Inter-group Conflict: The Symbol

You can't look for a solution without seeing that groupism, with it's sharp and divisive claws, has torn apart what it means today to ride a bicycle on the American road. For those that do so are split into three main groups as far as I can tell: the commuter class, the club riders and racers, and the simple transportation types. Or to look at it another way, there are those that see the bike as a symbol, those that see the bike as an activity, and those that see the bike as a tool.

Choice defines this first group (which can be further classified within a spectrum ranging from those that own a car and use the bike when convenient to militant hardcore bicycle activists who have forgone four wheels and a motor entirely). For them the bicycle, whether because riding one is simply fun or provides for some higher moral calling, is a brand that's worn, identifying the commuter and defining them as someone who's made the very conscious choice not to use a car because of what it means not for just the transportation it provides.

In the context of groupism, this defining of oneself aides in the segregation on the streets with thoughts of things like: I am a cyclist, apart from the auto or from the motorist perspective, There's another damn cyclist, out in the road where they don't belong. Through a more inclusive lens however, a broader-group worldview, the definition looses much of it's meaning and a commuting cyclist's presence in the street is merely seen as adding to the great diversity of road users.

To some of these folks, the bike has come to symbolize a future free of fossil-fuel dependence; a human-powered and Eco-friendly transport attracting a kind of rider that speaks of cars as their nemesis, or even evil incarnate (bud-um bum). They have no car because in choosing automotive abstinence they are, in their minds, taking the moral high-ground in a junkie, petroleum addicted, world.

While I don’t think you can argue about our current dependence on foreign oil being a road-block to growth, that doesn't make cars evil. It makes our nearsighted view of the world a bit immoral…it makes our consumerism suspect to sustainability…it makes corporate greed seem tangible, a wet-blanket heavy on the face...but it doesn't make cars evil. If you can’t find beauty in the lines of a ’68 Ford Mustang Fastback or find mellifluous the purr of eight steel cylinders humming in mechanical perfection then maybe you’re just not a "car person", but they’re not evil. For me, I’ll always find appeal there and the sound my Honda motorbike makes when I twist the throttle open will always be music to these ears.

Maybe some of those militant cyclists do have a point though. Do any of us really want to be tethered to the teat of the gas pump for the next thirty years? I’d like to think not, yet here we are nursing away, afraid to be weaned for fear our economy will suffer for our conservatism; afraid to swallow that bitter pill even though it will make us well in the long run; afraid that to do so would spell the end of our beautiful, beautiful cars.

Maybe it's just that it doesn't feel life threatening…yet. Maybe things have to be literally life-threatening for action in the US. Our glaciers have to melt entirely along with the Antarctic ice-sheet (hey, more shipping lanes right?), the ocean must acidify wiping out fish stocks and the rising sea level shrink the great phallus of Florida...maybe then we’ll act. Too bad we couldn't see global climate change as an evil fascist dictator, hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, committing genocide, or wanton world-domination. Then perhaps?

I'll quit babbling with this; if your use of the bike is driven by hate for the burning of fossil fuels...will a roadfull of plug-in electrics charged with the sun's power bring about a new peace? Or will a Nissan Leaf right-hook you just the same as a '59 Caddy?