On the fairly rare occasions that I drive a car, I remind myself to be extra careful. As a biker, I've got firsthand experience with dangers of a moment of inattention or a risky lane change - I have been hit by cars and daily I have the opportunity to take evasive action that would be unnecessary were there a culture of safe, competant driving, and adequate infrastructure for bikers. When I'm driving a car, I don't want to contribute to the dynamic that I hate while biking, so I'm extra careful.

When I'm biking, I try to reign in my frustration with pedestrians. We have to share the same inadequate spaces, we share similar dangers from cars, and we stand to benefit most from (and ought to be united by) the Liveable Streets Movement. However, it is extremely frustrating navigating jaywalking pedestrians. Yelling "Heads up!" or "Coming through!" will get their attention, but too often, people just freeze, or the step further into my path in a confused attempt to get out of my way.

A fraction of a second to react.

This morning: kaboom. He puts his arms up, I go flying. A drawback to weighing a paltry 135lbs is that my momentum wasn't enough to knock him over instead of crashing.

So, my first crash on the Pogliaghi. The bike is fine and I'm fine - physically - but I am annoyed, peeved, disgruntled. Five months I've been commuting in this city, 20 miles a day, and I've gotten in to two crashes. That's a crash every thousand miles of commuting, which is a little bit too high for my liking. It's not my riding that's doing it - it's the conditions: manifestly unsafe. The sidewalks are narrow, the avenues are highways in disguise; the speed is low, but the speed limit is high, so if there is a yellow light or an open strip of asphalt, then there's weight on the gas pedal, a revving of the engines.

Expecting safety on New York City streets makes about as much sense as expecting your Cheerios not to bump each other in the breakfast bowl. Demanding safety? This is something every New Yorker should be doing. Anybody who has ever frowned at a delivery truck gunning it through a red light, anybody who has ever had a cab come too close as it's rounding a corner, anybody who grips their child's hand tightly when they cross the street, saying, "Always look both ways!" Anybody who has ever gotten on a bike, and, more importantly, anybody who finds too many reasons not to ride. Anybody who has ever dodged an SUV. Anybody who walks on Manhattan's narrow, crowded sidewalks and sighs as cars go roaring by. Anybody who looks at the incredible amount of space taken up by gridlocked cars and wonders if maybe it wouldn't be nicer if some of those were plazas, with outdoor cafes, vendors, exchange students playing guitar for quarters... the sights, sounds, and smells of New Yorkers interacting with each other, instead of muttering as they push by each other, competing for scraps of sidewalk space, forced to the edges by a culture that's willing to go to any extent - even destroying a beautiful city - so that everybody can drive where they please.

Two items of horror have come to my attention recently.

1. Eric Ng, a biker and Times Up! volunteer, was riding on the west side greenway - considered by many to be the safest place to bike in the city, set apart from automobile traffic except for a handful of intersections. Eugenio Cidron, drunkenly driving his BMW from a Canon Corporation holiday party to his home in the East Village, drove for over a mile along the bike path and killed Eric Ng. I'm tired of reading and thinking about this. Gothamist has the story, and Bikeforums.net has the sad reactions of some in the bicycling community.

2. Jennifer Stark, a nineteen year old girl with an already length history of being an asshole behind the wheel of an automobile, was convicted of "improper lane usage" and fined $1000 for an incident wherein she, while downloading ringtones for her cell phone, drove off the road and into a cyclist named Matt Wilhelm, killing him. Bikeforums has some links and some of the outrage.

Some people use incidents like this to call for the incarceration of automobile drivers who are involved in the death of a cyclist. Noteworthy is Kill A Cyclist, Get Ten Years, which is linked to the Fixed Gear Gallery." But as one poster on bikeforums said, it's a tragedy, not a crime. The underlying issue here is not that drivers have a willful disregard for life, but rather that our economy's development of the automobile as an omnipresent part of life, and our cities' construction around the transmission of people via the automobile (combined with general irresponsibility, senses of entitlement, and extreme reluctance to accept anything less than the pinacle of comfort) constitute a willful disregard for life. We accept a world where people are killed by cars every day, and yet streets are built wider, freeways faster, pedestrian spaces fewer. If ever there was an example of diminishing returns, this is it. All we get is more traffic, more deaths, more pollution, more petroleum reliance - all this much to the detriment of other parts of our lives. Streetsblog has continuing coverage of the movement for a safer, more liveable New York City, and Transportation Alternatives is on top of advocacy for a sensible transportation strategy in NYC; Time's Up! takes care of the bicycling advocacy and community gardens.

I'm really saddened by a lot of the bullshit gets thrown around around this subject, so I want to make some things clear to anybody reading these words:
*This should not dissuade you from riding your bike any more than the omnipresent threat of auto accidents dissuade you from driving or walking on sidewalks.
*Bikers need safe, bike-specific infrastructure.
*Automobile traffic needs to be reduced.
*Promoting pedestrian spaces increases economic activity, happiness, and decreases pollution.

This post by Rick got me thinking about some things that I've been thinking about. I used to be involved in a lot of activism, organizing, and radical-style community building and education. In fact, I almost dropped out of school because there were other projects that I spent more time on... anti-war organizing, medic organizing, Food Not Bombs, traveling to protests, organizing health trainings, this, that, and et cetera.

I burned out, a little bit. Then I graduated, took a job at a teensy tiny community-oriented non profit organization in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and sort of stepped back from a lot of organizing, and stepped back from my connection and involvement in a lot of projects that meant a lot to me, that I had put a lot of energy in to. To some extent, I felt that some of them had run their course. I stopped being vegan and started cooking really good meals with yogurt and cheese in them.

A year and a half after getting my diploma, I'm settling into a life that I might occupy for an indefinite time period. I'm feeling really settle-y. I might have this current job for several years, I want to pay off debts, save money, and importantly, I want to live somewhere where I don't have a move-out date in mind. Except for my eleven months in Bridgeport, I haven't lived somewhere uninterrupted for more than three or four months at a time since I was seventeen and moved out of my parents' house when I went to school.

And now as I'm getting kind of settled and Growing Up just a little bit, I'm wondering how I want to re-insert myself into movements for change; how I want to participate in valuable work and projects. Because, really, while it's nice to have a Real Job, it is *not* the thing in my life that I want to take the highest priority. Being employed is a priority. Job = Life is not an equation I'm interested. I want to be a part of a larger community and I want my participation to be defined by doing positive work.

And I am feeling that defining that participation in Change - standing for something larger than myself, as Rick phrased the question - is a long, long way away from how I defined it three or four years ago, when I was all to willing to scream things at the top of my lungs while cops were arresting me. It's a long way away from two or three years ago, when I was interested in teaching people how to be healthy and safe so that they can scream things at the top of their lungs while cops were arresting them.

There's so much room to build infrastructure to ensure that radical communities can support radical change-oriented projects. The question is, how? And, now that I'm in New York City, where do I start? That's something I'm working on.