S2:E34: rage road

Thursday, May 27, 2021

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Episode description:

Who keeps us safe when the world shuts down? On cyclist road rage, community, and how mutual aid makes us better.

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Show notes:

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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Last May, as the severity of the pandemic set in and it became clear that our cloistered way of life wasn’t going anywhere, I went on a bike ride in the Oakland hills. It was a beautiful summer day, with flowers blooming on every tree and bush, but I was tense and jumpy after an afternoon of trying to work while negotiating screentime with the kids, who had spent most of the day whining and complaining about school and each other.

Even though we were far enough into the pandemic for me to understand that the old life was gone--maybe forever--I couldn’t stop myself from wishing for it. In the old life we had a stable income. In the old life I had full days of quiet while my husband Nate was at work and the kids were at school. In the old life, my afternoon ride would have left me feeling grateful instead of grumpy. 

As I climbed up neighborhood roads and past mossy streams, I pedaled harder and faster, hoping to burn off my agitation. Sweat dripped down my back as I wound around a neighborhood street where the road curved sharply downhill and then just as sharply uphill at my next left turn. It was a windy street that didn’t see much traffic even in pre-pandemic times, and so as I cruised downhill, I coasted to the left so I could cut the corner and keep some of my momentum going up the next hill. I took my hands off the brakes as I came around the final blind corner before that left turn and let myself fly--right into the path of an oncoming car.


I heard the screeching of his brakes first. I swerved so hard to the right that my wheels spun out from underneath me and my arm skidded on the pavement. We’d avoided a collision, but I was on the ground with my bike on top of me, and my handlebars were twisted unnaturally like a broken limb. 

“I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” the driver said from his rolled down window.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying not to cry. “I shouldn’t have been in your lane.” I stood to my feet and checked to make sure I could still move everything. 

“You’re sure you’re okay?” he said, looking at my arm, where my road rash was bleeding. “Is there anything I can do?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, fighting back tears. “Thanks for stopping to make sure I’m okay.”

I did my best to straighten my handlebars and tried to fake confidence I didn’t feel. As I rode away, tears streaked from my eyes and my whole body shook as I slowly coasted back to our neighborhood and onto our street. My arm stung and my pride was scraped raw.

But then I saw something that changed everything, that made me forget for a moment about pandemic life and even my accident. Nate and the kids were biking down our street, slowly riding up each driveway, onto the sidewalk, and then down the next driveway back onto the street. Our 3-year-old was strapped to his back in a hiking backpack, and our 6 and 8-year-old kids were on their bikes behind him. 

The scene I witnessed was one that would become a daily ritual, what the kids would call “the bike train,” a pandemic hallmark to get us through the long weeks of summer. At first, it was just Nate and the kids. But after a few days, the kids from a few houses over joined in. Then the little girl who lived a few blocks away started coming by in the mornings to ask when the bike train was starting. 

That daily bike train became a simple but powerful act of community, a small way to experience a bit of levity in a life that felt painfully serious. Each day the kids would take turns playing Follow the Leader on their bikes, weaving in and out of driveways, laughing and talking loudly as they rode. Parents would take turns standing in the street to keep an eye out for cars--but cars didn’t come by very often. 

All across Oakland, streets had been barricaded in an effort to encourage people to get outside and stay socially distanced. Our block wasn’t one of them, but we were a few blocks away from one of those open streets, and we still experienced the ripple effect of fewer cars in our neighborhood. Often, as we stood out on the sidewalk chatting with our neighbors across the street while the kids biked, I had the sudden thought that maybe in some ways this new life was better. Maybe the old way of doing things hadn’t actually been working. 

In today’s episode, we’re holding the old way and the new way up side by side, parsing out the parts of pandemic life that we want to hold onto. Clara Smith, one of our Shelter in Place apprentices, is going to get us started. Her story starts a lot like mine.

Clara: Last week, on a beautiful spring day, I grabbed my helmet, hopped on my bike, and began my trek to work. All around me, I could hear the sounds of kids laughing and neighbors chatting, cars honking and parents calling their kids to come inside. It was a very Brooklyn scene.

