Scaring The Public to Death

bicycle: lightweight, two-wheeled, steerable machine propelled by its rider; the bicycle is said to be the most efficient means yet devised to convert human energy into propulsion.

-- The New Encyclopaedia Britannica

A marvel of efficiency, the bicycle is also cheap, handy, nimble. It can sprint like a cat, then stop on a dime and give you nine cents change. It is easy to ride and speedy enough for any sane short-distance traveler. In the typical bumper-to-bumper city creepathon the bike can outrun a Porsche.

Unlike the car, truck and bus, the bike does not spew stinky fumes and carcinogens. A bike is easy to park in a sliver of space, and of precious oil it needs only a smidgen to keep the wheels squeakless. Riders may turn rowdy, but the vehicle itself is quiet -- a blessed virtue amid the squawk-bleat- scream-grind-growl-honk-toot-wail-shr iek that is the voice of the big city.

Given such merits, the bicycle ought to be universally embraced by humankind as a sensible way of getting about in the strangling, traffic- plagued city. Bicycles have long been a major mode of transport in Europe and Asia; there are as many as 230 million of them in China. Now they have taken to U.S. streets with a vengeance. According to Bill Wilkinson, director of the Bicycle Federation of America, roughly 2 million people commute to work on bikes, up from approximately 500,000 a decade ago.

Still, though Americans have always liked two-wheelers as a child's plaything, and currently own 111 million of them, they have never truly welcomed the bike as a serious vehicle. In fact, wherever it appears in numbers, the bicycle provokes tension, annoyance, outrage or hostility. This year bikers from Manhattan to Denver, from Oregon to Missouri, have wound up in conflicts: bikers vs. motorists, bikers vs. pedestrians, bikers vs. runners, bikers vs. police.

In Washington the overlap of bicyclists and Pentagon-based joggers has turned the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River into an anger zone. Last month bikers were banned from hiking trails in California's Santa Monica mountains. In St. Louis, where a motorist has been known to slosh a bucket of water on a cyclist in cold weather, someone sprinkled tacks on the route of a Labor Day cycle tour and flattened the tires of some 40 bikes. Motorist-biker tensions around St. Louis grew high last month after Bicyclist John S. Reif Jr., 22, a nationally ranked triathlete, was fatally injured in a head-on collision with a car. Speaking of the current mood, Deeds Fletcher, 47, a municipal-bond dealer and a cyclist, says it often feels as if "cars are going after people. It's like the Christians and the lions."

In Boulder police in July snared and ticketed a flight of 55 cyclists racing past a stop sign, and Steve Clark, the city's bicycle-program coordinator, applauded the crackdown: "When one segment of the group creates bad p.r., it hurts all cyclists." In Eugene, Ore., according to Bicycle Coordinator Diane Bishop of the public-works department, police patrol university areas, especially in their annual autumn bike-safety campaign, in which, she says, "they ticket as many as 100 riders a month." Proliferating cyclists reduced Denver Post Sports Columnist John McGrath to epithet: "Look around: geeks in long black shorts are hunched over a pair of handlebars at every urban intersection, on every country road."