Cyclists face many dangers. A single act of terrorism won’t scare them off

After Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York City, in which police say Sayfullo Saipov steered a truck onto our most popular bike path and killed eight people while injuring 12 others, many local cyclists took to social media to express their determination to ride the next day despite the horror.

They needn’t have done so, because the fact that we’ll keep riding is a given.

Indeed, if there’s one group of road users virtually immune to being cowed by a lowly act of terror involving a motor vehicle, it’s cyclists. We’re reminded every day via social media and through rolled-down car windows that we “share” the roads with people who actively hate us and that our interests (including safety) come behind theirs. Every one of us knows what it’s like to stare death by auto square in the grille. We’ve all had drivers set their cars upon us at one time or another, whether due to run-of-the-mill inattention or out-and-out road rage. This reality is already priced into our decision to ride.

Cyclists also know all too well that our most cherished “protected” spaces are not truly protected. In 2006, Eric Ng was killed on his bike when a drunk driver steered his car onto this very same stretch of path; advocates have been calling for the necessary protections ever since. Even the sheer scale of the incident is hauntingly familiar. In June 2016, authorities say Charles Pickett Jr., killed five cyclists and injured four more in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when he rammed them from behind.

Unlike Kalamazoo, government and law enforcement have declared what happened here in New York an act of terrorism. This ensures it won’t get lumped in with all the other standard-issue road deaths to which our culture has become so inured — 722 cyclists were killed in 2016 nationwide, up only slightly from past years — and also guarantees a tweet (or nearly 20 tweets) from the president. But this distinction hardly factors into anyone’s decision about whether to get on their bike in the morning. Consider Dan Hanegby, killed by a charter bus driver while riding a Citi Bike in Midtown this past summer. According to the criminal complaint, the driver explained to a bystander after the incident that he had honked at Hanegby before choosing to fatally overtake him.

Carnage like this is far more frightening to cyclists than terrorism because these sorts of conflicts happen literally every day. From behind the handlebars, the meaningful difference between a misdemeanor right of way violation and an act of terrorism is whether the driver tooted the horn or shouted “Allahu akbar” during the act. Yet still we ride.

Another reason New Yorkers will never be frightened out of their bike lanes or off their bicycles is that you won’t find anyone more appreciative of our little slice of the cityscape than cyclists. Sidewalks? On a day-to-day basis, too many people just take them for granted. Highways? We only think about them when we’re stuck in traffic; then we hate them. But cyclists are all too aware of what it took to get those hard-won and too-few bike lanes, and we’re reminded of what’s at stake every time some crackpot candidate promises to rip them out again because it plays well in the tabloids. Sure, half the time the bike lanes are full of parked cars, but they’re our lanes, dammit! So if you think some nut case in a rented Home Depot truck is gonna scare us out of them, guess again.

At this moment, we’re united in both our condemnation and our resolve, and there’s none of the victim-blaming that all too often accompanies acts of traffic violence, especially when they involve people on bikes. Immediately after Hanegby’s death, media reported that he “lost control of his bike.” When Lauren Davis was killed, NYPD perpetuated the false narrative that she had been riding against traffic. And when James Gregg was killed by a driver operating an 18-wheeler on a residential street where such trucks are not permitted, police attributed it to a “wind force.”

Hopefully we can reconcile our cognitive dissonance going forward and come to regard all acts of traffic violence as abhorrent across the entire spectrum of unacceptable excuses — from ISIS to “I didn’t see him.”

This story was originally published November 2, 2017 at 1:49 PM with the headline "Cyclists face many dangers. A single act of terrorism won’t scare them off."