“ All modes of transportation are equal. But some modes of transportation are more equal than others.” - Me, paraphrasing George Orwell’s Animal Farm
Hello, everyone, yada yada yada, The Friday Post here on Trauma Response! I know, crazy right, I already posted something for today saying I wouldn’t be posting anything today. Lucky for you, me, and everyone else, I got into a vaguely political argument with people I didn’t even know existed on Twitter dot com today. So here’s a surprise Trauma Response post!
I have never been a foe to the cyclists in Chicago, but I have never really been a friend to them either. We have a lot of bike riders here, we’re a big city with many people who can’t afford to buy cars and don’t want to take the train, which is totally okay! I don’t have a car, nor do I have a bike, but my boyfriend has a car, and when we don’t take his car somewhere we usually Uber. For anyone who has a car in Chicago, I’m sure you can attest to the fact that cyclists are a bit of a passing nuisance. This city isn’t quite as “bike efficient” as it could be, and that leaves many cyclists to drive in the middle of the street amongst the cars, which is just about as dangerous for the biker as it is irritating for the car driver. It sucks that this city isn’t 100% bike friendly, but this city wasn’t built for bike riders, that’s just the way it is.
This morning, September 23, 2022, I saw a tweet from “bike-riding communist” Sam Wight. The tweet reads, “WE STOPPED LAKESHORE DRIVE,” then “More than 232 CYCLISTS SHOWED UP,” and finally, “SO FUCKING COOL.” The tweet was accompanied by a video of a large group of cyclists, with their bicycles in tow, on the normally very busy street of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive, holding up traffic. The tweet was followed by a reply from Wright explaining that this event was a protest by the Chicago-based group Bike Grid Now which aims to turn 10% of Chicago’s streets into a bike grid that “cyclists and pedestrians feel safe riding on.” That’s all fine and good, but why are you targeting regular people just driving in cars?
I voiced my opinion in a tweet of my own saying, “the mission: stop traffic on one of the busiest streets in chicago using bikes to protest chicago not having enough bike lanes,” and then, “the goal: make everyone hate bikes even more and never get those bike lanes ever.” I, like Sam Wight himself, replied to my own tweet, further emphasizing my confusion at the whole situation, “this idea is so asinine it sounds like it was pitched by someone from the anti-bicycle lobby[...]” I said. Because it does. Cyclists forcibly causing traffic for people in cars in order to get those people in cars to rally behind the cyclists is backward logic that sounds like something someone who wanted these people to fail would propose. If there’s one thing people who drive hate, it’s traffic, so if you want them to be on your side, maybe don’t cause fucking traffic. Yeah, my comment was probably a little snide, but I don’t think it was that revolutionary of a take, nor do I think what I said was untrue or uneducated.
It wasn’t long before I got my first reply from a cyclist. “This worked in the Netherlands! Safe bike infrastructure is good for both drivers and everybody else using streets,” said Ben (bicycle emoji) on Twitter (mind you, this happened in the Netherlands in the 70s and no one has ever accused the 1970s Netherlands of being remotely similar to 21st Century Chicago). But he was nice about it, so I volleyed back because I secretly enjoy a civil debate. “[S]eems a little odd to direct the anger at regular schmegular people just trying to drive home from work. go do wheelies outside of lightfoot’s house, she’s your enemy!” Now Lori Lightfoot is not the only object of the cyclists' ire, a lot of the people involved with city government and city infrastructure are, but Lori Lightfoot is more of a tangible enemy to the cyclists than the thousands of faceless people who drive cars in Chicago are. Now if I’d known that comment would be so controversial I probably wouldn’t have even said it, but I did, and now here we are.
Ben (bicycle emoji) responded, again, very level-headed, saying that he agrees Lori Lightfoot is an enemy and that every week they go to a different ward and invite aldermen to take part in their bicycle activism. Ben (bicycle emoji) was the only one to respond normally. Someone else, whose name isn’t even worth mentioning, replied “No that would be you,” meaning I was somehow their enemy. Someone else responded by saying that Lori Lightfoot hasn’t killed a cyclist “as far as I’m aware.” And a separate person echoed that sentiment in a quote tweet saying that the “regular schmegular people” driving cars that I mentioned “are the ones murdering people on bikes and on foot.” Everyone, and I mean everyone, who drives a car is an accessory to the murder of innocents.
I won’t bore you anymore with the minutiae of my argument with the leftist cyclists, just assume it was a lot more people using “dead cyclists” as political props the same way Republicans use “the unborn.” I have no dog in this fight, I don’t have a driver’s license and I don’t own a bicycle. I don’t plan on getting a driver’s license because I don’t like to drive, and riding a bike around the city seems dangerous and can be dangerous. All I was attempting to do with my original tweet was point out the confusing logic of the activism I saw as I do quite often in this newsletter. For me, it seems weird that the cyclists held up traffic because the people in cars are the very people they should hope to rally to their cause if they want to get material change. If Democrats campaigned only to solidly blue people, and not the people who were on the fence and didn’t know who to vote for, they would lose elections because they are only speaking to people who already agree with them.
If cyclists want actual change, like they have made it very clear to me that they want, then it serves them nothing to ostracize the people who can help them by pissing them off and causing traffic. The entire cyclist community in Chicago could rally together and that still probably wouldn’t be enough to get their agenda on the city’s docket because, let’s face it, there aren’t a shit ton of cyclists in the city compared to non-cyclists. They desperately need the support of the non-cycling community to get what they want but are intent on making themselves out to be exactly what I called them earlier: a nuisance.
What I tried to impress upon the cyclists in my Twitter mentions was that the rage should not be directed at “people in cars,” or even, I’ll say it, “people in cars who have killed cyclists.” People in cars outnumber cyclists a million to one, and people in Chicago of all places aren’t going to stop driving cars, they are too big of a group. And people who have killed cyclists by driving cars are too small of a group. It’s terrible that cyclists, or anyone, can be killed by a person driving a car, but making the anonymous and very few people who have killed cyclists by driving a car is a flimsy political stance. The political action should be targeted at the structures in place that allow for anyone, not just the “cyclist class,” to be killed by a motor vehicle. With enough political effort you can get the city’s government officials to take action and change the infrastructure, but you will never ever in a million years get people to be better drivers en masse.
As of right now, I am still a very minor target of the Twitter bicycle communists. To me, they’re like a fly buzzing in my face, and I’m sure they feel the same way about me, but the thing is I’m not trying to rally support for my cause. Ben (bicycle emoji) ended our conversation by saying, “Whether you like it or not, you have learned a lot today[...]” and that was the first thing he said to me that genuinely irritated me. I didn’t learn much of anything from my encounters with the bicycle mafia. Perhaps I learned not to mess with anyone on two wheels, or perhaps I learned that bicyclists are even more annoying on Twitter than they are when they’re driving in the middle of the road while you’re just trying to get some chicken tenders from Sonic. Either way, my interaction with the cyclists was not positive, and I can’t say that anything that was said to me made me more sympathetic to their cause. I’m not “anti-bike” at all, and I’m not “pro-car” either, but I’m certainly not “pro-cyclist.” The cyclists failed to convince me that they’re a cause worth joining, just as I’m sure they failed to change the minds of anyone on Lake Shore Drive they stuck in traffic.
I want to get on the Twitter just so I can read ALL of the comments! Keep fighting the good fight!! Those cyclists are dumb!!