QOTD: Feeling Conflicted?

Steph Willems
by Steph Willems

“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?

Steph Willems
Steph Willems

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  • JaySeis JaySeis on Oct 02, 2018

    I ride on the nearest state highway that happens to be a beach.

  • Don1967 Don1967 on Oct 03, 2018

    There are two logical "lanes"... motorized and non-motorized. They only reason cyclists aren't put on the sidewalk where they belong is that doing so would force them to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians, something which they are loathe to do. They want the right-of-way for themselves, no matter how disruptive it is to the 99%.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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