And then, just as quickly—I was faced with another very Brooklyn scene: a car swerved into the bike lane and came so close to me that I had to jerk sharply to the left, almost wiping out and narrowly missing another car that was stopped in the intersection. 

“Watch where the [HONK] you're going! You almost hit me!” I yelled at the driver who had almost hit me, who had his window down. The light turned green and I started riding again--but not before I saw him roll his eyes at me.

A second later I felt the hot metal rush of a car approaching me, and then that same driver swerved into the bike lane once again, this time on purpose. I banged on the side of his car as he drove past me and then sped off ahead. 

I took a breath, and knew what I had to do: I was to get this guy and make him apologize!

I secured my phone in its holder on my handlebars, pressed record, and sped down Williamsburg’s streets, chasing this driver who thought he stood a chance at getting away from me by car. 

In every other city, he would win, but not in New York. I had bike lanes. He had traffic. I knew these streets with my eyes closed. He was careless and uncertain in his lane changes and turns. There was no way I wasn't catching up to him.
I saw his face in his side mirror and then he craned his head out the window to look back at me. When he saw me racing toward him, my expression furious and determined, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. I could hear the growl of his foot on the gas as he made a few erratic turns in an attempt to get away from me. Each time the light went green, he’d get further away from me, but then the next light would turn red and I’d close the distance. At last I chased him to a street where he couldn’t escape. An enormous truck was unloading its cargo, backing up traffic for the entire block. 

Seeing that he was caught, the driver leaned out his window and started yelling as I pulled up beside him, my phone camera still recording.

“It was a mistake,” he yelled. 

“You could have killed me!” I yelled back.

“I didn't see you,” he cried. “What was I supposed to do?” 

“But then you swerved into me!” I said. “You swerved into me TWICE! Do you have any idea how dangerous you are? How many cyclists are killed every year because of people like you?”

“What are you gonna do, call the cops?” he said as I snapped a photo of his license plate. “I’m a member of the PBA. The Police Benevolent Association. No one’s going to arrest me. ” 

The PBA is basically a union for police officers, family, and occasionally friends. It’s stated purpose is to protect their rights--and apparently also protect them from angry cyclists like me. But in function, it gives them impunity from the law. This, for me, was the most angering part. He had just made explicit that he felt comfortable endangering my life because he knew there wouldn’t be consequences.

I can’t repeat what he said to me next. It was something along the lines of “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you {HONK}{HONK}{HONK-HONK}. Who the {HONK} do you think you are anyway?”

I stepped off my bike and planted my feet directly in front of his car so he couldn’t go anywhere. All behind him, cars were honking and people were yelling out their windows to get out of the road. The driver kept yelling at me from his window, telling me to get out of the way--but I couldn’t move. I was stuck in my anger, right there in the middle of that New York street, trembling in rage even as I asked myself what, exactly, I wanted from him. 

We were in a stalemate of him cursing at me and me saying over and over again, “but you swerved into me!” until finally he yelled back, “and what do you want me to do about it now?”

The question pulled me out of my cycle of fury. “I don’t know,” I sputtered. “Maybe pull over and see if I’m ok? Maybe just apologize for almost killing me?”

Even though the truck was still blocking the end of the street and there was nowhere for him to go, the driver jolted his car forward--and drove right over my foot and lurched down the block. I lost it. The guy looked back at me from half a block up where he was still waiting for the truck to move, and still--no apology.

I might have kept chasing him down all day if I hadn’t been stopped by a gentle voice on the sidewalk behind me. I turned to see a woman with a loose gray bun at the nape of her neck and a summery dress with sunflowers printed on it. 

“I have this all on video, if you want,” she said, and then quickly added. “Are you okay?”

This was my out, the only way I could leave the situation without completely losing my dignity. I hesitated, nodded, and then winced when I took a step with the foot that had been run over. 

“Come inside and get some water,” she said, walking toward me and placing a gentle hand on my elbow. “My shop is just right here. Do you need ice for your foot?”

“No, no, I'm on my way to work,” I said, still shaking in my anger a bit. “I would just love that video.” 

