Until you get her on the subject of cycling in the road… and she becomes a frothing bigot. She would never buzz or threaten a cyclist, but boy, does she become pissed off if she gets “trapped” behind one, and she’s not afraid to say so to my face (which I love her for, and then the debate begins!)

But the lesson I learned is this: otherwise perfectly decent and wonderful people can be bigots when it comes to cyclists (or any subject I suppose). This somehow made me feel liberated, made it not seem so terrible to get honked at, because hey, maybe under other circumstances I could sit down and have a drink with this person and get along.

Sure there are genuinely malevolent people out there, but I think they are fewer and farther between than people who are otherwise good-natured but uninformed or simply having a bad day.

Here’s why I consider it bigotry:

It’s actually easier to get stuck behind a bus because it comes to a complete stop, necessitating much more of a gap in the adjacent lane when a driver gets caught behind it and needs to change lanes from a stop. If a guy isn’t paying attention and gets stuck behind a bus, he may have a pity party or a temper tantrum inside his car, but he probably won’t honk at the bus and he certainly won’t roll down his window and call the driver a f$#%^& a$$hole when he is able to pass. Likewise, no one honks and yells at a bus from two lanes over, just because it’s there. Because buses are accepted as part of traffic.

Speaking of buses, no white man today would get on a bus and demand a black woman give him her seat, but 60 years ago that disgusting, bigoted behavior was common in the South — backed by social custom and law. It’s not that different from the sense of entitlement a motorist has when he comes up behind a cyclist and expects that cyclist to get out of his way. That entitlement comes from the belief that a person using a bicycle is an interloper or lower class user of the public space. Whenever a group of people is given class-based superiority over another group of people, they can hold any member of that group in contempt for even the slightest perceived inconvenience, while ignoring or excusing much more significant inconvenience caused by “equals” or the system itself. Anti-bicyclist bigotry doesn’t come close to the ugly treatment of brown-skinned people (which continues, still, in both blatant and insidious ways), but it IS a civil rights issue when transportation independence is inhibited by ugly behavior, social taboos and discriminatory laws.

Incivility stifles bicycling. And it will until we address its root causes head on.

In fact, it almost always happens at intersections where, after the light, a passing lane exists and it’s no trouble at all to use it. It does not happen, for instance, in intersections where the road enters on one side with two lanes (straight and turning) and emerges on the other side with one lane — but it does happen in intersections that go from one lane to two. My favorite variation, in fact, is when somebody moves into the left lane to pass me — and then, when I catch up with him (it’s always him) at the next red light, starts yelling at me from the left lane as I roll up in the right.

You’re right that the motorist’s perception here has nothing to do with what he has actually just experienced in physical reality — but I’d like to see a psychologist’s explanation of what’s going on here. I’m not sure that “bigotry” quite nails it; I think it has something more to do with assertion of power — it’s when the driver _does_ have the power of free movement that he feels most disempowered and aggrieved. There might be an analogy to certain trends in right-wing politics here…