Being a not-boring cyclist

Being a cyclist is a lot like being a Marxist. A lot of what you believe is correct but there’s a lot of money behind making you sound mad. It holds out utopian prospects for the future. You’d like nothing more than to stop being one. I’ve italicised the last three letters because I draw a distinction between someone who uses a bike and cyclists. I’ve been cycling in Dublin for about fifteen years but I only became a cyclist since I developed a consistent commute.

I believe a crack developed in ~2.5 out of 10 people’s heads during the pandemic (although against this the suicide rate during lockdown actually went down and this is, according to Dan Davies, because lockdown was less intolerable than everyday life) and this has manifested itself in many destructive ways. One of the less spectacular instances is the behaviour of people on the roads. There are less superstructural causes here i) increasing vehicle sizes (more fatal in collisions) ii) large screens embedded in an increasing number of car dashboards iii) ongoing shortfalls or failures in public transport or infrastructural design iv) 60% reductions in guards enforcing traffic offenses and v) radio stations who know that if more sustainable forms of infrastructure become the norm they’ll go out of business.

At the same time Elon Musk, climate breakdown manifesting as a culture war, and the conflict between United States and a large centrally planned manufacturing economy indicates the many ways in which these economic and political developments play out in interpersonal settings. This is all to say that, over the course of the 90 minutes or so I spend commuting every week, I see about 20 drivers either using their phones, breaking lights, hanging out in yellow boxes or carrying out a ‘punishment pass’: this is a phrase I have learned recently and refers to the way drivers will pull in very close to bike users who overtook them somewhere back along the road. In my experience some will also try to cut you off from the cycle lane going forward so they don’t have to deal with you again. This is annoying because on the overwhelming majority of roads I use, at the times I use them, bike users move quicker than cars. You wouldn’t know it from how eager they are to race you to the next red light.

I really do not want to care about any of this. Cycling used to be something I never thought about and therefore unproblematically enjoyed. The movement, the sunshine or the lashing rain, the anticipation of a cold or warm shower at the end, but now I crave the catharsis available from reading irishcycling or boards dot ie threads populated by other people like me whose lives are suburban, expensive and require the negotiation of badly planned infrastructure, whose capacity is bled by rentiers, in all sectors of their lives. This all starts to press on me when I’m out now, especially during periods of constructed heat, having me think all the time about how all this is really bad and a small group of people are lying about it to keep their profits up. From years spent on Twitter I know the corrosive effects consistent low-level hums of irritation can have on your emotional intelligence. At a corporate event a while back a lad, making a by-the-by point about the shortcomings of legislation as a social technology, said cyclists don’t wear helmets or high-visibility apparel and this justifiably frustrates motorists because ‘it’s one law for thee but not for me’. I’ve noted his face and next time I see him I’m going to inform him that there is in fact no legal obligation for bike users to wear helmets or high-visibility jackets in Ireland, that the former apparently make motorists drive more dangerously and the latter don’t make us any more visible during the day (perhaps car users should be more aware of their surroundings), that the rules of the road weren’t drawn up because vehicles without engines were maiming hundreds of people every year and it’s not really anything got to do with me whether or not you’re jealous of how fast I’m moving, or how much of a legend I am. This is not necessarily the kind of person I want to be.

I wrote this post because this week a car pulled in on top of me over an unprotected cycle lane a few days ago. If I had been a bit further forward I’d’ve been knocked over onto the path. Yesterday a car was parked over the entrance to a cycle lane so I tried to pull in through one of these badly designed bollard things and launched myself over the handlebars. (Thanks to the lads who made sure I was ok and helped me up). Now this second incident was partly my fault, I should’ve stayed in the traffic lane, the bollards only last 10 metres anyway, but in general I never know what to do in these situations. Despite the tone of everything I’ve written so far I would like to think the best of people and assume that they’d be interested to know that they’ve just fucked up and put someone in danger, but most of the time they are annoyed that you were in their way and even worse trying to register some kind of protest. I think you can begin to under-rate the risks associated with escalating public confrontations - because it’s important to remember the bastard behind the wheel was the one who initiated it - once you start to open that door and I also think on a day-to-day level you can’t do very much with dickheads. I did go up to the guy and told him, in a tone that I worked very hard to keep polite, that he was blocking the entrance to the cycle lane and he apologised, not looking up from his phone.

Stewart Parker is a playwright from Belfast and one of the greatest writers of the century. His 1980 play Spokesong, set in Belfast during the war, has the owner of a bike shop as its main character and in a way that somehow works, installs the bicycle as the definitive symbol of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and collective flourishing.

Frank: Christ on a bicycle. You can see that. You can’t see him driving a Jaguar. Or an Avenger. Or a Sting-ray. A car is just a hard shell of aggression, for the soft urban mollusc to secrete itself in. It’s a form of disguise. All its parts are hidden. No wonder they’re using them as bombs. It’s a logical development. A bicycle hides nothing and threatens nothing*. It is what it does, its form is its function. An automobile is a weapon of war.