only in switzerland! – where the citizens are more cop-like than the cops themselves.
oh the embarassment!
i had a public fight yesterday.
what a shame….
here’s how: i was riding my bicycle in the city, there was some roadwork on the street ahead of me, traffic blocked, and i had to get onto a sidewalk for a short stretch. this fat ugly guy was heading straight towards me. i stopped to let him pass, but he got right in front of me and blocked my way. he got hold of my bike and was blocking it with his big fat ugly arms, demanding of me to get off the bike and walk.
unbelievable!
i asked him, if he was a cop. he said, no, but that he was a tax-paying citizen paying for these sidewalks and that he did not want any bikes on them.
i asked him to let me pass, he did not budge. i tried to push him aside, so i could drive on. then things got messy. he kicked the backwheel of my bike. i kicked his balls!
please understand; i simply had to make shure that this guy could not have any kids…. that was the least thing i could do.
god, do i hate this counrty!
please get me outta here…
excursion: the rise of aggression between pedestrians and bikers in inner-city traffic
what puzzles me is this rise in aggression from pedestrians towards people on bicycles. i hear this from lots of friends, it’s gotten worth and worth. i have this backlash-theory about this, wanna hear it?
in the 80’s and 90’s in switzerland, as in most of central europe at the time, the bicycle got back into fashion. but it became not only fashionable to ride a bike, it was even socially very rewarding, politically correct, to do this. the car was the common enemy against which bicycles and pedestrians formed an alliance together. it’s quite simple: cars can kill both people on bicycles and people on foot, while the other way is unlikly. have you ever heard of a cardriver killed in a accident with a bicycle?
cars are huge, smelly, dangerous. the drivers are protected in their box, seperated off from the rest of us, kings in their little micro-environment.
bike-riders noticed that for them the only way to survive against the car was to drive bold and fast.
while pedestrians had known all along that for them the only means for survival was to duck and cover.
so things started to change. maybe the hirearchy had shifted. of the three central players in modern urban innercity trafic, the car, the bicycle and the pedestrian, the pedestrian suddenly found himself on the bottom of the ladder. they now started to project their anger about this unfortunate position from the cars to the bike-rider. after all you can scream at a car as long as you want, to no avail, while the people on bikes will at least hear you.
so please you pedestrians out there:
remember, our enemy is the car!
we bike-riders have to drive like this in order to survive.
stop projecting your bent up frustrations on us.
we are family.
one love.
peace out.