The scope of 'Sixes and Sevens' was originally far more ambitious than a few hundred words about major felonies like honking at pedestrians while blocking a bike lane, but when I tried to get everything into one post it didn't quite work. I tried again a month later to capture some of those remaining ideas, but I unfortunately succumbed to the temptation of rolling out my Annual Rant Against Car Culture. Maybe today, the third time will be the charm.
The starting point was indeed a moment of confusion on the bridge. I was all sixes and sevens, as they say elsewhere, while I watched car after car zipping by a radar sign as it announced speeding verdicts - often fifteen or twenty miles per hour over the limit - for almost every passing vehicle. A few minutes later, a turning bus nearly pancaked me as I walked across Beacon Street, raising my temper as it lowered my confusion; speeding through an intersection doesn't mean speeding, but speeding surely normalizes the act of breaking other motor vehicle laws.
The thing that hit me much later - weeks after that first post where I so casually mentioned a ghost bike - was that I might actually have been leveled by that bus had the exact same moment happened ten years ago. Back then, the intersection was like most others in that the design didn't protect the cars, bikes, and pedestrians from each other; lives were ruined, inevitably and needlessly, as some died. The intersection has changed visibly to incorporate safety features and encourage Boston-bound drivers to slow down; these alterations surely made the difference, and allowed me to walk home, alive and unharmed.
So, who is to blame for my survival? I think it's a result of a cultural collision, Car Culture meeting Cycling Culture, which prevented my collision with a bus. On one side, we have decades of drivers accepting national road fatalities in excess of thirty thousand per year; the bikers on the other side unreasonably demand zero deaths. In Boston, it seems that each collision results in a small change that makes a road slightly safer - examples include plastic partitions that separate cyclists from bridge traffic, lights that signal 'early release' for bikes across busy intersections, and fresh coats of paint that reinforce existing bike lanes. It's the crux of any cultural clash, or maybe a natural consequence of collisions - with no possibility of maintaining order, the law rewrites itself.
These changes are so incremental it's hard to point to one tangible result, but as I noted above I feel that something added up in a critical way for me. It takes a long time before anyone can notice the effect of steady progress. It often comes after many years of raising lone voices until they can be collectively heard, and counted. I guess there is nothing impressive about any one person's two cents, but suppose everyone in America sent a couple of pennies to one bank account tomorrow - the impact for that recipient would be staggering. Of course, the reality is that most of us step over many pennies a day, literally in the sense of coins left underfoot, figuratively each time we keep silent about a problem; as long as there remains no understanding of just how little change is required to transform someone's world, I fear our world will remain shortchanged for us all.