She gave me a look that was both stern and kind. “No. Text work. Tell them that you're going to be late. Come inside and sit down.” 

I did as she said. She brought me a glass of water and even gave me some arnica. She did Reiki on my tense shoulders. And even though I’m not usually someone who ascribes to homeopathy, that moment was quite healing -- with her kind, calm voice, with the gentle pressure of her hands on my back, with her compassion. 

“This happens all the time in New York,” she said softly. “Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they die. And each time, nothing changes.”

“Thank you,” I said when at last she was satisfied that my foot wasn’t broken and I’d calmed down enough to go to work. 

“Of course,” she smiled and touched my hand.

“We have to do what we can to keep each other safe in this city.”

Laura: One of the scariest moments in parenting was helping my older two kids in the bath while my daughter Mattéa, who was a toddler at the time, was playing on a blanket in the living room. She’d only been walking for a few months, and so even though I couldn’t see her from the bathroom, I figured she’d be okay for a few minutes while I got my two older kids out of the tub.

It took me a minute to realize that the living room had gone quiet--and then I heard a car honking from the street outside our house. I left my two older kids dripping on the bathroom floor and raced out into the living room. The front door was wide open. I ran outside in my bare feet, expecting the worst. 

My neighbor Jesselle was walking up the sidewalk with Mattéa in her arms--and she was smiling, completely unaware of the panic she’d just induced. 

“I was just driving by when she stepped out into the street,” Jesselle said. “I’m so glad I saw her before another car could come by.”

Jesselle is a parent too, so she wasn’t scolding me. She’d had situations like that with her own kids, those sobering moments when you realize that in a split second you could lose your child. 

Our neighborhood is quiet and the traffic isn’t steady, but every once in a while a car would speed down our street, realizing too late that there were two speed bumps in our block. We once witnessed a high speed car chase as a car fled past our house and away from the police.

During the pandemic, there was almost no traffic on our street, but in pre-pandemic times the bike train probably wouldn’t have happened. Sure, kids biked around, but never without the worry of approaching cars. And anyway, we were all too busy with our afternoon activities, our commutes home from work. 

We’ve been calling this season of Shelter in Place Pandemic Odyssey, because as we’ve traveled from one coast to the other, from the old life to the new one, we’ve often felt like Odysseus lost at sea, wondering if we’ll ever get home. Sometimes navigating that life can feel a bit dangerous.

There’s a scene in the Odyssey where Odysseus has to sail his ship through a narrow passage where there are monsters on either side. On one is Scylla, a six-headed monster. On the other is Charybdis, a violent whirlpool ready to suck ships down like a toilet flushing.

Being a cyclist in a city can feel a lot like traveling between Scylla and Charybdis. You’re not supposed to bike on the sidewalk--that space is for walkers, people who might bite your head off (or at least be irritated) if you get too close. But on the other side is an even more dangerous option, a street with moving and parked cars, potholes that will pop your tires, and maybe even the occasional angry driver that will swerve into you if you’re lucky enough to have a bike lane. 

When the odds are stacked against you, when it’s so clear that the landscape was built not for people, but for cars, sometimes all you can do is choose the least bad option. For Odysseus, that meant losing six of his best men to the six-headed monster. For Clara, it meant narrowly avoiding being hit. When I told Clara that the accident was my fault, she pointed out that if the street had been designed with bikers in mind, I wouldn’t have had to cut into the oncoming lane to keep up my speed for that big uphill. And then there was the very obvious inequality of the situation that no matter whose fault it is, when a car hits a cyclist, that metal box will always fare better than the person on a bike. Like Clara, Nate has been biking to work for years, and I’ve often cautioned him to be careful. On one occasion he was knocked off his bike when the door of a parked car suddenly swung open and hit him as he was passing.

The moral of this story is not that biking is dangerous; it’s that our cities could be different if we decided they needed to be safer for everyone, if we prioritized people over machines. Until our streets went quiet during the pandemic, I would have found this line of thinking a little hard to grasp. Sure, I would have said, cars outnumber bikers, but isn’t that just the way it has to be? 

