious activity.” They tried to question a man riding his bike in the area. But instead of stopping, he sped up and tried to evade the cops.

He pedaled down a couple of streets pursued by the patrolmen who flashed their lights and blared their siren. He steered into a backyard where, in the darkness, he tumbled over an embankment and into the Hudson River, where he drowned.

I don’t know whether the man actually committed a crime or simply panicked when the cops approached him. Either way, fleeing wasn’t a good idea—especially if he didn’t know the territory.

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.