Red lights, stress hormones - and sympathy for Dorothy Rabinowitz

It’s the kind of scene that anyone using a busy city’s streets in the last few years will have encountered. “Hey, red light!” a pedestrian shouted at a couple riding down the Tillary Street bike lane. Unabashed, they continued through the crosswalk and on towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I, with the Invisible Visible Boy on his trailer bike, waited for the family to finish crossing. The man did so glowing with self-righteous indignation at the cyclists who had rolled slowly through the crosswalk a few yards ahead of them.

It was an inconsequential incident, in an area where I’ve encountered the aftermath of several nasty car crashes. The family in the crosswalk were not in any way seriously endangered, while the cyclists were far from completely reckless. I partly understood the cyclists’ behaviour. The crosswalk in question is lightly used – and any cyclist who waits until the lights turn green risks either a long wait to ride onto the Brooklyn Bridge or a dash across in front of traffic just as the lights there change.

But the family, I suspect, will have gone home cursing “scofflaw” cyclists. Next time one of their friends mentions the possibility of starting to cycle to work or to get the kids to school, they’ll suck at their teeth and mention how that couple totally blew through the lights by the federal court in front of them. When they’re driving, they’ll perhaps be a little less inclined to see cyclists as fellow human beings and a little more as the kindred of those people who rode in front of the family (the closeness of the encounter may by now have become considerably exaggerated).

The back of the New York City Cycling map:
an impossibly obscure place, it seems, to hide from senior
journalists what cyclists are told about the law.

I’ve been pondering the extraordinary mismatch between the irritation over cyclist misbehaviour and the actual danger it poses over the past fortnight since the Wall St Journal published a bizarre video featuring Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of its editorial board, sharing her thoughts on New York City’s new Citibike bikeshare scheme. Among her claims were that “everyone” in New York City knew cyclists posed a greater danger than yellow cabs (a collision with a bike last killed someone in the city more than four years ago). She also complained about seeing instructions on the doors of taxis warning her not to door cyclists, claiming that cyclists were not given similar instructions on safe behaviour (a glance at a Citibike, the NYC bike map or pretty much every other piece of cycling-related literature from the NYC Department of Transportation could have swiftly debunked this claim). The videos have helped to spur plenty of discussion about the virtues or otherwise of cycling in New York City – but have started the discussions off from a profoundly unhelpful point.

I’ve felt disinclined, however, to dismiss Ms Rabinowitz’s ravings entirely since a discussion with a colleague in the wake of the video’s release. I related to this colleague – who is certainly not unreasonable or poorly inclined towards cyclists – how that morning I had seen police stopping a cyclist who was riding recklessly. She expressed relief, on the grounds that more needed to be done to stamp out bad cycling. New York’s police department, I pointed out testily, already gave cyclists more traffic tickets than their share of the traffic would suggest they should receive. The ticketing was even further out of line with the damage that cyclists did to other people. It was motorists’ law-breaking that needed to be a higher priority. When cyclists rode on the sidewalk and she was walking her dog, however, she feared they were going to harm her dog, she replied. We both grew steadily more agitated.

 

Since we're talking politeness, I could have done without
the language on this parked single speed. Thank you.

We had both, I realised afterwards, started during our conversation to recall stressful incidents we’d experienced on New York’s streets. The stress hormones that had coursed through our bodies at the time began to move again. As our adrenalin rose, we both gradually became more defensive and less amenable to reason. The conversation made me realise that, yes, some people do find interacting with cyclists inherently stressful. In fact, looking at the stream of abuse one encounters in most online fora that discuss cycling, most people – drivers or pedestrians – find it stressful in some way. Pedestrians often fail to spot even cyclists who are behaving entirely properly – and hence get a shock when one whistles by as they stride out into the street sending a text message. Motorists find it stressful to manoeuvre around vehicles that have such different shapes on the road and move in such different ways. Handling some of these situations seems to activate ancient flight-or-fight responses in the human brain, well away from the brain parts that undertake moral and intellectual reasoning.

Not, of course, that people should surrender to mere gut instincts on these issues. No matter how irritated Dorothy Rabinowitz feels if a cyclist passes her on the sidewalk, she ought – particularly given her exalted position on a quality newspaper – to recognise there’s no intellectual basis for saying cyclists pose a bigger danger than yellow taxis. Incidents involving yellow cabs are often fatal in New York City – the last one involving a cyclist was on June 6, while one last killed a pedestrian (by mounting the kerb) on February 24. Livery cars (the New York equivalent of minicabs) pose far greater dangers.

