That oh-so-irritating empty bike lane/Wikimedia Commons

Why motorists hate cyclists

On the bike on roads in an urban American far from Alaska, I finally discovered why some motorists so hate cyclists.

Credit traffic “engineers” who’ve spent decades promoting the idea that drivers should be able to speedily make their way through the metropolis.

The fundamental problem with this idea is that, except for the wee hours of the morning when few motorists are about, it survives for only months after roads are “improved.” The improved roads quickly attract more traffic, congestion ensues, and there dies the fantasy of moving speedily through the urban landscape.

Unfortunately, the consequence of this congestion is that it turns driving into a competition for many. If you’re not one of the competitors – though the odds are that you are – just look around at all the other drivers on the road.

You’ll see them speeding constantly.  Tailgating anyone they deem to be driving too slow. Weaving between lanes, hoping to save a few seconds of time. Aggressively cutting off drivers they don’t think are behaving properly. Stomping the accelerator when a streetlight turns yellow ahead, hoping they can get through the intersection before the light goes red. Rarely, very rarely, yielding to anyone or anything unless out of absolute necessity.

And all the time getting more and more frustrated and angry, because that promise of speedy movement has been rendered a false promise by all the other idiot drivers on the road.

This frustration and anger all too often ends up directed at so-called “vulnerable road users.” Some drivers could now care less about the number of these people being killed. The victim-blaming that takes place on social media after a pedestrian or cyclist dies these days is something to behold.

How careless the driving that killed them rarely matters. The drumbeat of the refrain is that those unprotected by the metal cocoon of a motor vehicle shouldn’t be on or near the roads, should only cross roads at traffic-light-controlled intersections, and then only with a sign saying “walk.”

Some motorists are now in such a hurry to beat the traffic that they seem to have forgotten that where “right on red” turns at traffic lights are allowed, a complete stop at the intersection is required and in Alaska, as in many states, anyone in the crosswalk to the right has the right-of-way.

(Alaska law specifies that “the right to proceed with the turn shall be subject to
the rules applicable after making a stop at a STOP sign.” And at all road intersections in the 49th state, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians, though they often don’t.)

Enter the cyclist

Traffic engineers in the U.S. have created a staggering sense of entitlement among drivers, and it reaches its zenith when a cyclist enters the picture due to the appearance of “special treatment” on contested urban roads.

Consider the motorist who finds herself stopped yet again at a traffic signal in heavy traffic when a cyclist pedals up alongside in an unoccupied cycle lane. How can she help but think that “here is some little shit who doesn’t have to compete with anyone on the road.

“Why does he/she get this special treatment? Why does he/she get an unrestricted traffic lane? How can this be ‘fair’?”

A thirtysomething woman in a Subaru actually schooled me as to this moto-think. I pulled up next to her at a traffic light, looked to my left to watch the intersection, and she smiled at me. So I smiled back.

The light turned green. She floored it and took off. The next light stopped her.

Her car was five or six back from the intersection when I pedaled past and hit the intersection just as the light changed green. Her Subaru went flashing past when I was somewhere down the street beyond the light.

Still, I passed it once more when she got stuck at another light. When I glanced at it as I went by, her eyes stayed straight ahead, and her face showed no smile. She looked more like someone with a day going badly.

That I might have been part of the reason for that wasn’t clear until I passed her one more time before my route turned off the road.

This time I waved and smiled as I went past the yet-again, stuck-in-traffic Subaru, and when I looked back over my shoulder, she was giving me the finger. Obviously, the lady was having a bad day.

#1 Cause of Stress

These bad days, unfortunately, have become the norm for many American drivers. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety issued a report in September warning that a troubling 96 percent of drivers now report they have engaged “in aggressive driving or road rage behaviors at least once in the previous year.”

This included the observation that “11 percent of drivers engaged in violent behaviors.”

