Cycling in Ottawa

By this point, it’s pretty safe to assume that most people have heard about Monday’s incident between former Ontario cabinet minister Michael Bryant and courier Darcy Sheppard. Details as to what exactly happened, or at least what started it all, are still being sorted out, but the Star seems to have a pretty good initial rundown. It’s pretty shocking, it’s more than a little bit terrifying, and obviously absolutely tragic.

There isn’t a lot to say about something such as this, except that at the end of the day, regardless of potentital criminality, this was almost certainly avoidable at a couple of stops along the way. Christie Blatchford, writing in the Globe, however, uses this as an opportunity to reflect on road rage and the motorist-cyclist dynamic. I think that this is the best part and is how I feel, regardless of whether I am behind or on top of the wheel.

It worked: At the next light, he got out of his car and put a boot through my door. I was so shaken, and simultaneously mortified by my own conduct, that I reported him neither to police nor insurance company, and just paid for the damage myself – and that was in a clash with a peer, a fellow motorist driving a vehicle as big and powerful as my own. We were for the most part in our moving bubbles, seat-belted and air-bagged and roll-barred unto safety.

But a cyclist is never in a bubble like that.

Thus, it is the motorist who has the greater responsibility – not just because he is the only party licensed by society to drive, by which I mean granted the privilege of driving – but because on some level, all of us understand the rules, one of which is that behind the wheel, we are driving a potential weapon. The burden of sucking up the insult, the raised finger, even the punch, and acting like a grown up is always and forever with us.

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