QOTD: Feeling Conflicted?

“Peace is not absence of conflict,” Ronald Reagan once said, “it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”

And so it goes on the world’s roadways, highways, and, depending on your relationship with the neighbors, driveways. After the engineers are done gauging line of sight, measuring stopping distances, and calculating the necessary roadway width and angle for safe passage of a vehicle travelling the speed limit, we’re left to battle it out on the infrastructure laid out for us by city planners.

It’s a lot of responsibility. Maybe one day, perhaps sooner than we think, we’ll look back on such times and wonder how our betters at city hall or the legislature allowed us the ability to fend for ourselves on the road. Men and women, children and youth. Each depending on the closest person in their vicinity to not kill them.

Inevitably, conflict arises. And, increasingly (or so it seems) we’re facing conflict between motorists and a new breed of traveller: the disruptor.

Let’s be clear that roadways have never been relegated to just one vehicle type. People on horseback once had to pass slower moving wagons and carriages. Pulling around to pass, they might have encountered a man or woman ambling up the road, coming the other way. Good visibility on a horse, though. Then the French felt it was necessary to invent the bicycle, thus adding a new contraption travelling at a different speed, behaving in a different manner than all other road-going vehicles. In cities, plodding, horse-drawn omnibuses rapidly gave way to quicker electric streetcars fueled by an overhead wire, running on a dedicated track.

At least you knew a streetcar wasn’t about to dart left or right, looking for a hole in traffic. But they do make a better door than a window.

Today, green sensibilities have placed more cyclists on our roads than ever before. In many cities, these people sometimes represent a very vocal lobby that’s out of proportion to their numbers, capable of squeezing infrastructure — perhaps much-needed infrastructure — out of penny-pinching bureaucrats. No, I’m not about to go full Keith Crain here.

Urban cyclists and the much more disruptive (in every sense of the word) tide of electric scooter users brings vulnerable people into closer proximity with drivers now forced to share their lane with smaller, slower-moving vehicles. It’s a recipe for conflict, and it’s no wonder activists and engineers would prefer that these two modes of transportation remain segregated, either by distance or by obstacle. Still, it’s possible to co-exist peacefully, so long as you’re willing to accept some risk, open your eyes, and keep your anger on a short leash.

If you’ve ever been sermonized by a law-breaking cyclist, you know just how difficult it is to keep your temper under wraps. Same goes for that dude on the Bird. But in a civil society you must, just like you need to hold back from tailing that guy who cut you off. We haven’t really risen that far above the animals — we just wear nicer clothes.

I can’t profess to any innocence in this regard. I’ve done things behind the wheel in a moment of anger I later regretted, though never were punches thrown. Never was anyone’s hair mussed.

While scooter riders are a menace anywhere, my love/hate relationship with cyclists is something truly difficult to come to grips with. The two sides battle back and forth in my brain. On the one hand, I’m totally on board with the freedom — low-cost freedom, too — that bicycles provide. A nearly completely unregulated machine propelled by the user, with no fuel or insurance costs, that, if properly equipped and maintained, can go just about anywhere and last forever. It’s all so libertarian.

On the other hand, that annoying subset of cyclists, a group I’ll call the self-righteous scofflaw set, continually endangers themselves while claiming everyone else is the problem. The “You’re not supposed to hit me (as I cruise through this four-way stop at 20 mph)” identitarian type. Never mind rules, sharing the road, etc.; they’re on a bike and you’re in a car so you’re bad and they can never be wrong. If Karl Benz hadn’t patented the Motorwagen in 1886, you wouldn’t be a danger to me right now.

Well yes, and if my mother was a fish, I’d have once been a tadpole. Benz built his car 132 years ago and here we are, so take some responsibility for protecting your own life. Do your part.

The question we’re leading to is this: is there a type of non-car roadgoing transport you enjoy, one feel a kinship with, that the motorist half of your brain rebels against? Bikes, skateboards, scooters, motorcycles, buses, trams, you name it. All fair game.How do you keep the two sides settled?