If it is March in Cape Town, it must be Argus time, and a miserable time it is too. I don’t mean for that poor benighted species, the motorist; I mean for cyclists.
Creslin Atwood died in a 6am hit-and-run on the windy road through Glencairn, Craig Haskins on Ou Kaapse Weg and Colin van Schalkwyk on his way through Milnerton.
These deaths have not gone unremarked — in the local press and on talk radio voices are being raised, and what most of them are saying is depressingly familiar: ”Cyclists ignore the rules of the road. They roll through traffic lights, they ride two abreast, they swear at drivers.”
Traffic authorities loudly promise to clamp down on ”reckless” cyclists. The logic is pretty clear. Atwood, Haskins and Van Schalkwyk had it coming.
Newspaper editorials and even letters from the Pedal Power Association to its thousands of members call for ”tolerance” and for better behaviour from cyclists.
Few of the callers, letter writers and editorialists seem bothered that they are effectively endorsing vigilante death sentences for petty traffic violations. Nor do they seem to have noticed that none of the dead was killed when riding through stop streets or ignoring traffic lights.
On the contrary, it was the motorists involved who broke the law, fleeing the scene in several cases, driving without a licence in at least one. But that is beside the point.
Even if cyclists do break traffic laws — and I do so routinely — it is principally themselves they endanger.
In a contest with a hurtling of steel it is my none-too-solid flesh that will resolve itself into a bloody dew, whereas the car suffers at worst a few dents. And of course motorists routinely break traffic laws in ways that threaten my safety and smooth passage.
This inequality is what should inform the debate about the safety of cyclists, not the outraged sensibility of commuters and delivery men.
South Africans, schooled in the struggle, should understand this, but they don’t, and cyclists perhaps least of all.
Our anger is utterly inchoate and our representative bodies are quisling councils, preaching moderation to keep the authorities on-side.
Some of us give up and go mountain biking instead. Some train only indoors, or in large groups. Me, I ride where I like. I swear at drivers who almost kill me, because I think swearing is the rational response, although sometimes I pull up at the lights and give them a lecture instead. I take up my space in the lane and I spin alone into the magical rhythm of early morning.
But on Sunday I will join 35 000 others at the start of the Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle tour. I’ll be riding close to the front, with the mid-life
hard men in the 30-40-year-old racing bunch, desperately trying to avoid being dropped. Others will be focused on breaking three hours, or four, or just finishing.
What we should be doing instead of chasing down the time that will give us bragging rights for another year is raising a collective finger to the vehicular death cult that rules our roads. We could turn the cycle tour into the biggest rolling mass action since the early 1990s.
There should be black armbands, and banners, and anger. But there won’t be and that, not jumping a few traffic lights, is our real crime.