Both bike riders and bus drivers in the Twin Cities are different than they are were I had previously lived, in the Boston area. In Boston, bike riders are well-armored but live in abject fear, are hardly found on the road within the cities, but have reasonable options for recreational biking. Bus drivers, cab drivers, truck drivers, and car drivers in Boston are all maniacs, and it is impossible to identify one group vs. another as dominant on the highways and byways.

In the Twin Cities, bike riders are numerous (this is one of the bike-ridingest cities in the country), radical, and fearless, and bus drivers drive as though there was no one else on the road. And that behavior by the bus drivers is matched by the behavior of the car drivers…buses always have the right of way, and you always let them go, move aside, and avoid them. Or they crush you. Since everyone does get out of the way, there are few problems.

Except for the bike riders, of course.

So one of the man news stories du jour in the Twin Cities was this battle between bus drivers and bike riders. The official news reports don’t tell the full truth. What was happening was this: The recently modified Nicollet Mall, a major downtown street closed to regular traffic…was open to buses, cabs, pedestrians, and bikes. But the bus drivers were annoyed at the bike riders, because the only people on the Mall exhibiting more hubris than the bus drivers were those bike riders. The bike riders would drive as though they were the only people on the road, and so would the bus drivers.

The bus drivers asked the city to exclude bikes from the Mall. Bike friendly, the city refused. So the bus drivers simply started running into bikes. Or so it would seem. Right after the bus drivers complained and help was refused, slam, a bike went down. More discussions, more negotiations, another refusal. Slam, another bike went down.

Now, it is possible that this was all a coincidence, but I did not get that sense at the time. The sense got was that buses kept slamming (gently) into bikes until the bus drivers got what they wanted and bike riding was restricted to specific times on the Mall.

Now this is all changing, with new rules.

…starting Monday, bicyclists will be able to ride along it on weekdays for the first time in 12 years.

In 1997, the city banned bicycles from the mall between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays, after Metro Transit drivers complained of close calls between their buses and bikes.

the story is here

There is also to be a free shuttle service up and down Nicollet. This is being touted as a “long asked for” service, but that is not true. Well, it is partly true. But what many people have actually been asking for all along is a service that would ALSO connect Nicollet Mall with Eat Street, the part of Nicollet to the south that is a self-organized neighborhood phenomenon that puts to shame the high-volume, hyper-consumeristic, downtowney development we see along the Mall. I mean, the Mall is nice and all, but Eat Street is Minneapolis. A shuttle that brought downtowners to Eat Street would help ensure long-term stability in that neighborhood. The down side, I suppose, is that it might bring brown poor people into more direct contact with the downtowners, who we all know live in the suburbs and commute to the city to make their living.

This seems to be a case of city tax money subsidizing the suburbs. And that’s okay, because suburban tax money subsidizes the city as well. But I think the lack of a shuttle to Eat Street is highly questionable.

I hope we can see an Eat Street shuttle some time in the near future.

The bike was heading south at a reasonable clip, but he had stopped pedaling about 100 feet back. The car was slowing and had a left signal on, indicating that she would turn into the driveway of the bank just north of Kinko’s. That would be across the path of the oncoming bike, if she continued. But she was stopped.

It was obvious that the bike rider assumed that the car would stay stopped and let him continue before she made her turn. Therefore, he did not slow down much. But, just as the two vehicles were about 20 feet apart, the car made a small jerking motion, as if the driver was adjusting her foot on the brake. At no point, however, did she move forward. I do note, however, that her front tires were turning left as this was all happening. Depending on what the bike rider saw, he may have reasonably interpreted the signs and signals to mean that this car was about to pull in front of him. I’m pretty sure, however, that this was not going to happen.

The bike rider slammed on his brakes, but it seems that the front brake stuck more firmly than the back brake. The bike stopped instantly and the rear tire started to swing around to the right. But that was irrelevant now, because the bike rider, who was already leaning forward on the handle bars as per normal, was in the air.

He flew up into the air and over the front of the bike, and as he did so, his body rotated 90 degrees and his legs rotated 180 degrees. So, there was a moment in time when this large framed man looked like this:

This is a stick figure like a cartoon, but it is not meant to be funny. It is decidedly not funny. The point of this figure is to illustrate so there is no ambiguity this statement: The second to last experience this man had was being perfectly upside down, with his entire body up in the air and no contact with anything but the air around him.

The last experience he had was his head being pounded into the pavement with the full weight of his body.

He collapsed to the ground and convulsed. I said to Martha “Go into Kinko’s and call 911,” which she did. The nearest rescue facility with an ambulance was almost in sight a couple of blocks up the street, so they would be there in a moment.

I ran over to the man and made myself look big so that cars coming down the street would notice us and not run us over. He was now on his side convulsing heavily and continuously. His convulsing was causing his head and neck to whip around, so I got down and held his body in place so he would damage himself less.

The woman who was driving the car got out and was staring. Two people who had walked out of a local store and did not see the accident came over and yelled at me.

“Leave him alone!” one of them screamed at me.

“He’s an epileptic! He’s just having an epileptic fit! Don’t treat him like he was sick or something.”

The woman who had been driving the car was distraught. She said “I didn’t hit him! I don’t know how this happened! I was waiting for him to go by!”

He continued to convulse. Martha came out of Kinko’s and was standing nearby helping to keep traffic from either hitting us or causing a jam that would make it hard for the ambulance to come down the street. The ambulance was there in moments, and just as the EMTs came rushing over, the man with the bike stopped convulsing. He stopped moving. Eyes that were rolled back in his head became a blank stare.

I lied to Martha. I said I thought he’d probably be OK. It seemed to me that he was dead. To this day, I do not actually know. Perhaps he simply lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Oh, did I mention? He was not wearing a helmet.