Atruistic punishment

How could you hate her?

A fascinating, if somewhat perfunctory article on the BBC's website yesterday posits that the reason motorists hate cyclists derives from the game theory notion that society functions only because we are programmed to self police by punishing one another for behaving outside the bounds of accepted "morality." That is to say that humans have actually evolved to punish people perceived to have broken the rules. And for drivers, practically everything cyclists do is technically in violation of the rules, since the set of rules by which they operate is specific to cars. Cyclists can't, by definition, obey some of those rules. We can't go the speed limit most of the time, for instance.

And the rules we can obey, we often don't. Largely because the laws of physics play a much greater role in our mode of transportation. Since the calories we burn are derived from the energy our bodies have converted from food instead of from the refined essence of prehistoric organic matter (i.e., gasoline), we cyclists typically observe much stricter adherence to the laws of conservation of energy. That is, since it takes us a lot of personal energy to build momentum, we often go to extraordinary pains to maintain it. Drivers just push one pedal a couple of inches and hundreds of horsepower are produced, whereas a pedaler has to grind a crank round and round just to get up to a speed most motorists disdain and curse. Don't believe me? Do the math. So we often blow through stop signs. We're following rules - just not the same rules motorists have to follow.

We come by our own little set of rules by the exact same method as drivers have come by theirs - through trial and error, underpinned by a grave sense of self preservation and public safety. We do what we do because we have weighed the costs against the benefits, considered the possible risks and come up with a pretty workable set of operating principles. Just like cars. Even in a society where bicycles represent a meaningful proportion of the mode share (transportation geek speak for percent of trips made by bike), the transportation induced death rate is negligible. Can we say the same thing about our own society in which the car is clearly the dominant mode of transportation? No we cannot.

So when a person sitting in a type of vehicle responsible for over 30,000 fatalities a year can get all pissed when I scoot around them on a vehicle responsible for so few fatalities a year as to be not worth mentioning, I don't really feel that bad about it. When was the last time you heard about a motorist getting killed by a bicyclist? Just doesn't happen. Sure occasionally a cyclist runs down a pedestrian and kills them. Occasionally. How frequently do cars run down pedestrians? But I also understand when motorists, being the good egalitarians they are, and apparently in thrall to their limbic brain, go berserk and start shouting out their car windows and shout, "get off the feckin' road!"