Riding down the Pandora bike lane last week, I almost got picked off by a pickup truck making a right turn on a red light.
He must have read my column, I thought, eyeing his Alberta plates.
Then another right-turner cut me off a couple of blocks later, though this time the car was local.
Maybe it’s because I’m a MAMIL — a middled-aged man in Lycra — I decided. Guys in cycling gear, particularly those who look like something went terribly wrong at the sausage factory, tend to trigger the kind of instinctive loathing normally reserved for TV preachers and street mimes.
Then it happened a third time, a super-close call (the brakes squealed, or maybe it was me) as a driver whipped onto Douglas, ignoring both the No Right Turn On Red sign and the green bicycles-can-go traffic light designed to lure riders into the road like deer into the crosshairs.
I was annoyed because, as we know, All Drivers Are Entitled Bastards.
Then, later in the week, I was driving down Pandora when this helmetless cyclist suddenly lurched out of the bike lane and across a Quadra Street crosswalk, shooting through a gap in traffic before riding down the sidewalk. (Too bad she wasn’t drunk texting, or she could have filled the entire punch card.)
I was annoyed because, as we know, All Cyclists Are Entitled Bastards.
I’m not sure I’m in love with the separated Pandora bike lane. It has been open five months, but sending cyclists in two directions on one side of the street still feels counterintuitive, unsafe. Also, it’s hard to blame drivers, particularly in a tourist town, when they fail to obey traffic rules that are out of the norm.
It’s confusing, even for locals. (This summer I saw someone drive down the bike lane, then — after realizing the mistake — reverse into the Government Street intersection.)
It’s also easy to criticize a bike lane when you don’t use it much, which I don’t.
Maybe the Pandora route is great if you’re a Fernwood hipster pedalling to your pot shops, your tattoo parlours, or one of those cafés that charges $27 for a plate of gluten-free silage (I might be showing a certain grumpy-guy bias here). But it’s pretty much irrelevant to other cyclists, like the ones who white-knuckle along the Douglas Street priority lanes that are “shared” in the same way the Christians “shared” the coliseum with the lions in Rome. (Of course, if it were my butt being regularly protected by separated lanes, I would see them as vital.)
But that’s not the point. What’s more important than how well Victoria’s bike lanes work is the real problem: the wedge they have driven between road users.
This is Victoria’s version of identity politics: Two wheels versus four.
And good lord, people get testy and tribal about this stuff. Just check out the online comments. This is our default setting in the age of social media: Instant, rabid, self-righteous indignation.
Some drivers argue Victoria’s agenda has been hijacked by a special-interest group, people who get to ride bikes because their knees and hips don’t hurt yet, they don’t have to get a goaltender to hockey practice across town, or they don’t have to drive around in a truck full of work tools.
At the same time, cyclists are tired of putting their lives at risk every time they leave the Galloping Goose or Lochside trails.
They don’t want to crowd cars off the roads, they argue, they just want to get home without being turned into a smudge on the pavement. Since when does “not wanting to die” qualify as a “special interest” group? Bike Lives Matter.
So, road-raging riders get videoed booting the doors of cars. And anyone on a bike risks a random lecture about “you people,” usually accompanied by an anecdote of individual illegality, the kind of conflation that is standard practice by any bigot trying to prove a point.
The fear is the snarling is about to get worse. Work on the Fort Street protected bike lane is to begin on Monday. It’s a stretch lined with more storefronts than Pandora, ones that are nervous about what the change will mean. Bike lane advocates might scoff, but it’s not their businesses that are being volunteered as guinea pigs in city hall’s grand social-engineering experiment.
After that, more protected corridors are planned for Cook, Humboldt/Pakington and either Government or Wharf.
As the Vancouver experience has shown, change — justified or not — breeds resentment, which doesn’t foster reasoned reactions.
So please, everyone, turn down the heat (but not the street, at least not on a red on Pandora).
