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The Motorist's Identity Crisis

Brian Ladd, 20 December 2010, Planetizen

Bicyclists and transit riders are losers - right? Or are they elitist, sneering yuppies? Brian Ladd says that people's attitudes and transportation choices are shaped by deep-seated feelings about respectability, and it planners should pay attention.

Bicyclists and transit riders are losers - right? Or are they elitist, sneering yuppies? Brian Ladd says that people's attitudes and transportation choices are shaped by deep-seated feelings about respectability, and it planners should pay attention.

Non-motorists often wonder why drivers seem so oblivious to their needs and even their safety. Todd Litman's recent Planetizen post on "The Selfish Automobile" argues persuasively that motorists' sense of entitlement has grown out of plans and hidden subsidies that stack the deck in their favor, while appearing to do the opposite. Automobile dependence, as he describes it, has structural causes and psychological effects. Attitudes, though, can carry their own power. Auto-centered planning and auto-centered lives have made it hard for American motorists even to imagine alternative transportation. The idea of getting around without a car has been just too frighteningly gauche to contemplate. But that may be changing.

A car advertisement picturing a bus that says CREEPS AND WEIRDOS on the front. Most Americans know one thing about the bicyclists they see on the roads: they are losers, and you thank God you're not one of them. Who, after all, rides bikes (at least for transportation, not recreation) in the United States? Mostly kids who aren't old enough to drive—and not even so many of them anymore. Adult cyclists are seen as people too poor to own a car, or too dysfunctional to have a license: grizzled misfits and dark-skinned immigrants you see wobbling along the side of your suburban highway as you zoom past their elbows. Hollywood, as Tom Vanderbilt has shown in a recent Slate article, powerfully reinforces this contempt for the carless.

The reality of biking and bikers is, of course, more complicated. But even the fantasy is more complicated. In American cities with newly thriving bike cultures, cyclists have acquired an entirely different image: as arrogant yuppies. Just look at the letters column or the comments thread any time a daily newspaper publishes a story about bike lanes or shared streets. One motorist after another rages against the privileged spandex crowd that interferes with ordinary working stiffs trying to drive to work: They should be banned from the roads! The police need to crack down on them! Why do we have to get licenses and pay taxes, while they don't? Life is so unfair for us motorists! The venom is often shocking, but the sentiments are heartfelt--even if a cyclist, just home from her daily brush with death, can only shake her head in disbelief.

But wait: weren't motorists the superior ones? Who's sneering at whom here? Could it be that motorists are sitting a little uneasily in their driver's seats? It’s harder to dismiss cyclists as beneath contempt when you suspect that they might just be contemptuous of you. What's a poor motorist to think? They've always known that bicyclists are scum, but now they aren't quite sure why.

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