“Drivers reported many different motivations for driving aggressively including
getting to destinations more quickly, perceived threats to safety, claiming control
over sometimes chaotic driving environments, educating other drivers on the
correct way to behave, retaliating against perceived slights, and punishing other
drivers for bad behavior,” the report said.

That more than one in 10 drivers around you on the road is on the verge of violent behavior is a rather chilling thought, given that Everytown Research & Policy reports that someone was “shot and either wounded or killed in a road rage incident in 2023 every 18 hours on average.”

Everytown has an anti-gun agenda, so its reporting must be viewed carefully. But AAA has no such agenda.

It is an organization founded as the American Automobile Association in 1912 to promote the interests of American motorists. It is not some touchy-feely anti-driving group or full-on advocate for the increasing number of so-called “vulnerable road users” – pedestrians, cyclists and children – being killed on U.S. streets. 

Still, AAA has recognized that motor vehicles are dangerous weapons, which is the reason drivers are supposed to get licensed before driving. Recognizing the dangers of driving, AAA spun off its Foundation for Traffic Safety in 1947. The Foundation became a leader in the push for better driver education, safer motor vehicles and safer roads, but has in recent years come to recognize the huge role driver attitudes play in terms of safety.

Better roads, better-designed cars, seatbelt laws, airbags and crackdowns on drunk driving helped drive down road deaths in the U.S. from the 1950s on into the new millennium, but as the foundation noted in November 2023, road deaths in the U.S. have now been at “essentially the same level for 15 years.”

Forty thousand to 43,000 people now die on American roads every year –  three times more than are killed in firearm homicides.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported 13,529 deaths from firearm homicides in 2023, the last year for which complete data is available. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said 40,901 died on American roads in the same year.

Firearm homicide deaths are widely reported in the news. Traffic deaths are largely ignored unless there is a massive pileup, leaving numerous dead, as happened on a Georgia interstate highway just days ago.

“I-85 crash: 8 dead, multiple cats injured after semi-truck collision in Georgia,” ABC News reported.

That ABC gave as much importance to multiple injured cats as to eight dead people says about all that needs to be said as regards mainstream media attitudes toward deaths on the country’s roads.

No surprise there. The mainstream media isn’t exactly overrun with reporters or editors who get around by walking or cycling. Most of them, like most Americans, drive everywhere – even if it might in some cases be faster to walk or cycle – because they are accustomed to spending most of their time sitting on their big, fat asses and because they’ve drunk of the same traffic-engineer Kool-Aid as other motorists.

This is America, for God’s sake, where you’re supposed to be able to jump in your car and truck to get to wherever you want to go quickly, right?

Motothink

This motothink now drives a public health crisis responsible for one out of every 34 deaths in the U.S. A number of labels – motornormativy, windshield bias, car brain and more – have been used to describe the tolerance for bad driving that contributes to these deaths.

They all point to a society that has let machines – in this case, motor vehicles – dictate how the society thinks and behaves. The body count on the roads, those 40,000 or more dead Americans every year, might also be the least of the motothink problem.

America used to be a place where it was safe for children to play in the streets and walk or ride a bicycle to school, a place where adults could safely walk to work or take a “constitutional” stroll after dinner, a place that didn’t need “dog parks” because it was safe for people to walk Fido on or near the pavement.

The first dog park notably didn’t appear on the scene until 1979, according to the Smithsonian magazine, but they are everywhere in cities now. The magazine reported 2,000 as of 2020.

Dogs aren’t the only ones going to parks to get their exercise, either. Many, if not most, American kids now get driven to some sort of park to exercise, or they get little exercise at all.

One of the consequences of that has been a national epidemic of childhood and adolescent obesity, paralleling the national epidemic of adult obesity.

The Centers for Disease Control last fall reported “that in 23 states more than one in three adults (35 percent) has obesity. Before 2013, no state had an adult obesity prevalence at or above 35 percent. Currently, at least one in five adults (20 percent) in each U.S. state is living with obesity.

