I once confronted a woman driving her motorcycle on a Milan sidewalk. I was pushing my twins past her in a double stroller the opposite direction.
I stopped her to ask why she was doing what she was doing. She replied, “I’m driving slowly.”I said, “But driving a motorcycle on the sidewalk is illegal.”
She replied, “I didn’t see you say anything to those boys on bicycles over there. Why not?”
Indeed, there were two boys riding bicycles on the same sidewalk. Not only that, they were trying out stunts, driving up a handicapped ramp and bouncing down stairs on the other side. It was getting dark, and they had neither visibility gear on nor helmets.
I told her, “You weigh a ton and have a motor. They weigh fifty kilos and don’t.”
Here is what I wish I had added, but couldn’t drum up to say in Italian on a dime.
Those kids don’t have any alternative. Milan doesn’t offer them any place to safely cycle. If they go in the street, they will be a menace to traffic, and traffic will be a mortal danger to them.
Since she drove off in a huff, certain that my bicycle sympathies stemmed from hypocrisy (I admitted that yes, I do have a bicycle myself), I wished I could have asked how she could ever, ever equate a motorcycle with a bicycle?
But then I had to admit the logic. In my head, motorcycles and cars are in one class. Bicycles and pedestrians are in another. If I slip onto the sidewalk to avoid potholes, cobblestones, tram tracks or a traffic jam, I usually walk my bike, but sometimes I, too, “drive slowly”. I know, however, that many pedestrians don’t feel they should have to share sidewalks with bicycles, as the law says that they do not. I justify myself (at least in my mind) saying the city doesn’t provide me safe passage on the street – which, by the way, is true.
It is only human nature – the nature of self-interest – that the motorcyclist should think she belongs to the bicycle category, since this would afford her many of the same perks we cyclists take for ourselves.
Take, for instance, parking on the sidewalk. Bicyclists do it constantly. And so do motorcyclists in Milan. Both say it is the city’s fault for not providing proper parking.
Bicyclists and motorcyclists figure it’s okay to drive on a sidewalk up to their parking spot – it’s only a fraction of a block, right?
It is a baby step from there to use the sidewalk to skirt up the wrong direction on a one-way street or to rumble through a public park to a favorite loitering spot, as teenagers on their motorbikes do in my neighborhood.
This is a nightmare for pedestrians, of course — especially those with little ones, or those at the opposite end of the life cycle, the elderly. We already skirt fixed obstacles in our path with great difficulty – the poles, planters, railings, potholes, curbs, and so forth.
But the chain of lawlessness doesn’t stop there. Car drivers behave like disobedient motorcyclists. They too park on sidewalks, and even drive fractions of blocks to a “parking spot”.
And delivery truck drivers behave like car drivers, parking anywhere they can wedge themselves in: on crosswalks, in driveways, in piazzas, on traffic dividers, on the borders of public parks, and yes, even on sidewalks.
Not too long after the incident, I was walking that same stretch of sidewalk where I met that woman, again pushing my twins. There was a delivery truck parked in the middle of that sidewalk. I literally had no room to pass, and the cars were wedged so tightly together on the other side of the street that I could not cross over to the opposite sidewalk.
My only choice to get where I needed to go was to swing my double pram out into the middle of head-on traffic. I marched boldly, angrily toward the headlights of surprised car drivers forced to halt in their tracks. I managed to find a gap among parked cars to return to the sidewalk 15 or 20 meters on, by which time I had caused a traffic jam.
I once asked a policeman why he didn’t fine the cars, motorcycles and trucks deposited on crosswalks and sidewalks around him. He told me the city didn’t have enough parking spaces for them.
“The city would come to a halt and no one could get around,” he said. He failed to see the irony.
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