Sunday, November 12, 2006

Cue the crickets

I haven't been riding for over a week. I had a big training class last week that made commuting difficult, and Friday I worked from home. So to blow the dust off of the blog, here's a 4 page article about bike relations in New York, from The New Yorker appropriately enough. That should keep you busy for a bit. It's Sunday morning, pull up a couch and some coffee. And read nuggets like this:

Of course, some people’s fun is another person’s nightmare. The completion of the thirteen-mile greenway along the Hudson has inspired a great many people—five thousand, on a good day—to ride their bikes. According to Michael Smith, a veteran city cyclist, the new riders tend to wear spandex and helmets and go very fast, with a great sense of purpose, on expensive machines. Smith is a member of Right of Way, an organization “dedicated to the overthrow of car tyranny.” On its Web site, he wrote, “Back when we were all fighting the cars on the street, I felt a certain sense of solidarity. But now that we’ve got this dedicated—or sorta dedicated—space, I’m finding out that a lot of us are, well, assholes . . . just like that Guido in the S.U.V. who nearly killed you on Sixth Avenue last week.” Smith longed for a return of that “good, mutinous urban attitude” about cycling, where “we’d just laugh at the stoplights, and give the finger to the indignant, honking drivers. And we’d all feel like comrades or co-conspirators or something.” The “drivers on bikes,” as he called them, are really suburbanites in disguise. “Will they—please God!—move to fucking Scarsdale as soon as their kids are born?”

Discuss.

3 comments:

LvilleTex said...

i read the article yesterday, but don't remember much. i think i read it at 7.00 a.m. as a way to wake up at work. i do remember the general note of how diverse the "cyclists" are in NY. to me, that's a "duh" observation. i was just there and was fascinated how many bikes of all types there were on the streets.

Frostbike said...

What I constantly find interesting, and this article was just one example, is how much of an "us vs. them" mentality there is within the cycling community. Not only bikes vs. motorists, but certain types of bikers against another (roadies v. messenger, etc.).

rigtenzin said...

It's difficult for some of us to get along with other people.