Are bicyclists in Western Washington out of control?
Aug 27, 2013, 12:28 PM | Updated: 2:53 pm
Do you think bike riders in Western Washington are getting out of control because we give them too much? (AP Photo/file)
(AP Photo/file)
Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
What we have seen over the years, over the decades, over the centuries, over millennia of human existence is when somebody is given everything, and coddled, and told that they’re special, and that they’re above everybody else, that group becomes entitled, and with entitlement, generally comes bad behavior.
The question I have for you is: Are cyclists, as a group, fitting this description and getting out of control?
I know there are a lot of individual cyclists, myself included, who have not bought into this entitlement mentality.
But I recently had a run-in with a cyclist in downtown Seattle who tried to break the windshield wiper off my car.
Over the weekend, we had a bicyclist shove a 70-year-old man in Bellingham into the road. On top of that, we had the story in Seattle over the weekend where a pedestrian was hit by a bicyclist in Madison Park. That pedestrian was taken to Harborview with head trauma in critical condition.
After I told these stories on the air, I was flooded with emails from listeners saying it’s never been worse, trying to interact with cyclists around the region. Just the sheer volume of emails I got leads me to believe a lot of you think that the bicyclist community is getting out of control.
When we tell them how special they are, when we dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars, as Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has done, without any expectation of anything in return – they don’t license bicyclists, they don’t ask them to pay any fees. We just take roads away from cars, give them to the bicyclists. We build $10 million bicycle overpasses so they don’t have to ride one minute farther down on the road to get around the train tracks.
It’s crazy how much they’re given. And with this gimme, gimme, gimme, there seems to be an entitlement mentality that is leading to bad behavior. Is the bicyclist community getting more and more out of control as we dedicate more and more of our resources and transportation dollars to them?
Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
JS
