On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 4/1/2013
Taking a Stand
In my final column from last year, I caught up on a few loose ends associated with all the terrible car-bike accidents that had plagued the bike community in 2012. Following along on the tail of all that mayhem, the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition had crafted and promoted an ordinance known as the Vulnerable User Protection ordinance. Patterned after similar bills passed in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Berkeley, its intent is to beef up protection and redress for cyclists and pedestrians harassed by motorists, or in fact by anyone. That even includes cyclists harassing other non-motorized road users, by the way. However, I think I am safe in saying the primary intent of the bill is to protect cyclists from road-raging bully motorists.
I was pleased to report, in that December column, that my hometown of Sebastopol was the first town in Sonoma County to pass the bill. I spoke at the City Council meeting, before the vote (which was unanimous). Gary Helfrich, the Director of the Bike Coalition, made a presentation about the ordinance at a recent Santa Rosa Cycling Club meeting. (Gary, by the way, is a very sharp cookie, doing great things with the Coalition. As a trivial aside, I wonder how many folks know that, in a previous lifetime, Gary was the founder and prime mover at Merlin, the late, great titanium bike builder. As a former Merlin owner, you can bet I know.)
Gary noted that other Sonoma County cities have the ordinance on their calendars for consideration at upcoming council meetings. Someone pointed out that the real prize would be to get the ordinance passed by the County Board of Supervisors, as most of the roads where we ride, and where we are most likely to be harassed, are out in the country, out in the unincorporated parts of the county. He admitted that this was true, and conceded that it was going to be a tough nut to crack, because the fine points of law regarding such an ordinance work differently for counties than they do for cities. (I had the difference in the law explained to me, but don't ask me to repeat it now. Ask Gary, and I'm sure he'll be happy to explain it in excruciatingly precise detail.)
But Gary is smart, and politically savvy. After that club meeting, he went to work with county staff. The county put together a draft ordinance that modified the city-based bill to meet county-based criteria, and the next thing we knew, the Board of Supes had agreed to consider the measure. On Monday, March 11, the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, ran a large editorial strongly supporting passage of the ordinance. The next day, the Supes did exactly that: they voted unanimously to adopt the ordinance, making Sonoma County the first county in the United States to have such a law on the books.
The paper followed up with a report on that decision the next day. The reporter who covered the story for the PD had called me a few days previously to ask for my opinion on the matter. We chatted for close to half an hour, I think, and I ended up quoted once, in the article that appeared in the paper version of the PD. But it appears my brief quote was subsequently edited out of the version that appears in this linked on-line column. Oh well. What I was quoted as saying, and what several others have said as well, is that we are less interested in nailing someone in court than we are with pushing the conversation forward. The ultimate goal is to eventually live in a world where such an ordinance is unnecessary…where no one would ever even think of harassing a cyclist.
In the unincorporated area of the county, the ordinance would prohibit:
• Physically assaulting or attempting to assault a bicyclist or pedestrian.
• Intentionally injuring or attempting to injure, either by words, vehicle or other object, a bicyclist or pedestrian.
• Intentionally distracting or attempting to distract a bicyclist.
• Intentionally forcing or attempting to force a bicyclist or pedestrian off a street for purposes unrelated to public safety.
• The ordinance also would prohibit pedestrians and cyclists from physically or verbally abusing other non-motorized users of county roads.
As the article in the paper says, this is a hot-button issue, with folks lining up, pro and con, to debate the matter in the public forum. One public forum was the comments section following that on-line article. I usually avoid reading those. The vox populi as expressed in the modern social media usually drive me crazy, with their combination of vapidity and incivility. But I did dip into this very long list of comments. Not every one of them: I sampled, like browsing a buffet. I was pleasantly surprised to see the overall tone being quite civil, even though the opinions were sometimes poles apart.
A typical comment from the anti-ordinance people was something like: "If I see three cyclists riding three-abreast, and I want to yell at them that they're idiots, it's my First Amendment right to do so!" And you know what? In some ideal, hypothetical case, I agree with that. I would be inclined to remonstrate with those riders too, if they were being persistently, unrepentantly clueless. In fact, I have had occasion to chastise riders for not singling up when I was working as a course marshal. Some people really don't get it.
But somehow I doubt such a case--yelling at doofus riders--is ever going to end up in court. If we ever do get a case that gets into the courts, It's going to be for much more outrageous vehicular violence. And in fact, we do have such a case in the courts right now: the one where Harry Smith is alleged to have chased the cyclist down a golf fairway in his Toyota and run the cyclist down (detailed in previous columns). I can't think of a more clear-cut case than that one, and we are all waiting to see what sort of verdict and sentence come out the other end of the long, judicial pipeline.
One little interesting sidebar on this whole story occurs to me. Any veteran cyclist knows all too well how often these incidents of harassment happen. But most of the time, the bullies get away with it because the cyclists have no proof. However, that could change. More and more cyclists are riding with video cameras running full time, both helmet-mounted and bike-mounted. I've already seen a number of videos documenting motorist misbehavior that ranges from just inattentive to downright intentional and malicious. Sooner or later, one of these is going to be so egregious and so well documented that it will serve as a case too clear-cut not to end up in court. It will happen.
I hope, I really do hope, that if we do get a case or two like that--starting with Harry Smith--that they only serve as historical curiosities on the road to a better world, where such things never happen, because the motorists have finally accepted the cyclists as a legitimate part of the transit mix, and the cyclists have become well-schooled enough in the craft of riding bikes that they know enough to single up when traffic is nearby. Am I dreaming? At this point, it seems like a dream. But I think we can get there, someday. And in the meantime, this ordinance is a stepping stone toward that new and better world.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net