BAY AREA BIKERS ARE
FUCKING ASSHOLES
ALL OF THEM
I love my bike, my bike named BIZZLE. I keep riding it even though I’ve been taken to the police station once and hassled half-a-dozen times. I ride it even when it’s faster to take the train. Even when it’s dangerous as hell. Most importantly, I ride it just for fun.
But I never would have discovered the joys of bicycling if I had stayed in California, and here is the reason : BAY AREA BIKERS ARE FUCKING ASSHOLES. ALL OF THEM.YES, YOU TOO. . .. . . ASSHOLE!!!!!!
Self-righteous, smug, irritating, spandex-girded assholes with gay little helmets and dreadlocks while discoursing at semi-lucid length about the evils of gas, man. NO BLOOD FOR OIL! And so on. Which is, in fact, perfectly valid. But I guess their mama never told them, ‘it’s not what you say, but how you say it.’ And saying it in a holier-than-thou tone that Jerry Falwell himself would covet, is not going to make me want to own a bike (except maybe as a hood ornament).
To understand about the bike-martyr mentality, first you have to understand about Bay Area politics. The problem is not bikes per se, but the insane proliferation of coalitions in the Bay Area. Normal cities have blocs of well-organized voters that politicians have to pander to: irish, Italians, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics. But S.F. (apparently not content with having way more religious and ethnic voter blocs than most cities) also has legions of single-issue groups who act like militant ethnic groups: Non-smokers, smokers, the legendary ‘AIDS-is-a-hoax’ phalange of ACT UP, transsexual postoffice workers, the Allergic To Hair Products, atheist soccer dads, etc. And every single-issue coalition group appropriates not only the organization and militancy of the civil rights groups, but the sense that We Are Righting History’s Greatest Wrongs!
You get off-the-leash-dog-walker-guy who is absolutely convinced he’s the Mahatma Ghandi of off-the-leash-dog-walkers, and the non-smoker who will tell you that Martin Luther King was just a whiner because everyone knows non-smokers are the single most discriminated and voiceless group in earth’s history, and then you have the Bike Martyrs, who go even farther: not only are they the single most discriminated, despised, denied, misunderstood, mal-treated and persecuted group, but they are THE ONE GROUP STANDING BETWEEN US AND THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF EARTH. Like the comic-book heroes, X-men, bike guys believe they are singlehandedly saving the planet from the super-villains of environmental gasoline destruction, but instead of thanks, they get abuse. OH, WHY OH WHY?? THE TERRIBLE IRONY! WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!, etc.
Just to clarify, further use of IDIOTIC ALL-CAPS will indicate the shrill, bongwater-smelling voice of a bike asshole, not my own much more calm and dignified voice. You absolutely cannot win an argument with one of these bike people:
“MAN, THIS CITY HATES BIKES! DID YOU KNOW THAT LAST MONTH 2 BIKERS WERE KILLED IN ACCIDENTS?”
“Um, dude, last month 9 car drivers were killed in car accidents.”
“YEAH, THUS PROVING MY POINT: CARS ARE BAD AND EVIL!”
Once a month they have a parade called CRITICAL MASS. The point of the parade is to clog as many downtown streets as possible during rush hour, in an act of civil disobedience.
The rationale is something like this: “WELL, IT WORKED TO STOP APARTHEID.”
No, wait, the rationale is “BY MAKING CAR OWNERS AS PISSED OFF AS POSSIBLE WE’LL BRING THEM ROUND TO OUR SIDE.”
No, wait, the rationale is “BY DOING AN UNLICENSED PARADE, WITH POLICE SUPPORT AND BREAKING ALL THE TRAFFIC LAWS, WE’LL SHOW EVERYONE HOW DISENFRANCHISED WE ARE.”
The other 30 days of the month they spend spray-painting ‘DRIVING‘ below the word ‘STOP‘ on traffic signs, so that the rest of us know their views on driving and the stopping of it.
At first I was pissed off by the self-righteousness of this. But then I realized: bikers, who have never stopped at a stop sign in their lives, honestly don’t know what it’s for. They honestly think it’s some kind of octagonal red billboard. These guys don’t stop for stop signs, or red lights, or pedestrians, or one-way streets, or ANYTHING. They’re free, man. Free like the wind. Free of conformity! Free of the steel-metal-and-plastic death boxes that the rest of us are jailed in, man! Free of dependence on foreign oil (as opposed to Turkish hash, Jamaican hemp, and Afghani opium, which are I guess multicultural and therefore benign?), free of the whole freaking system, man!!
And yet, the minute some biker gets hurt, they’re all shrieking “IT’S THE CAR’S FAULT!! HE WASN’T OBEYING PROPER TRAFFIC SAFETY LAWS! WHY OH WHY MUST WE SUFFER AS SECOND-CLASS-CITIZENS IN THIS BIKE=HATING, GAS-GUZZLING MAZE OF CONTRETE AND STEEL??”
Keep in mind that drivers don’t WANT to be driving. The commutes are notoriously long and there is NO PARKING. None. The only reason that people drive is because the Bay Area has the worst mass-transit systems in the country. BART, the subway that only stops every 3 miles, and MUNI, the bus that is slightly slower than walking. Every election there are only 2 issues in San Francisco, and always the same 2 issues: the homeless and MUNI. Yet you never hear about bikers trying to fix public transportation. That would be too helpful. That would actually give them common ground with the hated car owners, as well as being difficult work. They’d rather just complain about how hard they have it (as opposed to car owners, who everyone knows LOVE to be stuck in traffic for 3 hours everyday, just for the sake of inconveniencing passing bikers!! Ha ha, they’re falling for our evil scam!!).
Does anyone live in the Bay Area that hasn’t heard about the big 3? the 3 Things That Cars Do To Kill Cyclists?
- Parked cars that open doors into the path of oncoming cyclists (WHERE ARE THE CAR DOOR WARNING LIGHTS? WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!)
- Cars that turn right without giving the 10 seconds of warning required to register in the pot-fogged brain of the average cyclist, and wind up cutting him/her off.
- The high price of meth lately (oh sorry, that’s just a bike MESSENGER complaint)
- Cars that don’t give right-of-way to a biker that’s lane-splitting, running a stop sign, or otherwise totally breaking the law. This is the #1 unsafest thing that cars do to discriminate against Earth’s Selfless Guardians, the bikers.
Believe me, back when I was driving I got an earful of this. . . . almost everytime I had a biker pal riding in my car. A pal who begged me for a ride.
So, is it hazardous to bike in S.F.? Yes! But, let me say, it’s WAY WORSE IN FUCKIN’ TOKYO. It’s total anarchy here, and there is no organized single-issue activist group for me to turn to for ‘validation.’ But you won’t hear me whining and complaining about it. Why? Because, number one, I’m not an ASSHOLE. And number two, I LIKE BIKES. I’m just HAPPY to be able to ride one, not mad that everything isn’t 100% my way. And to think that if I’d stayed in good old bike-friendly S.F. I never would have discovered how much fun bikes are.