For months I haven’t had a hostile altercation with a motorist while riding my 12-speed. It’s uncanny. In the war between bikes and cars, this cycling soldier hasn’t seen much action. Nor have I heard many tales of defying death from my bicycling comrades of late.
Granted, winter has just ended. Warm weather means more bikes in the street thereby making riders more visible, but a rising heat index can also elevate stress levels and increase incidents of road rage.
There’s a wealth of words written on this. Tom Vanderbilt has written at length about the empathy-diminishing confines of the automobile, expounding on how this phenomenon effects drivers more than passengers by orders of magnitude. It would seem operating an automobile tends to bring out the worst in us all – makes us start seeing one another less as human beings and more like mere obstacles in the way of motorists trying to drive fast.