Bike Snob - Anonymous [14]
Cyclists Have Supernatural Powers
When you’re stuck in your car on the highway because an accident or construction has suddenly transformed a twenty-five-minute jaunt into a three-hour nightmare, or you’ve been sitting in a stopped subway train in a tunnel for half an hour after a particularly miserable day at work, you feel impotent—and nothing is more frustrating than impotence. These are the times when you attempt to bargain with the universe: “If you make this train move now, I swear I’ll be a better person.” Then you try to think of people worse off than you. “Well, at least I’m not in prison.” But really, you are in prison, and even worse, you don’t deserve it. Eventually, you might try the stuck-in-transit last resort: meditating until you attain enlightenment and transcend the material plane altogether. Unfortunately, it’s the very rare traveler who can pull this one off.
But you’ll almost never feel that maddening impotence on a bike (unless your saddle is adjusted improperly, causing crotchal numbness). Sure, you’ve got to travel by car, train, or bus sometimes, but the truth is that you can actually do it a lot less than you’d think. A bicycle can often make a trip that might take an hour take just a fraction of that hour. Or, even if the trip does take longer by bicycle, at least you’ve got almost total autonomy. You can pick your own route, you can make your own schedule, you can weave through traffic. And, when you get to where you’re going, you don’t have to look for parking. On a bike, you’re self-sufficient, and you’re virtually immune to delays.
When it comes to commuting or running errands, your outlook changes considerably when you bookend your day with a little recreation. Sure, there’s a bit of a learning curve involved—figuring out what to wear, how to carry your stuff, and so forth. But it doesn’t take long to work those things out. Being packed onto a subway or a bus or even stuck in your car in traffic makes you feel like cattle, and that’s an awful way to feel. If you never want to feel like a cow again again—physically or mentally—start riding your bike.
Cyclists Are Free from the Rules of Humanity
Bicycles are vehicles, just like cars and motorcycles, and in most places they’re governed by many of the same rules of the road. This is a good thing. However, many people aren’t aware of this fact, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because there are idiots in cars who think they’re more important than you because you’re on a bicycle, or who think you don’t belong on the road. Almost every cyclist has been admonished by some dimwitted motorist to “Get on the sidewalk!” even though riding on the sidewalk is completely illegal in most places. (Telling a cyclist to ride on the sidewalk is like telling a driver to drive through a shopping mall.) But the good part is you can use this ignorance to your advantage by doing whatever you want, since nobody really has any idea what you’re supposed to be doing anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no anarchist—I’m a curmudgeon. And as a curmudgeon I love a good law. Sure, there are some dumb ones (marijuana laws, sodomy laws, laws against strangling drivers who tell you to ride on the sidewalk), but a lot of them are useful. One of my biggest fantasies is actually placing somebody under arrest for spitting. Still, the law as it pertains to cyclists isn’t particularly well-tailored to our needs, so I believe strongly if you’re an enlightened cyclist you can safely disregard a few laws here and there as long as you’re careful. It’s not so much civil disobedience as it is common sense. Stopping at