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26 Jul 2009 11:19 am
Letter From A Former Bike Salmon
by Patrick Appel
Caleb Crain discusses "bike salmon," bicyclists who liberally violate the laws of the road, and the war between cars and bikes:
It would, after all, be swell if motorists paid more attention to the road. The trouble is that
motorists hate to have to pay more attention.
Their disgust has to do, I think, with the asymmetrical nature of the
warfare between cyclists and motorists. As I vaguely recall from
high-school physics, the damage that a moving object can do is
proportional to its momentum—its mass times its speed. A 5000-pound SUV
going 35 miles an hour is therefore about 81 times as dangerous as a
150-pound cyclist on a 30-pound bike going 12 miles per hour.
The worst
thing a motorist can do to a cyclist is kill him, and the worst thing a
cyclist is likely to be able to do to a motorist is saddle him with the
guilt of having killed. But guilt enrages in a way that fear doesn't,
maybe because people are softies underneath, and would rather run the
risk of being killed than of killing. (Between the certainty of one or
the other, the choice might be different, naturally.) The only way a
motorist could level the playing field would be to drive 81 times more
prudently than the average bicyclist, and that may not be humanly
possible.
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