But that bike train gave me a vision for a different way to move through my city. Sometimes whole weeks would go by when I’d bike every day while our car sat parked in our driveway.

In a time when many people were feeling isolated inside their homes, that bike train reminded us that we were still a community. 

Clara experienced something similar in her own neighborhood. 

[Soundscape of Berry street: people chatting, kids playing, bikes whizzing by]

Clara: This is Berry Street, a few blocks away from where I live in Brooklyn. It’s a mile-long stretch where no through traffic is allowed. Metal barricades block off the ends of the street, and the open street is bustling with the sounds of summer: a street musician playing guitar, friends walking and talking, neighbors chatting over coffee, and even a group of kids doing their own version of a bike train. It’s about as different as you could imagine from that street where the angry driver ran over my foot.

[birds chirping, birdsong, musicians]

Berry Street is one of several pedestrian-priority stretches across the city, an urban oasis in a car-fill city. But I didn’t find out about it until a year ago, right around the time that Laura’s family started their daily bike train. 

Last May, New York was the epicenter of the pandemic with thousands of new cases and hundreds deaths each day, and I was feeling more closed in than ever. At a time when it felt like the world was unraveling, I wanted to do something to stop it--but all I could do was stay home. I wasn't a nurse. I wasn't an epidemiologist. I couldn't go out there and save people's lives beyond giving money and sharing information. But I felt like I had to do something.

I was raised on the belief that being a good person meant doing your part to make a difference. My parents were always very involved in local politics, and when I was younger, I joined my mom going door to door handing out flyers on election years and helping to make protest signs at our kitchen table. I joined her phone banking, in the beginning years barely understanding the script I was reading, and spread out plastic table cloths when we hosted fundraisers for local candidates. 

In my New Jersey suburban town of 40,000 people, community engagement felt manageable. The link between our actions and the results they produced was obvious. But a few years ago, after graduating college, I moved to New York for my job. Suddenly in a city of 8.4 million, I lost that sense of connection.

I loved New York, and I had a group of friends that made it feel like home, but at the same time I felt like one small person in a giant city, like nothing I could do would ever make a difference. 

That feeling was amplified when the pandemic hit. Over the summer, one of my closest friends moved several time zones away. After months of spending most of every day of lockdown in the company of someone I loved, I was suddenly alone. My Brooklyn apartment, which I shared with two other roommates, felt suddenly too-small. I became conscious of the days and weeks and months. Every day felt the same. I began to feel stir crazy, and the old daily irritations of living with other people took on a new intensity. My routine of waking up, walking two feet to my desk for work, eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, spending the evening with my roommate, watching Survivor, and then heading to bed became a monotonous pattern I couldn't seem to break out of.

Summer came with its sunshine and heat, but I felt disconnected, unable to fully enjoy it the way I had in summers past. I had reconnected with friends around the city over Zoom or social distance park dates, but I didn’t just want socialization; I wanted to be useful.

I wasn’t satisfied passively waiting for the pandemic to be over while so many people in my city needed help and support.

The turning point of my pandemic paralysis came when I learned about a mutual aid organization that had formed at the beginning of the pandemic to meet the needs of the neighborhood. The North Brooklyn Mutual Aid is made up of local volunteers in the neighborhood, who, at the peak of the pandemic, coordinated daily delivery of masks to hospitals, hot meals to senior centers, and did grocery runs for neighbors in need. Over time they expanded their work to include vaccine sign up programs, a compost project, and a housing defense group. 

I started delivering meals to senior citizens and helping to stock community fridges with North Brooklyn Mutual Aid, which is how I learned about Open Streets. 

In New York City, there’s a fundamental inequality between people and cars. For every car here, there are 1.5 parking spots. Street parking takes up what is equivalent to 12 Central Parks. But the majority of people who live in New York don’t have cars, and only 25% of New Yorkers drive to work. 

On the flip side, for every bike spot in New York City, there are 116 bikers vying for a spot to lock up. Over half of a typical New York City street is dedicated to moving cars, a quarter to parked cars, and less than 1% to bike lanes.

