shelbinator.com

Tessa just made me aware of an outstanding bike-themed website for any angry two-wheeled commuter like myself — at least for entertainment and venting purposes. I’m not sure there is anything actually useful that will come of it, but Atlanta has joined a host of other cities on MyBikeLane.com, a site that seems to have originated in New York.

What’s its purpose? If you’re tooling along on your fixie, urban hybrid, or nasty yellowbike and come upon a gas-guzzling roadblock in the bike lane — and you happen to have really quick reflexes, good balance, and a shoulderstrap-mounted camera case — snap a picture of the yobbo. You can then upload the photo, report the tag number if you catch it, and bitch about it. The site keeps a tally of repeat offenders by tag number, but again, not sure that’s actually going to do anything.

There’s a big moral gray area here that I don’t know what to make of. On the one hand, while I’m much calmer, happier, and healthier on my bike than in my car, I’m no less aggressive when provoked by bad drivers, whatever my vehicle. I’m plenty likely to scream at, cuss out, flip off, and even in really bad circumstances, chase or strike an offending automobile. (I really love putting the fear of God and criminal court in a driver who comes too close with a quick swat to their trunk; when they hear the thud and think they might’ve just killed somebody, maybe they’ll hang up the damn phone and drive.)

And bike lanes are an important feature of any city that wants to improve its urban commute. Providing 30 inches of space for people to take to work without adding another car to the road is a good investment in progressive transit (not to mention the reduction of health care costs, as long as we don’t get run over).

But for the bike community to get hoity-toity about cars parking in our lanes like it’s a special infraction above and beyond parking in any No Parking zone, we’re going to have to police some of our own members and sacrifice our own self-appointed privileges. During my evening commute when there’s more congestion, I usually sit at every red light I hit on the way home, content to enjoy my music and the end of the day. But in the morning, I join most other cyclists I know in running any desolate red light and rolling through most stop signs. I shrug off such infractions by considering these our man-powered equivalent to the exception hybrid vehicles get to drive in the HOV lanes without passengers. We’re doing our part to cut smog, so we get a wink and a nod to a quicker commute.

And then there are the crazy bike bastards, weaving in and out of bumper-to-bumper traffic, going the wrong way in the opposite lane, and alternating between sidewalk and road as conditions suit them. During the Critical Mass rides at the end of every month, we get in the ballpark of 300 bicycles together to completely dominate all 3 or 4 lanes in one direction of major downtown arteries as we cruise around the city making our little “Bicycles are here, get used to it — heck get your own” statement, and that’s all fine and good (though I’m sure you disagree if you’ve ever been stuck behind us). But out of those 300 civil disobedients, there’s always a handful of yokels who consistently swerve over double yellow lines into oncoming traffic when the pace of the mass doesn’t suit them. I would guess they’re also the commuters who freak you out by weaving through your gridlock and cutting you off by hopping off the sidewalk. They’re really not helping the movement.

Bike lanes are our safety zones, where theoretically we are not supposed to be crushed to a pulp by big boxes of speeding metal, so getting cars to respect those lanes can be a matter of life or death. But it’ll also help if we respect the same boundaries as much as possible, no? Perhaps the MyBikeLane.com people can fire up a sister site called YourDeathWish.com for drivers to upload pictures of jackass biker punks on fixies making risky traffic violations of our own. There are no tags to keep track of, but you can usually identify us by the colors and badges on our snooty Chrome bags.