[bikeqld] Men on bicycles: New York Times editorial

[John Nightingale]

Editorial
Men on Bicycles

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: January 10, 2009

A well-worn landscape like Long Island¹s yields few surprises to the
driver¹s gaze. Shops cluster by size and species: pizza with bagels and nail
salons, Home Depot with Old Navy. But one roadside incongruity that always
unnerves me is the sight of a person outside the shell of a car on purpose ‹
like a man pedaling slowly beside a highway on a bicycle.

Bicyclists and suburbs are an uneasy fit. I don¹t mean the racing bikers who
swarm like neon-colored beetles, hogging the middle of the road. I¹m talking
about the guys without helmets, on beat-up mountain bikes: restaurant
workers wearing windbreakers over white dress shirts and ties; men in
sweatshirts and baseball caps riding home from the store, plastic shopping
bags hanging awkwardly off the handlebars.

Such sights are evidence of a valiant adaptation to a hostile environment.
For immigrant workers, as with so many of us in the suburbs, life boils down
to the job, the bed and the travel between. But when you live in a landscape
designed for cars, and you are poor, and it is too far to walk to work, and
there¹s no bus to take you there, the only option is two wheels. This is
what is cheap and effective. It can also be deadly.

On Christmas Day, a car going at least 80 miles per hour on Route 111 in
Central Islip hit a bicyclist, Hector Rapalo. The driver sped off. Mr.
Rapalo, a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant who worked at a pizza shop, died.
Police said that the collision may or may not have been an accident, but
that the driver surely knew that he or she had struck someone.

Immigrants ask for little more than the opportunity to work so they can send
money home. Their lives are quiet but precarious, in a place that accepts
their labor but offers little warmth or welcome. An inveterate hostility
sometimes sinks into brutality, as in the fatal stabbing in Patchogue last
November of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant set upon by a gang of
teenagers.

The accidents they suffer go unnoticed, except when carnage briefly makes
the news: Santos Javier Ramos, 21, a bicyclist killed by a car in Selden;
Enrique Aguilar-Gamez, 26, fatally struck by a minivan while bicycling in
Copiague; Adolfo Reyes, 42, a day laborer badly injured by a hit-and-run
driver while on foot in Holtsville. The police in that case suspected a hate
crime, because there were no skid marks or evidence that the driver slowed
down after Mr. Reyes flew into his windshield, fracturing his skull,
collarbone and arm.

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The 'invisible' and unrepresented cyclists: Brisbane also has plenty of
them, poorly prepared for road conditions that give no assistance to
cyclists, on roads rarely cycled by the lycra set and not served by any
lobby group to argue for cycle lanes and safe routes to factories. I imagine
it is as bad in Australia's other cities.