And that disproportion between people and machines doesn’t just affect those who commute. More cars means more streets and less green space, which means less outdoor space for people to exercise and eat and play and live. In North Brooklyn, which has some of the least green space per resident in the city, there’s about 29 square feet per person. That’s about the size of a queen sized mattress. By contrast, the typical car takes up more than twice that amount of space. North Brooklyn is a neighborhood ringed by highways, truck routes, and heavy industry, so for years its residents have suffered from high rates of asthma as well as pedestrian fatalities from trucks. Last year was the deadliest year on New York City streets since the Mayor took office and started the Vision Zero program, with its ambitious aim to end traffic deaths by 2024. In 2020, nearly 100 pedestrians died, and well over 200 people died overall in crashes.

The Open Streets program started in the spring of 2020, when New York City decided to open up 100 of its 6,000 miles of streets for pedestrians. That meant closing it off to through traffic and slowing down any cars and local traffic that might be driving down that block. Initially it was a way to create space for people to walk around while maintaining social distancing, which was hard to do on a sidewalk. It’s what Oakland was doing in Laura’s neighborhood. But like many of the changes of the past year, what began as a measure to address pandemic needs ended up showing us a better way to live.

New Yorkers began to realize that its city was better with fewer cars, that redesigning the city for its people--and not for its metal machinery--might be an effective path forward to making our neighborhoods safer and more enjoyable to live in. 

Originally the mayor's office designated the New York city police department to run the program, but the NYPD never took a personal interest in the project. They didn’t set up barricades to block off the streets . . . which meant there were no open streets. On a few streets the NYPD did put up those barriers and police the area, but it didn’t take off since people didn’t want to hang out on a street where police officers were standing guard. 

The program was quickly revamped, and took applications from community partners to maintain the open streets, which is how the North Brooklyn Open Streets Community Coalition was formed. 

I found Open Streets right around the time that the North Brooklyn OSCC had taken over the project. For several years before that, I had been learning about how to address the growing inequalities of our public spaces with programs like car-free neighborhood zones to make our streets safer for pedestrians. When I learned about the work that the North Brooklyn Open Streets Coalition was doing just a few blocks from my house, I immediately joined them. 

For years I’d felt disconnected from the neighborhood I lived in, and never met my neighbors beyond a quick wave on the street. But once I started volunteering with Open Streets, all of that changed. Each day, we would set up, take down, and care for the barriers that blocked off two stretches of roadway, including that Berry Street stretch, from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, slowing down local traffic and blocking off access to through traffic. I started to get to know my neighbors who were volunteering with me. A few of them became friends. I learned about the history of Greenpoint, and its strong history of activism. It began to feel that this wasn’t just the place I was living; it was home.

In the span of a year, I went from walking the streets of my neighborhood knowing no one, to watching the mayor sign a bill reflecting work that my own neighbors and friends had pushed forward.

Since its beginnings in March of 2020, Open Streets has expanded to include more city blocks. The New York City Council recently voted to make the Open Streets program permanent. The bill that they introduced would require the department of transportation to maintain and fund an open streets program in the city going forward. The mayor, Bill de Blasio, just signed it into law. 

Open Streets has given communities across the city safe spaces to walk, get groceries, and talk with neighbors, while staying socially distanced and out of the way of cars. Our neighborhood began to change, too. People were friendlier to each other. Neighbors grilled out on the sidewalk and shared coffee on the street. One neighbor told me that before Open Streets, he’d often had to drive out of the neighborhood just to find a safe space for his son to be outside. Now he could just open his front door and bike on the street with the other kids.

I'm going to the first wedding of my adult life in my friend's backyard next weekend to virtually join in the celebration for another friend who lives a block away. We tried to convince the bride and groom to hold the ceremony on an Open Street, and though they opted for a more traditional setting, I’m not ruling out the possibility for the community’s next wedding.

