Kristin Janz

Here’s the text of an email I sent to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s customer service division on Friday.  (Some information has been redacted, because I’m not that obnoxious.  Yet.)

 

Although I was not on the bus when this incident occurred, I am a regular MBTA customer.  I was riding my bike along Mass Ave, westbound, and was passed unsafely by the XX bus (vehicle number XXXX).  This occurred between 2:05 and 2:10 pm today (July 22), just past the intersection with Pleasant St.  The bus passed too close to me, with inches to spare, and it might have hit me, potentially causing serious injury, if I had not moved farther to the right.  This occurred just after the light changed to green.  The irony is that if I had broken the law and ridden through the red light, I could have avoided this unsafe situation, and not been in the bus driver’s way.  This is, in fact, why many cyclists do not stop at red lights, because we feel that our safety will be threatened if we do by the impatient motorists and bus drivers behind us.  I still choose to obey the law, and I would prefer to not be endangered by reckless MBTA bus drivers as a result.

I don’t want the bus driver to get in trouble, because I know that we all make mistakes on the road, and he or she may have genuinely miscalculated and not intended to pass so closely.  However, I would hope that someone would speak to the driver about this incident, reminding them that cyclists are entitled to use the roads in Massachusetts, and that if there isn’t room to pass a cyclist safely while staying in the same lane, and the lane to the left is occupied by cars, they need to wait until either the lane on the left is open, or the cyclist has turned off the road onto another street.  In this particular case, bus drivers should be aware that many cyclists who go through the intersection between Mass Ave and Pleasant St at Arlington Center are planning to take a right turn 2 blocks later onto Water St to access the bike path.  Because of the Arlington town bylaw banning the riding of bikes on sidewalks, this is the only legal way to use the bike path to get through Arlington Center without dismounting and walking.  If the XX bus driver behind me had been patient enough, they would have had the lane all to themself after I turned onto Water St.

Thank you for your time, and I trust that this matter will be addressed.  I will be posting this letter to my personal website and blog, along with any response I should receive from the MBTA regarding this issue.

So far, I have received the following, apparently an automated email response:

 

Hello,

We appreciate your business and value your feedback.  A customer service issue was logged on 07/22/2011 at 15:27:59.  A tracking number of XXXXXXXX has been assigned to this call.  Please reference this number on any additional communications you may have regarding this issue.

Type of Feedback: Complaint

Topic :                          Other

The information you provided has been forwarded to the appropriate department to be addressed.  If additional actions are required, a member from that department will follow up on your issue.

We’ll see if I ever hear anything else from them.  Like I said, I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.  Everyone makes the occasional mistake while driving, and usually nothing too terrible comes of it, and we all try to do better next time.  On the other hand, if anyone should be expected to drive safely and follow the rules of the road (including not passing other vehicles–including bicycles–unless it’s safe to do so), it’s city bus drivers.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been put in an unsafe situation while biking because of a reckless bus driver.  And I’m sick of hearing about how cyclists never stop at red lights, every time some cyclist complains about being threatened by a motorist.  I always stop at red lights.  I didn’t used to, but I do now.  The only time I ran a red light in the past year was when a motorist behind me was yelling and honking because I was moving too slowly and he couldn’t pass because of all the snow piled up on the edges of the road, and I ran the red light because I was turning onto the bike path half a block later and I was genuinely afraid that if I didn’t, the motorist was going to pull some dangerous stunt to try to teach me a lesson, or pass me when there wasn’t room to do so safely.  (Even though I was doing nothing more illicit than riding my bike on the street, which I have every legal right to do.)  Like the bus driver did on Friday.

An open letter to the nice gentlemen who hollered at me to “Stay on the f**cking sidewalk!” as I was bicycling down Cambridge St towards the Longfellow Bridge this afternoon:

1. Bicyclists do not have to ride on the sidewalks in Massachusetts. In fact, they aren’t supposed to. In some towns (such as Arlington, where I live), it’s against the law and subject to a fine.

2. Bicyclists riding in the right-hand lane do not have to pull over even farther to the right and let you pass whenever the left-hand lane is full of other cars. Particularly when there’s a line of parked cars along the edge, and the cyclist would either have to come to a complete stop, or ride close enough to the parked cars to risk getting “doored”.

3. In fact, bicyclists don’t have to pull over and let you pass even when there’s only one lane of traffic in either direction. We’re allowed to sit right in the middle of the lane. Just like a car. You can either wait until it’s safe and legal for you to pull out into the oncoming traffic lane and pass, or drive at the same pace we’re driving, or find an alternate route. (I don’t usually take advantage of this right, because I’m a nice person. I do sometimes use the middle of the lane when there’s a perfectly good left lane for motorists to use when they’d like to pass.)

All this also applies to the SUV driver who tailgated me, honking, and then passed dangerously close, so that I had to move over closer than I liked to the row of parked cars (I’m willing to give him or her–but let’s be honest, it’s usually a him–the benefit of the doubt, in that he may not have realized he was passing me unsafely. Sometimes I think they do it out of spite, though.). Apparently you don’t think you’re paying enough for car insurance!

Sometimes I’m tempted to take down license plate numbers of cars whose drivers harass me and post them on a special “Wall of Shame” page on my blog. Don’t get me started on the ones who think I’m not allowed to make a left turn from Mass Ave onto Somerville Ave from the center eastbound lane, or don’t realize that even if I were driving a car instead of a bike, I’d have to wait for the green arrow, and they’d still be stuck behind me.

Cyclists can be obnoxious too, though. Too many cyclists in Massachusetts think we aren’t required to stop at red lights (bicyclists on the road have to obey all the same laws as motorists, except that we are permitted to pass other vehicles on the right). Just today, I saw a woman biking along, weaving slightly, and when I passed her I saw that she was holding her iPod in one hand.

The problem is that, in Massachusetts, the motorists, cyclists and pedestrians all show blatant disgregard for whatever traffic laws might inconvenience them. Part of it is that the roads are set up so poorly, with inadequate signage and ridiculously long wait times at pedestrian-controlled intersections. I’m no exception, sadly. I don’t have the patience to wait through 1 1/2 entire light cycles when I want to cross the street. And the other weekend, I irritated Donald to no end by refusing to make a right turn when I found out with twenty feet to spare that I was in a right-turn only lane (I just angled the car so I was blocking both lanes of traffic if the other lane wouldn’t let me in). Or was it that I made a left turn from the right-hand lane, because I realized at the last minute that my turn had come up, and I hadn’t seen the street sign early enough to move over to the left? Ha! I’ve done both, I can’t remember which it was this time. (I hope it wasn’t both at the same time.)

At least I don’t holler obscenities at poor, defenseless cyclists.