As the February 24 death suggests, even when walking on a sidewalk (or pavement, for British readers) pedestrians are in far more danger from motorists than from cyclists. I’ve mentioned before how I ride every morning past the site where a car on the sidewalk killed Martha Atwater on February 22. There have been many such incidents across the city since – including the very sad death on June 4 of Ariel Russo, a four-year-old hit by a 17-year-old involved in a chase with the police. Any pedestrian worried about his or her safety in New York City should, logically, be begging the city authorities to encourage cycling. It’s far safer for pedestrians to be around relatively light, relatively slow bicycles than to be around cars.

A cyclist and his son on the lovely Manhattan Bridge
bike lane: cyclists can't expect nice things like this,
Sarah Goodyear says, if we keep being naughty.

Nor am I making a point like the one that Sarah Goodyear made in a now mildly notorious piece on the Atlantic Cities website about how cyclists allegedly “wanted it both ways” demanding better enforcement against dangerous drivers while being reluctant to behave better themselves. Cyclists couldn’t expect better infrastructure, such as bike lanes, if they didn’t improve their behaviour, she argued. It’s quite clear that, if officials’ willingness to give a road user group infrastructure depended on the group’s behaviour, there wouldn’t be much road space devoted to cars. There’s no evidence that cyclists’ rule-breaking (archetypally, red light-jumping and sidewalk riding) is more widespread than motorists’ tendency to speed and pay insufficient attention. There’s plentiful evidence that cyclists’ misbehaviour causes less harm to others than motorists’.

A Citibike rider checks out the rules:
bet she'll be nicer to cyclists
next time she drives

I also stick to the view that many people’s views about cyclists are based on simple prejudice and irritation towards people who decide to do things differently, rather than either objective factual points or stress from near-misses with negligent cyclists. It’s one of my hopes for the Citibike scheme that, if it encourages more first-time New York cyclists to ride, it’s going to create a new group of pedestrians and motorists who have some understanding of the pressures on people who cycle.

But I’ve personally taken the view for a long time that there’s little point in antagonising pedestrians or motorists unnecessarily. It’s far simpler to take the position that a red light means “stop” than to engage in some complex – and inevitably error-prone – risk assessment at every traffic light-controlled junction. I don’t ever want to be in the position of being the cyclist who crashed into me near Elephant & Castle in March 2009 after going through a red light. “I didn’t see you,” he complained. “There was a red light to tell you not to go,” I replied.

I take that position not least because it’s such a distraction from the important issues if I encourage people to complain even more about cyclists. There was a chilling illustration of that on June 8, when the Wall Street Journal – encouraged, perhaps, by the website traffic from Dorothy Rabinowitz’s original rant – posted a second video featuring her views. Having considerably improved her make-up and clothes, she launched into further strange denunciations based on misunderstandings of the facts – and heaped abuse on a couple of fairly mild questions from viewers about her opinions. Around my office, I spotted headphones going on and browsers being directed to the Journal’s website as even colleagues with no interest in cycling sought to gawp at the latest episode.

Yet, just as the Journal’s editorial staff were posting the video, on 5^th Avenue, just around the corner from the Journal’s offices, the driver of a sports utility vehicle lost control, mounted the sidewalk and ploughed into a crowd of people, sending six – including a small baby – to hospital. The incident was depressingly routine – but, given the numbers of people involved, I’d have hoped to see more comment and perhaps some more information on Twitter and some of the news sites I regularly visit. Instead, most were full of arguments about the largely illusory danger that bikes pose to pedestrians such as Ms Rabinowitz.

It’s my goal, as far as I can, to cycle in such a way that I don’t cause unnecessary stress to other people that I encounter. I don’t want to encourage them to focus on the pointless ephemera that were the subject of Dorothy Rabinowitz’s complaints. I hope to leave them at least a little freer to concentrate on the hundreds of annual deaths from motor vehicle crashes in New York City and other large cities worldwide. It is, after all, those, rather than a few stray bikes on sidewalks, that represent the true roads scandal of our time.