A peer-reviewed study in the journal of Global Pediatric Health in 2009 reported 17 percent of U.S. children and adolescents suffering from obesity as well, up from 13.9 percent at the start of the new millennium. And almost double the estimated rate in 1970.

“Obesity can affect all aspects of the children including their psychological as well as cardiovascular health; also, their overall physical health is affected,” the Global Health researchers noted.

This is true of adults as well.

More than a third of Americans are now on statins, a drug used to lower high cholesteral rates linked to lack of exercise and excess weight, and the way doctors are pushing GLP-1s, drugs designed to combat Type 2 diabetes, obesity, poor cardiovascular health, kidney disease and more, it doesn’t seem it will be long before a third of the country or more in on those drugs as well.

There are even suggestions that GLP-1s could be used to treat depression, a psychological problem now also at epidemic levels in this country. The CDC in April of this year reported that almost one in eight Americans over the age of 12 suffer from depression or bouts of depression, an increase to 13.1 percent from 8.2 percent a decade earlier. 

Why? Likely in part because Americans move less and less under their own power year by year.

When Chinese researchers studied the data from more than 90,000 residents of the UK tracked with accelerometers as part of that country’s Biobank research, they found a direct connection between declining physical activity and increasing rates of depression.

Among Brits, they reported, depression risk grew ever smaller as “time spent in light physical activity, moderate physical activity and vigorous physical activity increased to 2,000, 500, and 50 minutes per week, respectively.”

Their study, published in Translational Psychiatry in 2017, echoed that of others which found a dose-response relation between exercise and depression, and warned that in the UK, where people walk significantly more than in the U.S.” vigorous exercise levels remained “well below the optimal target of 50 minutes per week for maximizing depression risk reduction.”

In this country, according to the Harvard Medical School, “only 20 percent of middle-aged and older adults spend even 15 minutes per week in vigorous physical activity.” And there is likely a dangerous link between this lack of exercise, depression and driving.

Depression has long been known to be associated with anger.  At the website VeryWellMind, clinical psychologist Arlin Cuncic earlier this month pondered whether they are “Two Sides of the Same Coin or Two Coins in the Same Purse.”

“Anger can be a common emotion among people experiencing major depression,” she wrote. “You may feel angry at the world, angry about events from your past, or even angry at yourself. This anger can be intense and difficult to control….”

Given all of the above, one can’t help but wonder if the steady national rise in road rage isn’t tied in part to people driving so much and exercising so little that their beloved car or truck has actually driven them “mad” to use an old term for mental illness.

And to think that traffic engineers have been at the wheel of this catastrophe, although there are finally hints of change. Many states are now moving away from the “85th percentile rule,” traffic engineers long used to steadily ratchet up speeds on urban roads.

The federal government long encouraged states to “set speed limits that weren’t already set by law by conducting a speed study,” writes Eric Murphy at the State Smart Transportation Initiative. “The limit would be set at the speed 85 percent of cars were traveling slower than. This method leads to high speed limits, and can lead to a feedback loop where higher limits lead to higher 85th percentile speeds, which continue to push the limit higher as the fastest drivers set the new floor. 

“Engineers used this ’85th percentile rule’ because they thought doing so led to lower variation in speed and therefore fewer crashes, as professor Wes Marshall lays out in his 2024 book Killed By A Traffic Engineer. But a 2017 National Transportation Safety Board study found that “there is not strong evidence that the 85th percentile speed within a given traffic flow equates to the speed with the lowest crash involvement rate for all road types.”

Alaska, unfortunately, is not among the states moving away from the 85th percentile, which is part of the reason motor vehicles can still be found speeding through the pedestrian kill-zones of Anchorage’s Midtown at speeds approaching those once reserved for highways rather than urban roads.

And God forbid anyone try to make Anchorage streets safer by incorporating bike lanes or adding more stop lights to make it easier for pedestrians to cross streets without going a quarter mile or more out of their way.

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