Those lonely days from the beginning of the pandemic feel far in the rearview mirror. Some mornings, I walk over to the edge of my roof and call out to my friend in the next building over. She climbs through her window to her fire escape and we talk across the space between our buildings, our voices echoing off the brick walls. We’ve rigged up a pulley system between our rooftops, and sometimes she’ll pull some lemony-flavored leaves from her window box garden and pass them over to me for my tea. We talk about what we’re doing that day, about work and relationships and our plans for the future. Those conversations are their own kind of community building, a daily reminder that in any city, we can be isolated or embraced; the difference comes in how we help each other. 

This week I found myself telling her about my road rage, about how I felt both justified and humiliated in my anger. 

“I’m working on it,” I said to her, shaking my head. “It’s just that every time something like that happens, it triggers this complete volcano of anger. Maybe that’s the part of me that feels like that’s the only way to regain control in the face of complete lack of safety.”

“But how lovely that the woman in the shop came to your aid,” my friend pointed out over her steaming cup of tea. “She could offer you a place to rest and recover and remind you that better things are possible.” 

For me, that’s what Open Streets is. It’s a beginning, a first step to a safer city. From setting up barricades to meeting friends across rooftops over tea, it’s a reminder that better things are possible, that safety is less about geography and more about connection. I’m still working on managing my anger--even when it’s justified--but knowing that I’m surrounded by people who care about keeping each other safe makes the struggle feel possible. 

Laura: What’s so powerful about Open Streets is that it started with a real need in the community--for people to be safe--and then someone took the step to organize it, and then it became a daily thing. Those open streets started to change the way people felt in their neighborhoods. It made them feel safer in their streets. It allowed them to get to know each other even in a pandemic. In a city with millions of people, a few neighborhoods questioned the way things had always been done, and imagined a better way of living. Eventually, the city officials saw that, and they signed the change into law.

It’s a powerful model, an example of how the new life can be better than the old one, and often that change starts small.

We’ve been ending each episode with an invitation, and so today I want to invite you to think about the place you live. Maybe you’re in a big city like Clara, or in a quiet neighborhood with sporadic traffic. Maybe you’re out in the country and you see more land than people. Maybe biking to work isn’t an option for you. But just for a moment, I want to invite you to close your eyes and put all that aside. Try to imagine a world built for people instead of cars. What would that look like in our cities? In our towns? In our suburbs? What if instead of closing ourselves off to the possibility that things could be different, we opened up instead? It might be as simple as a barricade or a bike train or a block party that we host. It might be the thing that helps us finally get to know our neighbors.

In a couple of weeks when we leave Massachusetts and start slowly making our way back to California, we’re going to stop in New York City and meet Clara and the other New York apprentices for the first time. We might meet at a park, or maybe even on one of Clara’s open streets. My kids will have their bikes with them, so maybe they can even do a bike train there, and see if there are other kids in the neighborhood who want to join. 

Shelter in Place episodes are now airing on many radio stations across the nation, and station managers have told us that listener requests make a big difference in what they choose to air! If you’d like to hear Shelter in Place on your local public radio station, send them an email and ask them to air our episodes. 

As always, if you listen to the end of this episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes. But first, we want to thank one of our newest supporters.

Annie Gullick, when I think about open streets, I think about you--not just the bike trains, but the bike rides, the neighborhood runs, the hours spent on camp chairs in front of our houses, and the hours our kids have spent playing in the streets together. Thank you for keeping me sane in this pandemic year, both in Oakland and across the country. Your support, encouragement, and friendship have been a rock to me in a year when I’ve often felt lost at sea.

To you, our listeners, we want to say thank you, because Shelter in Place is listener-supported, and we really couldn’t do this work without you. Your ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts help more people find us, and your listener survey responses help us decide where to go next. 

If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. You can also join our community by signing up for our newsletter, where we pass along a little bit of the symbolic starter behind each episode. 

Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Clara Smith was our Associate Producer for this episode, Shweta Watwe was our Assistant Producer, and Samantha Skinner was our Assistant Audio Editor. Alana Herlands was our Producer. Alana Herlands is our producer, Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 spring apprentices are Michele O'Brien, Samantha Skinner, Clara Smith, Elen Tekle, and Shweta Watwe.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.