I’ve got this new habit of using Twitter and Facebook. Mostly because I need to figure out how to use it. I guess it is thing that people do (I never really knew why everyone was staring at their phones all the time!). I guess other people use these things as well and it helps me keep up with other bike groups in the city.
Today, it brought me some bad news and now I’m on our website wondering out loud where to go with this information.
Last night an eight year old child was murdered by an automobile. Correction, he was murdered by a human using an automobile as a weapon. Maybe it was on purpose, maybe it was negligence. But it wasn’t the eight year old’s bike that killed the child, it was the really heavy box made of metal on wheels flying down the street. Anything can be a weapon depending on how you use it.
Obviously this caught my eye because it was a child. I saw the pictures of the bike and didn’t recognize it. That didn’t really matter though. Whether it was a youth from my shop or not, some kid was riding his bike last night and then got hit and dragged by a car until he wasn’t living anymore.
As I am writing this someone turned themselves in to the police in connection to the murder. I made the mistake of reading some of the comments (never do that!) and of course the grieving parents are blamed pretty quickly. There was a comment about how bad the traffic is in Detroit and how anyone would be crazy to let a child ride a bike in the city.
So I have to ask – are we living in a time when children don’t ride bicycles? I think it is a problem when folks associate bicycles with children and therefore don’t ride as adults, but do we think children shouldn’t ride anymore? I don’t think this is the case as I see plenty of youth still coming to Back Alley Bikes trying to earn bicycles. They all have permission slips signed by guardians that want their kids to ride.
Have we decided to end this childhood staple in exchange for high speed freeways and rolling yachts that are cars on steroids? Is this a safer world we are creating?
Granted, I know I have a bias, but I really am asking this question of people that don’t ride regularly – is this the world we all want to live in? A world where that child should have never had a bike or where they should ride on a 10 x 10 foot slab of concrete in some park? Because that is where we are at right now.
And for the person that mentioned in a comment that traffic is so bad in Detroit; I challenge you to try riding a bike in the suburbs. It seems as if people believe that the suburbs are some sort of safe zone, but I would argue that traffic is worse out there.
The good news is that there are regularly thousands of people biking in the city. I don’t see that happening in Sterling Heights, Westland, Livonia or even Royal Oak. So while I could get more gloomy and feel like I am part of a dying breed of people willing to ride a bicycle, I can’t. Change will come.
Folks are moving to the city. They are doing it because they don’t want to drive their car for hours everyday just to get to work to pay for gas for the car that they have to pay insurance on to drive to work to…(you see where this is going).
So, now is the hard work. How can we slow down and consider others? How can we change the mentality that a cyclist is “in the way” as opposed to “a human being worthy of consideration”?
Because, lets be honest, more people will care about this child simply because of his age. But here are a few facts:
– It isn’t the parents fault
– A cyclist of any age getting run over is horrible
– It isn’t the fact that this family lives in Detroit that caused this to happen, it is an entitled mentality that people take when they get behind the wheel that cause things like this.
Bicycling isn’t dangerous. Driving a huge metal box at 70mph is dangerous. I don’t see any laws demanding that automobile drivers wear helmets. I’m not saying that we need to do away with automobiles, but it is time to do away with the idea that they are safe and bicycles are not. We also need to do away with the time when we are willing to accept that our streets are not safe spaces. Don’t accept this tragedy as status quo and don’t roll your eyes and say, “Oh, Detroit.” Because I may only be one, but this Detroit resident isn’t going to put up with it. This isn’t par for the course in my city. And again, I’m sure I’ve got a few thousand others that feel similarly – cyclists and not.